Assassin's Quest (The Farseer Trilogy, #3)

by Robin Hobb

She didn’t answer that. After a time she asked me, “Do you know your nursery rhymes?” I don’t know why it made me so angry. “I don’t know!” I retorted. “I don’t recall my earliest childhood, when most children learn them. I suppose you could say I learned stable rhymes instead. Shall I recite for you the fifteen points of a good horse?” “Recite for me instead ‘Six Wisemen Went to Jhaampe-Town’!” she snarled. “In my days, children were not only taught their learning rhymes, they knew what they meant. This is the hill in the poem, you ignorant pup! The one no wise man goes up and expects to come down again!” A shiver walked down my spine. There have been a few times in my life when I have recognized some symbolic truth in a way that stripped it down to its most frightening bones. This was one. Kettle had brought to the forefront of my mind a thing I had known for days. “The Wisemen were Skilled ones, weren’t they?” I asked softly. “Six, and five, and four…coteries, and the remains of coteries…” My mind skipped up the stair of logic, substituting intuition for most of the steps. “So that’s what became of the Skilled ones, the old ones we could not find. When Galen’s coterie did not work well, and Verity needed more help to defend Buck, Verity and I sought for older Skilled ones, folk who had been trained by Solicity before Galen became Skillmaster,” I explained to Kettle. “We could find few records of names. And they had all either died, or disappeared. We suspected treachery...