The Farseer Series Books 2 and 3: Royal Assassin, Assassin’s Quest

Certainly there is an ancient code of conduct, and certainly its customs were harsher than ours today. But I would venture that we have not wandered so far from those customs, so much as put a veneer over them. A warrior’s word is still his bond, and among those who serve side by side, there is nothing so foul as one who lies to his comrade, or leads him into dishonour. The laws of hospitality still forbid those who have shared salt at a man’s table to shed blood on his floor.

Winter deepened around Buckkeep Castle. The storms came in off the sea, to pound us with icy fury and then depart. Snow usually fell in their wake, great dumps of it that iced the battlements like sweet paste on nut cakes. The great darks of the long nights grew longer, and on clear nights the stars burnt cold over us. After my long journey home from the Mountain Kingdom, the ferocity of the winter didn’t threaten me as it once had. As I went my daily rounds to the stable and to the old pig hut, my cheeks might burn with cold and my eyelashes cling together with frost, but I always knew that home and a warm hearth were close by. The storms and the deep colds that snarled at us like wolves at the door were also the watch beasts that kept the Red Ships away from our shores.

Time dragged for me. I called on Kettricken each day, as Chade had suggested, but our restiveness was too much alike for us. I am sure I irritated her as much as she did me. I dared not spend too many hours with the cub, lest we bond. I had no other fixed duties. There were too many hours to the day, and all were filled with my thoughts of Molly. Nights were the worst, for then my sleeping mind was beyond my control, and my dreams were full of my Molly, my bright-red-skirted candle-maker, now gone so demure and drab in serving-girl blue. If I could not be near her by day, my dreaming self courted her with an earnestness and energy that my waking self had never mustered the courage for. When we walked the beaches after a storm, her hand was in mine. I kissed her competently, without uncertainty, and met her eyes with no secrets to hide. No one could keep her from me. In my dreams.

At first, Chade’s training of me seduced me into spying upon her. I knew which room on the servants’ floor was hers, I knew which window was hers. I learned, without intention, the hours of her comings and goings. It shamed me to stand where I might hear her step upon the stairs and catch a brief glimpse of her going out on her market errands, but try as I might, I could not forbid myself to be there. I knew who her friends were among the serving-women. Though I might not speak to her, I could greet them, and have a chance bit of talk with them, hoping always for some stray mention of Molly. I yearned after her hopelessly. Sleep eluded me, and food held no interest for me. Nothing held any interest for me.

I was sitting one evening in the guard-room off the kitchen. I had found a place in the corner where I could lean against the wall and prop my boots up on the opposite bench to discourage company. A mug of ale that had gone warm hours ago sat in front of me. I lacked even the ambition to drink myself into a stupor. I was looking at nothing, attempting not to think when the bench was jerked out from under my propped feet. I nearly fell from my seat, then recovered to see Burrich seating himself opposite me. ‘What ails you?’ he asked without niceties. He leaned forward and pitched his voice for me alone. ‘Have you had another seizure?’

I looked back at the table. I spoke as quietly. ‘A few trembling fits, but no real seizures. They only seem to come on me if I strain myself.’

He nodded gravely, then waited. I looked up to find his dark eyes on me. The concern in them touched something in me. I shook my head, my voice suddenly gone. ‘It’s Molly,’ I said after a moment.

‘You haven’t been able to find where she went?’

‘No. She’s here, at Buckkeep, working as a maid for Patience. But Patience won’t let me see her. She says …’

Burrich’s eyes had widened at my first words. Now he glanced around us, then tossed his head at the door. I arose and followed him as he led me back to his stables, and then up to his room. I sat down at his table, before his hearth, and he brought out his good Tilth brandy and two cups. Then he set out his leather mending tools. And his perpetual pile of harness to be mended. He handed me a halter that needed a new strap. For himself, he laid out some fancy work on a saddle-skirt. He drew up his own stool and looked at me. ‘This Molly. I’ve seen her then, in the washer-courts with Lacey? Carries her head proud? Red glint to her coat?’

‘Her hair.’ I corrected him grudgingly.

‘Nice wide hips. She’ll bear easily,’ he said with approval.

I glared at him. ‘Thank you,’ I said icily.

He shocked me by grinning. ‘Get angry. I’d rather you were that than self-pitying. So. Tell me.’

And I told him. Probably much more than I would have in the guard-room, for here we were alone, the brandy went warm down my throat, and the familiar sights and smells of his room and work were all around me. Here, if anywhere in my life, I had always been safe. It seemed safe to reveal to him my pain. He did not speak or make any comments. Even after I had talked myself out, he kept his silence. I watched him rub dye into the lines of the buck he had incised in the leather.

‘So. What should I do?’ I heard myself ask.

He set down his work, drank off his brandy, and then refilled his cup. He looked about his room. ‘You ask me, of course, because you have noted my rare success at providing myself with a fond wife and many children?’

The bitterness in his voice shocked me, but before I could react to it, he gave a choked laugh. ‘Forget I said that. Ultimately, the decision was mine, and done a long time ago. FitzChivalry, what do you think you should be doing?’

I stared at him morosely.

‘What made things go wrong in the first place?’ When I did not reply, he asked me, ‘Did not you yourself just tell me that you courted her as a boy, when she considered your offer a man’s? She was looking for a man. So don’t go sulking about like a thwarted child. Be a man.’ He drank down half his brandy, then refilled both our cups.

‘How?’ I demanded.

‘The same way you’ve shown yourself a man elsewhere. Accept the discipline, live up to the task. So you cannot see her. If I know anything of women, it does not mean she does not see you. Keep that in mind. Look at yourself. Your hair looks like a pony’s winter coat, I’ll wager you’ve worn that shirt a week straight and you’re thin as a winter-foal. I doubt you’ll regain her respect that way. Feed yourself up, groom yourself daily, and in Eda’s name get some exercise instead of moping about the guard-room. Set yourself some tasks and get onto them.’

I nodded slowly to the advice. I knew he was right. But I could not help protesting. ‘But all of that will do me no good if Patience will still not permit me to see Molly.’

‘In the long run, my boy, it is not about you and Patience. It is about you and Molly.’

‘And King Shrewd,’ I said wryly.

He glanced up at me quizzically.

‘According to Patience, a man cannot be sworn to a king and give his heart fully to a woman as well. “You cannot put two saddles on one horse,” she told me. This from a woman who married a King-in-Waiting, and was content with whatever time he had for her.’ I reached to hand Burrich the mended halter.

He did not take it. He had been in the act of lifting his brandy cup. He set it down on the table so sharply that the liquid leaped and slopped over the edge. ‘She said that to you?’ he asked me hoarsely. His eyes bored into mine.

I nodded slowly. ‘She said it would not be honourable to expect Molly to be content with whatever time the King left to me as my own.’

Burrich leaned back in his chair. A chain of conflicting emotions dragged across his features. He looked aside into the hearth fire, and then back at me. For a moment he seemed on the verge of speaking. Then he sat up, drank off his brandy in one gulp and abruptly stood. ‘It’s too quiet up here. Let’s go down to Buckkeep Town, shall we?’

The next day I arose and ignored my pounding heart to set myself the task of not behaving like a love-sick boy. A boy’s impetuosity and carelessness were what had lost her to me. I resolved to attempt a man’s restraint. If biding my time was my only path to her, I would take Burrich’s advice and use that time well.

So I arose each day early, before even the morning cooks were up. In the privacy of my room, I stretched and then worked through sparring drills with an old stave. I would work myself into sweat and dizziness, and then go down to the baths to steam myself. Slowly, very slowly, my stamina began to return. I gained weight and began to rebuild the muscle on my bones. The new clothing that Mistress Hasty had inflicted on me began to fit. I was still not free of the tremors that sometimes assailed me. But I had fewer seizures, and always managed to return to my rooms before I could shame myself by falling. Patience told me that my colour was better, while Lacey delighted in feeding me at every opportunity. I began to feel myself again.

I ate with the guards each morning, where quantity consumed was always of more importance than manners. Breakfast was followed with a trip to the stables, to take Sooty out for a snowy canter to keep her in condition. When I returned her to the stables, there was a comfort in taking care of her myself. Before our misadventures in the Mountain Kingdom, Burrich and I had been on bad terms over my use of the Wit. I had been all but barred from the stables. So there was more than satisfaction in rubbing her down and seeing to her grain myself. There was the busyness of the stables, the warm smells of the beasts and the gossip of the keep as only the stable-hands could tell it. On fortunate days, Hands or Burrich would take time to stop and talk with me. And on other days, busy days, there was the bittersweet satisfaction of seeing them conferring over a stallion’s cough, or doctoring the ailing boar that some farmer had brought up to the keep. On those days they had little time for pleasantries, and without intending it, excluded me from their circle. It was as it had to be. I had moved on to another life. I could not expect the old one to be held ajar for me forever.

That thought did not prevent a pang of guilt as I slipped away each day to the disused cottage behind the granaries. Wariness always stalked me. My new peace with Burrich had not existed so long that I took it for granted; it was only too fresh in my memory exactly how painful losing his friendship had been. If Burrich ever suspected that I had returned to using the Wit, he would abandon me just as swiftly and completely as he had before. Each day I asked myself exactly why I was willing to gamble his friendship and respect for the sake of a wolf cub.

My only answer was, I had no choice. I could no more have turned aside from Cub than I could have walked away from a starved and caged child. To Burrich, the Wit that sometimes left me open to the minds of animals was a perversion, a disgusting weakness in which no true man indulged. He had all but admitted to the latent ability for it, but staunchly insisted that he never used it himself. If he did, I had never caught him at it. The opposite was never true. With uncanny perception, he had always known when I was drawn to an animal. As a boy, my indulgence in the Wit with a beast had usually led to a rap on the head or a sound cuff to rouse me back to my duties. When I had lived with Burrich in the stables, he had done everything in his power to keep me from bonding to any animal. He had succeeded always, save twice. The keen pain of losing my bond companions had convinced me Burrich was right. Only a fool would indulge in something that inevitably led to such loss. So I was a fool, rather than a man who could turn aside from the plea of a beaten and starved cub.

I pilfered bones and meat scraps and crusts, and did my best so that no one, not even Cook or the Fool, knew of my activity. I took elaborate pains to vary the times of my visits each day, and to take every day a different path to avoid creating too beaten a trail to the back cottage. Hardest had been smuggling clean straw and an old horse blanket out of the stables. But I had managed it.

No matter when I arrived, I found Cub waiting for me. It was not just the watchfulness of an animal awaiting food. He sensed when I began my daily hike back to the cottage behind all the granaries and awaited me. He knew when I had ginger cakes in my pocket, and too quickly became fond of them. Not that his suspicions of me had vanished. No. I felt his wariness, and how he shrank in on himself each time I stepped within reach of him. But every day that I did not strike him, every bit of food I brought him was one more plank of trust in the bridge between us. It was a link I did not want to establish. I tried to be sternly aloof from him, to know him through the Wit as little as possible. I feared he might lose the wildness that he would need to survive on his own. Over and over I warned him, You must keep yourself hidden. Every man is a danger to you, as is every hound. You must keep yourself within this structure, and make no sound if anyone is near.

At first it was easy for him to obey. He was sadly thin, and would fall immediately upon the food I brought and devour it all. Usually he was asleep in his bedding before I left the cottage, or jealously eyeing me as he lay gnawing a treasured bone. But as he was fed adequately, and had room to move, and lost his fear of me, the innate playfulness of a cub began to reassert itself. He took to springing upon me in mock attacks as soon as the door was opened, and expressing delight in knuckly beef bones with snarls and tusslings inflicted on them. When I rebuked him for being too noisy, or for the tracks that betrayed his night romp in the snowy field behind the cottage, he would cower before my displeasure.

But I noted as well the masked savagery in his eyes at those times. He did not concede mastery to me. Only a sort of pack seniority. He bided his time until his decisions should be his own. Painful as it was sometimes, it was as it needed to be. I had rescued him with the firm intent of returning him to freedom. A year from now, he would be but one more wolf howling in the distance at night. I told him this repeatedly. At first, he would demand to know when he would be taken from the smelly keep and the confining stone walls that fenced it. I would promise him soon, as soon as he was fed to strength again, as soon as the deepest snows of winter were past and he could fend for himself. But as weeks passed, and the storms outside reminded him of the snugness of his bed and the good meat filled out on his bones, he asked less often. Sometimes I forgot to remind him.

Loneliness ate at me from inside and out. At night I would wonder what would happen if I crept upstairs and knocked at Molly’s door. By day I held myself back from bonding to the small cub who depended so completely on me. There was only one other creature in the keep who was as lonely as I was.

‘I am sure you have other duties. Why do you come to call on me each day?’ Kettricken asked me in the forthright Mountain way. It was mid-morning, on a day following a night of storm. Snow was falling in fat flakes and despite the chill, Kettricken had ordered the window shutters opened so she might watch it. Her sewing chamber overlooked the sea, and I thought she was fascinated by the immense and restless waters. Her eyes were much the same colour as the water that day.

‘I had thought to help time pass more pleasantly for you, my Queen-in-Waiting.’

‘Passing time,’ she sighed. She cupped her chin in her hand and leaned on her elbow to stare pensively out at the falling snow. The sea wind tangled in her pale hair. ‘It is an odd language, yours. You speak of passing time as in the mountains we speak of passing wind. As if it were a thing to be rid of.’

Behind us, her two ladies tittered apprehensively, then bent their heads industriously over their needlework again. Kettricken herself had a large embroidery frame set up, with the beginning of mountains and a waterfall in it. I had not noticed her making much progress on it. Her other ladies had not presented themselves today, but had sent pages with excuses as to why they could not attend her. Headaches, mostly. She did not seem to understand that she was being slighted by their inattention. I did not know how to explain it to her, and on some days I wondered if I should. Today was one of those days.

I shifted in my chair and crossed my legs the other way. ‘I meant only that in winter, Buckkeep can become a tedious place. The weather keeps us within doors so much, there is little that is amusing.’

‘That is not the case down at the shipwrights’ sheds,’ she informed me. Her eyes had a strangely hungry look. ‘There it is all bustle, with every bit of daylight used in the setting of the great timbers and the bending of the planks. Even when the day is dim or wild with storm, within the sheds shipbuilders are still hewing and shaping and planing wood. At the metal forges, they make chains and anchors. Some weave stout canvas for sails, and others cut and sew it. Verity walks about there, overseeing it all. While I sit here with fancywork, and prick my fingers and strain my eyes to knot in flowers and birds’ eyes. So that when I am finished, it can be set aside with a dozen other prettyworks.’

‘Oh, not set aside, no, never, my lady,’ one of her women burst in impulsively. ‘Why, your needlework is much treasured when you gift it out. In Shoaks there is a framed bit in Lord Shemshy’s private chambers, and Duke Kelvar of Rippon …’

Kettricken’s sigh cut short the woman’s compliment. ‘I would I worked at a sail instead, with a great iron needle or a wooden fid, to grace one of my husband’s ships. There would be a work that was worthy of my time, and his respect. Instead, I am given toys to amuse me, as if I were a spoiled child that did not understand the value of time well spent.’ She turned back to her window. I noticed then that the smoke rising from the shipyards was as easily visible as the sea. Perhaps I had mistaken the direction of her attention.

‘Shall I send for tea and cakes, my lady?’ one of her ladies inquired hopefully. Both of them sat with their shawls pulled up over their shoulders. Kettricken did not appear to notice the chill sea air spilling in the open window, but it could not have been pleasant for those two to sit and ply their needles in it.

‘If you wish them,’ Kettricken replied disinterestedly. ‘I do not hunger or thirst. Indeed, I fear I will grow fat as a penned goose, sitting at needlework and nibbling and sipping all day. I long to do something of significance. Tell me true, Fitz. If you did not feel required to call upon me, would you be sitting idly in your chambers? Or doing fancy work at a loom?’