Royal Assassin

by Robin Hobb

“I can. I promise that if my king is taken, and I do not go with him, I will betray every one of your secrets. Every one. ” The Fool’s voice was shaking. He put his head back against the wall.

  I turned away hastily. The tears on his cheeks were tinged pink from the cuts on his face. I could not bear to see them. I ran down the stairs.

  27

  Conspiracy

  The Pocked Man at your window

  The Pocked Man at your door

  The Pocked Man brings the plague days

  To stretch you on the floor.

  When blue flames at your candles suck

  You know a witch has got your luck.

  Don’t suffer a snake upon your hearthstone

  Or plague will whittle your children to bone.

  Your bread not to rise, your milk to stand sour,

  Your butter not to churn.

  Your arrow shafts to twist as they dry,

  Your own knife to turn and cut you,

  Your roosters to crow by moonlight—

  By these may a householder know himself cursed.

  “We will need blood from somewhere. ” Kettricken had heard me out, and now made this request as calmly as if asking for a cup of wine. She looked from Patience to Lacey seeking for ideas.

  “I’ll go fetch a chicken,” Lacey said unwillingly at last. “I’ll need a sack to put it in to keep it quiet—”

  “Go then,” Patience told her. “Go quickly. Bring it back to my room. I shall fetch a knife and a basin, and we shall do it there, and bring but a cup of the blood back here. The less we do here, the less we must conceal. ”

  I had gone first to Patience and Lacey, knowing I would never get past the Queen’s attendants on my own. While I made a quick visit to my room, they had gone before me to the Queen, ostensibly taking her a special herbal tea but really to quietly beg a private audience for me. She had dismissed all her ladies, telling them she would be fine with just Patience and Lacey, and then sent Rosemary to fetch me. Rosemary played by the hearth now, absorbed in dressing a doll.

  As Lacey and Patience left the room Kettricken looked to me. “I will splatter my gown and my bedding with the blood, and I will send for Wallace, telling him I fear a miscarriage from my fall. But that is as far as I will go, Fitz. I will not allow that man to lay a hand on me, nor be so foolish as to drink or eat anything of his concocting. I do this only for the sake of distracting him from my king. Nor will I say I have lost the child. Only that I fear it. ” She spoke fiercely. It chilled me that she accepted so easily what Regal had done and was doing, and what I said she must do as a countermove. I wished desperately I was sure her trust in me was well placed. She did not speak of treachery or evil. She only discussed strategy as coldly as a general planning a battle.

  “It will be enough,” I promised her. “I know Prince Regal. Wallace will run to him with the tale, and he will follow Wallace here, no matter how inappropriate. He will not be able to resist, he will long to see exactly how well he has succeeded. ”

  “It is tedious enough to have all my women always commiserating with me over Verity’s death. It will be all I can bear to have them speak as if my child were gone as well. But I can bear it, if I must. What if they leave a guard with the King?” Kettricken asked.

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  “As soon as they leave to visit you, I intend to knock on the door and create a diversion. I will deal with any guard they have left. ”

  “But if you are drawing off the guard, how can you hope to accomplish anything?”

  “I have a … another who will be assisting me. ” I hoped. I cursed again that Chade had never let me establish some way of reaching him in situations such as this. “Trust me,” he had always told me. “I watch, I listen where I should. I summon you when it is safe to do so. A secret is only a secret as long as only one man knows it. ” I would not confide to anyone that I had already divulged my plans to my fireplace, in the hopes Chade was somehow listening. I hoped that in the brief time I would be able to buy, Chade would find a way to the King, to bring him respite from his pain, that he might withstand Regal’s badgering.

  “It amounts to torture,” Kettricken said quietly, as if able to read my thoughts. “To abandon an old man like that to his pain. ” She looked at me directly. “You do not trust your queen enough to tell me who your assistant is?”

  “It is not my secret to share, but my king’s,” I told her gently. “Soon, I believe, it will have to be revealed to you. Until then—”

  “Go,” she dismissed me. She shifted uncomfortably on her couch. “As bruised as I am, at least I shall not have to feign misery. Only tolerance of a man who would seek to kill his unborn kin and torment his aged father. ”

  “I go,” I said quickly, sensing her rage building and not desiring to feed it. All must be convincing for this masquerade. She must not reveal that she now knew her fall had not been any clumsiness of her own. I went out, brushing past Lacey, who was carrying a tray with a teapot. Patience was on her heels. There would not be tea in that pot. As I went past the Queen’s ladies in her antechamber, I took care to look concerned. Their reactions to the Queen’s request that King Shrewd’s personal healer be sent for would be genuine enough. I hoped it would be enough to draw Regal out of his lair.

  I slipped into Patience’s rooms and left the door just barely ajar. I waited. As I waited I thought of an old man, the herbs fading from his body and his pain reawakening in him. I had visited that pain. Given that, and a man relentlessly questioning me, how long could I remain silent and vague? Days seemed to pass. Finally there was a flurry of skirts and pattering footsteps down the hall, and a frenzied knocking at King Shrewd’s door. I did not need to hear words, it was all in the tone, the frightened pleading of the women with someone at the door, then Regal’s angry questions, turning suddenly to feigned concern. I heard him call Wallace from whatever corner he had been banished to, heard the excitement in his voice as he ordered the man to attend the Queen immediately, she was suffering a miscarriage.

  The ladies clattered past my door again. I stood still, holding my breath. That trot, that mutter, that would be Wallace, laden no doubt with all sorts of remedies. I waited, taking slow quiet breaths, trying to be patient, waited until I was sure my ploy had failed. Then I heard the more deliberate strides of Regal, and then the running strides of a man overtaking him. “That’s good wine, you idiot, don’t jostle it,” Regal rebuked him, and then they were out of my hearing. I waited again. Long after I was sure he had been admitted to the Queen’s apartments, I forced myself to wait for another hundred count. And then I eased out of the door and went to the King’s.

  I tapped. I did not knock loudly, but my tapping was insistent and unending. After a moment or two a voice demanded to know who was there.

  “FitzChivalry,” I said boldly. “I demand to see the King. ”

  A silence. Then: “No one is to be admitted. ”

  “By whose order?”

  “Prince Regal. ”

  “I bear a token from the King, one on which he gave me his word that I would always be admitted to see him whenever I so wished. ”

  “Prince Regal said specifically that you were not to be admitted. ”

  “But that was before …” And I let my voice drop lower as I muttered a few meaningless syllables.

  “What did you say?”

  I muttered again.

  “Speak up. ”

  “This is not for all the Keep to hear!” I retorted indignantly. “This is no time to spread a panic. ”

  That did it. The door opened a tiny crack. “What is it?” the man hissed.

  I leaned in close to the door, looked up and down the corridor. I peered past him through the crack. “Are you alone?” I asked suspiciously.

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  “Yes!” Impatiently. “Now what is it? It had better be good!”

  I lifted
my hands to my mouth as I leaned toward the door, unwilling to let the slightest breath of my secret escape. The guard leaned closer to the crack. I gave a quick puff of my lips and a white powder misted his face. He staggered back, clawing at his eyes and strangling. In an instant he was down. Nightmist: it was quick, it was effective. It was also often deadly. I could not find it in myself to care. It was not so much that this was my shoulder-wrenching friend. This guard could not have stood in the antechamber of Shrewd’s room and been totally unaware of what went on within.

  I had reached in through the crack and was struggling to undo the chains that secured the door when I heard a familiar hiss. “Get out of here. Leave the door alone, just go away. Don’t unlatch it, you fool!” I had a brief glimpse of a pocked visage and then the door was shut firmly in my face. Chade was right. It would be best for Regal to encounter a fully latched door, and to spend his time having his men chop through it. Every moment Regal was shut out was another moment that Chade had with the King.

  What followed was harder to do than what I had already done. I went down the stairs to the kitchen, made friendly talk with the cook, and then asked her what the commotion upstairs had been. Had the Queen lost her baby? She banished me quickly to find folk to talk to who would know more. I made my way into the watch room off the kitchen to consume a small beer and force myself to eat as if I wanted to. The food lay in my stomach like so much gravel. No one spoke to me much, but I was a presence. The gossip about the Queen’s fall ebbed and flowed around me. There were Tilth and Farrow guards here now, big, slow-moving men, part of their dukes’ retinues, hobnobbing with the Buckkeep counterparts. It was more bitter than bile to hear them speak avidly of what the loss of the child would mean to Regal’s chances for the throne. It was as if they bet on a horse race.

  The only other gossip that could compete with it was a rumor that a boy had seen the Pocked Man by the castle well in the courtyard. It was supposed to have been nearly midnight when the lad saw him. Not one had the sense to wonder what the boy was doing out there, or what light his eyes had used to see this vision of ill omen. Instead they were vowing to stay well away from water, for surely this omen meant the well had gone bad. At the rate at which they were drinking beer, I decided they had little to worry about. I stayed until word was sent down that Regal wanted three strong men with axes sent immediately to the King’s chambers. That excited a fresh round of talk, and during it, I quietly left the room and went to the stables.

  I had intended to seek out Burrich and see if the Fool had found him yet. Instead I encountered Molly coming down his steep stairs just as I had begun to climb them. She looked down at the astounded look on my face and laughed. But it was a short laugh, and it never reached her eyes.

  “Why did you go to see Burrich?” I demanded, and instantly realized how rude my question was. I had feared she had gone seeking help.

  “He is my friend,” she said succinctly. She started to push past me. Without thinking, I stood firm. “Let me past!” she hissed savagely.

  Instead I put my arms around her. “Molly, Molly, please,” I said hoarsely as she pushed at me without heart. “Let us find a place to talk, if only for a moment. I cannot bear to have you look at me that way, when I swear I have done you no wrong. You act as if I have cast you off, but you are in my heart always. If I cannot be with you, it is not because I do not wish to. ”

  She stopped struggling suddenly.

  “Please?” I begged her.

  She glanced about the dim barn. “We will stand and we will talk. Briefly. Right here. ”

  “Why are you so angry with me?”

  She nearly answered me. I saw her bite back words, then turn suddenly cold. “Why do you think that what I feel about you is the centermost pillar of my life?” she retorted. “Why do you think I have no other concerns but you?”

  I gaped at her. “Perhaps because it is how I feel about you,” I said gravely.

  “It is not. ” She was exasperated, correcting me the way she would correct a child who insisted the sky was green.

  “It is,” I insisted. I tried to gather her to me, but she was wooden in my arms.

  “Your king-in-waiting Verity was more important. King Shrewd is more important. Queen Kettricken and her unborn child are more important. ” She ticked them off on her fingers as if she were numbering my faults.

  “I know my duty,” I said quietly.

  “I know where your heart is,” she said flatly. “And it is not first with me. ”

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  “Verity is … is no longer here to protect his queen, his child, or his father,” I said reasonably. “So, for this time, I must put them ahead of my own life. Ahead of everything I hold dear. Not because I love them more but …” I floundered uselessly after words. “I am a King’s Man,” I said helplessly.

  “I am my own woman. ” Molly made it the loneliest statement in the world. “I will take care of myself. ”

  “Not forever,” I protested. “Someday we will be free. Free to wed, to do—”

  “Whatever your king asks you to do,” she finished for me. “No, Fitz. ” There was finality in her voice. Pain. She pushed away from me, stepped past me on the staircase. When she was two steps away and all of winter seemed to be blowing between us, she spoke.

  “I have to tell you something,” she said, almost gently. “There is another in my life now. One who is for me what your king is for you. One who comes before my own life, who comes ahead of all else I hold dear. By your own words, you cannot fault me. ” She looked back up at me.

  I do not know what I looked like, only that she looked aside as if she could not bear it.

  “For the sake of that one, I am going away,” she told me. “To a safer place than this. ”

  “Molly, please, he cannot love you as I do,” I begged.

  She did not look at me. “Nor can your king love you as I … used to. But. It is not a matter of what he feels for me,” she said slowly. “It is what I feel for him. He must be first in my life. He needs that from me. Understand this. It is not that I no longer care for you. It is that I cannot put that feeling ahead of what is best for him. ” She went down two more steps. “Good-bye, Newboy. ” She no more than breathed those final words, but they sank into my heart as if branded there.

  I stood on the steps, watching her go. And suddenly that feeling was too familiar, the pain too well-known. I flung myself down the steps after her, I seized her arm, I pulled her under the loft stairs into the darkness there. “Molly,” I said, “please. ”

  She said nothing. She did not even resist my grip on her arm.

  “What can I give you, what can I tell you to make you understand what you are to me? I can’t just let you go!”

  “No more can you make me stay,” she pointed out in a low voice. I felt something go out of her. Some anger, some spirit, some will. I have no word for it. “Please,” she said, and the word hurt me, because she begged. “Just let me go. Don’t make it hard. Don’t make me cry. ”

  I let go of her arm, but she did not leave.

  “A long time ago,” she said carefully, “I told you that you were like Burrich. ”

  I nodded in the darkness, not caring that she could not see me.

  “In some ways you are. In others you are not. I decide for us, now, as he once decided for Patience and himself. There is no future for us. Someone already fills your heart. And the gap between our stations is too great for any love to bridge. I know that you love me. But your love is … different from mine. I wanted us to share all our lives. You wish to keep me in a box, separate from your life. I cannot be someone you come to when you have nothing more important to do. I don’t even know what it is that you do when you are not with me. You have never even shared that much with me. ”

  “You wouldn’t like it,” I told her. “You don’t really want to know. ”

  “Don’t tell me that,�
� she whispered angrily. “Don’t you see that that is what I cannot live with, that you do not let me even decide that for myself? You cannot make that decision for me. You have no right! If you cannot even tell me that, how can I believe you love me?”

  “I kill people,” I heard myself say. “For my king. I’m an assassin, Molly. ”

  “I don’t believe you!” she whispered. She spoke too quickly. The horror in her voice was as great as the contempt. A part of her knew I had spoken the truth to her. Finally. A terrible silence, brief but so cold, grew between us as she waited for me to admit a lie. A lie she knew was truth. At last she denied it for me. “You, a killer? You couldn’t even run past the guard that day to see why I was crying! You didn’t have the courage to defy them for me! But you want me to believe you kill people for the King. ” She made a choking sound, of anger and despair. “Why do you say such things now? Why now, of all times? To impress me?”

  “If I had thought it would impress you, I probably would have told you a long time ago,” I confessed. And it was true. My ability to keep my secrets had been soundly based on my fear that telling Molly would mean losing her. I was right.

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  “Lies,” she said, more to herself than me. “Lies, all lies. From the very beginning. I was so stupid. If a man hits you once, he’ll hit you again, they say. And the same is true for lying. But I stayed, and I listened and I believed. What a fool I’ve been!” This last, so savagely that I recoiled from it as from a blow. She stood clear of me. “Thank you, FitzChivalry,” she said coldly, formally. “You’ve made this so much easier for me. ” She turned away from me.

  “Molly,” I begged. I reached to take her arm, but she spun about, her hand raised to slap me.

  “Don’t touch me,” she warned in a low voice. “Don’t you ever dare to touch me again!”

  She left.

  After a time I remembered I was standing under Burrich’s stairs in the dark. I shivered with cold and something more. No. Something less. My lips drew back from my teeth in something neither a smile nor a snarl. I had always feared that my lies would make me lose Molly. But the truth had severed in an instant what my lies had held together for a year. What must I learn from that? I wondered. Very slowly I climbed up the steps. I knocked on the door.

  “Who is it?” Burrich’s voice.

  “Me. ” He unlatched the door and I came into the room. “What was Molly doing here?” I asked him, not caring how it might sound, not caring that the bandaged Fool sat still at Burrich’s table. “Did she need help?”