FF3 Assassin’s Fate

by Robin Hobb

  ‘Walk away,’ Amber said in a small, deadly voice. ‘Walk away, Fitz. From things you don’t want to hear. Things you don’t want to feel. Things you don’t want to know.’

  I had halted at her first words, but as she continued, I did as she suggested. I walked away. She lifted her voice to call after me, her words freighted with anger. ‘Would that I could walk away from what I know! Would that I could choose to disbelieve my dreams!’

  I kept walking.

  A ship never truly sleeps. Always, there are sailors on watch and all must be ready to leap to the deck at a moment’s notice. But I was deeply asleep when someone shook my shoulder, and I came up ready to fight. By the hooded light of a dimmed lantern, I saw Spark regarding me with a mixture of alarm and amusement. ‘What?’ I demanded, but she shook her head and motioned that I should follow her. I rolled quietly from my hammock and threaded my way through sleeping sailors.

  We emerged onto the deck. The wind was slight, the waves calm. Overhead, the stars were close and bright, the moon a paring. I hadn’t bothered with a shirt or shoes but the air was so balmy I didn’t miss them.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ I asked Spark.

  ‘Yes.’

  I waited.

  ‘I know you thought less of me for bringing the book to Amber. For spying on you to see where you kept it. And you had the right to be distrustful of me. When last I tried to speak of this to you, you made it clear you did not wish to know any secrets. Well, now I come to betray trust to you again, and I expect your opinion of me will be even lower. But I cannot keep this secret any longer.’

  My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. My thoughts immediately leapt to her and Lant, and I dreaded what she might tell me.

  ‘It’s Amber,’ she said in a whisper.

  I drew breath to tell her that I did not wish to know any of Amber’s secrets. Amber’s anger at me was a wall I did not want to breach. I felt both sullen and sulky about it. If Amber had a secret she did not wish to share with me, but told Spark, well, then they were both welcome to keep it to themselves.

  But Spark didn’t care if I wanted to know or not. She spoke quickly. ‘She dreams your death. When we were on the river, it was only once, at most twice. But now it is almost every night. She talks and cries out warnings to you in her sleep, and wakes up shaking and weeping. She does not speak of it to me, but I know, for she talks in her sleep. “The son will die? How can the son die? It must not be, there must be another path, another way.” But if there is, I do not think she can find it. It’s destroying her. I do not know why she does not tell you of her nightmares.’

  ‘Did you leave her just now? Does she know you’ve come to me?’

  Spark shook her head to both questions. ‘Tonight, she seems to sleep well. Even when she awakens weeping, I feign sleep. The one time I tried to help her, she told me not to touch her and to leave her alone.’ She looked at the deck. ‘I don’t want her to know that I told you this.’

  ‘She won’t,’ I promised. I wondered if or how I would let the Fool know that I knew. He had told me that the more often something was dreamed, the likelier it was. During our years together, he had often helped me dodge deaths. I recalled how he had summoned Burrich to the top of the tower on the evening Galen had beaten me. Together they had drawn me back from the edge where I had crawled, inspired by Galen to hurl myself down. He’d warned me of a poisoning in the Mountain Kingdom. Carried me on his back to safety when I’d been felled by an arrow. He’d often told me that in his dreams my survival was so unlikely as to be nearly impossible, but that he had to keep me alive, at any cost, so that I could help him change the world.

  And we’d accomplished that. He’d dreamed his own certain death, and together we had defied that.

  I believed his dreams. I had to, except when they were too terrifying to believe. And then I always pretended I could defy them.

  And now he dreamed my death. Again. Or did he? Was I still the Unexpected Son in his visions, or was Bee? Did we hurtle toward a rescue that he believed could not succeed? I felt supremely unmoved at the thought of my own death. If my death was the price of rescuing Bee, I’d pay it and gladly. And I was suddenly relieved to think that Lant and the Fool would be there to take her safely back to Buckkeep. I knew that Riddle and Nettle would take her in, and probably do a far better job of raising her than I could.

  But if he dreamed we would reach Clerres only to have her snatched away into death— No. I would not, could not believe it. I would not allow that to be.

  Was that what had made Amber so callous when I shared my news? Did she now believe that Bee lived, but would not survive to be rescued?

  No! It had to be me. I was the Unexpected Son, not Bee. Please, Eda and El, not Bee.

  Spark was still staring at me, her face pale in the starlight. ‘It’s not the first time he has dreamed me dead,’ I told her. I managed a crooked smile. ‘Remember, when he is the Prophet, I am the Catalyst. The Changer. I have no intention of dying, or letting anyone else die. Go back to sleep, Spark. Get rest while you can. What is to be, may be. Or may not!’

  She stood silent and I saw a battle waged inside her. She lifted her eyes to meet mine and added defiantly, ‘She sees more than she admits to you.’

  I nodded to that. ‘He always has,’ I told her and turned away from her.

  I let my gaze wander back over the water. After a time, I heard her light footsteps bear her away. I let out my pent-up sigh. I wished it were all over. All the doubts and uncertainties finished. They wearied me more than any axe-fight. I wanted to be finished with waiting and preparing. Yet the waters stretched endlessly before me like crumpled paper under the uncertain moonlight.

  Somewhere upon those waters, another ship moved, toward Clerres, with my daughter aboard. Before us? Behind us? I had no way of knowing.

  TWENTY-TWO

  * * *

  The Butterfly Cloak

  Wasps sting when their nest is threatened. I went to fetch a clay flowerpot for my mother. I took one from the top of the stack, not knowing that wasps had built a nest between it and the one below. They rushed out in a horde and chased me as I fled. They stung me over and over and the pain was like fire eating into my flesh. They are not like bees, who must weigh an attack against their own lives. Wasps are more like men, able to kill again and again, and still go on living. My cheek and neck were swollen, and my hand was a shapeless lump with sausage fingers. My mother put the sap of ferns and cool mud on the stings. And then took oil and a flame and killed them all, burning their nest and their unhatched children in vengeance for what they had done to her daughter. This was before I could speak clearly. I was astonished at her hatred of them; truly I had not known my mother capable of such cold anger. When I stared at her, as the nest burned, she nodded to me. ‘While I live, no one shall hurt you and go unpunished for it.’ I knew then I must be careful of what I told her about the other children. My father may once have been an assassin. My mother remained one.

  Bee Farseer’s journal

  There are so many songs about sailing off the edge of the world. Some say one goes over an immense waterfall and reaches a land of gentle and wise people and strange animals. In other tales, the sailors reach a land of intelligent talking animals who find humans disgusting and rather stupid. The one I liked best was the tale of sailing off all known charts and finding a place where you are still a child, and you can speak with the child and warn him to make better choices. But on this voyage, I had begun to feel that when one sailed off the edge of the world, one entered a realm of endless work and boredom and the same watery horizon every day.

  The reality of sailing off the edge of all known charts was that one man’s unknown territory was another man’s pond. Paragon asserted that he had been to Clerres and the adjacent islands when he was Igrot’s ship, and that even Kennit had been there as a boy. Igrot had been obsessed with fortune-tellers and omens, a trait that some stories said had been passed on to Kennit. The crew we had t
aken on in Divvytown included a competent navigator. She had never sailed to Clerres, but had a chart from her grandfather. She was a seasoned deckhand, and as the trade routes familiar to Althea and Brashen were lost in the distance, she spent most of her time with them. Nightly they consulted the stars and she called a course to Paragon and most nights he confirmed it.

  The slow days melted one into another. There were minor diversions. One day when there was no wind to speak of Clef brought out a pipe and whistled us up a wind. If it was magic it was a kind that I could not feel and had never seen before. I pretended it was coincidence. Per got a splinter in his foot and it became infected. Althea helped me draw it out and treated it with two herbs I didn’t know. He was given a day to rest. Motley had become an accepted member of the crew. Any moment when she was not with Amber, she spent with Paragon. She rode on the figurehead’s shoulder or even on top of his head. When the winds were good and he cut through the waves, she flew before him.

  The sad thing about boredom is that one only learns to value it when it is exploded by a disaster, or the threat of one. I witnessed the changing relationships among our crewmembers from a distance, watching the tensions that any long voyage or campaign brings. I hoped to see those interior storms break apart and pass us by, yet one afternoon, as I worked alongside Lant mending a sail, he said to me the words I had dreaded. ‘Kennitsson likes Spark. And he likes her too much.’

  ‘I’ve noticed that he likes her.’ In truth, I’d noticed that almost all the crew liked her. Ant had regarded her as a rival at first, and Brashen had shouted at the girl more than once for being reckless in her efforts to show herself the better sailor. But that competition had dissolved into a solid friendship. Spark was lively, friendly, capable and hard-working. She wore her dark curly hair in a thick unruly braid now and her bare feet were callused from racing down the deck and up the rigging. The sun had baked her as dark as polished wood, and the work had muscled her arms. She glowed with health and good fellowship. And Kennitsson’s eyes followed her as she worked, and he almost always managed to sit across from her at the galley table.

  ‘Everyone’s noticed it,’ Lant replied darkly.

  ‘And that’s a problem?’

  ‘It isn’t. Yet.’

  ‘But you think it will be?’

  He gave me an incredulous look. ‘Don’t you? He’s a prince, accustomed to getting anything he wants. And he’s the son of a rapist.’

  ‘He isn’t his father,’ I said quietly, but could not deny the lurch of anxiety his words woke in me. I asked the next question carefully. ‘Is Spark worried by it? Did she ask you for protection?’

  He paused before he answered. ‘No, not yet. I don’t think she sees the danger. But I don’t want to wait for something bad to happen.’

  ‘So are you asking me to intervene?’

  He jabbed his needle through the heavy, folded canvas. ‘No. I just want you to know before something happens. So maybe you would back me, if it comes to that.’

  ‘It won’t come to that,’ I said quietly.

  He turned to look at me, wide-eyed.

  ‘If you are wise, you will do nothing until Spark asks for your protection. She isn’t the sort of girl who runs and hides behind a man. If there’s a difficulty, she should be able to handle it. And I think the quickest way for you to make her angry would be to interfere before she’s asked for any help. If you want, I’ll speak to the captains about it. This is their ship to keep order on. I know you have feelings for Spark, but—’

  ‘Enough. I’ll do as you suggest.’ He bit the words off and then began sewing with some ferocity.

  For the rest of that day I watched Spark and Kennitsson. There was no denying he was aware of her, and that she possibly enjoyed it. I did not see her flirting with him, but she laughed at his jokes. And I could see how Lant, constrained by both honour and duty, might chafe to see it. It made me both weary and envious of their youth. How many years had it been since I had felt the stabs of jealousy and the painful doubts of loving someone I could not claim? It was both a relief to be free of such turmoil, and a reminder of the years that I carried on my shoulders.

  I teetered on the edge of interfering. I tried to decide if I should have a private conversation with Spark, but feared that would seem more like a rebuke to her. And if I spoke to Prince Kennitsson, I wondered how he would react. If his attention was but a friendly flirtation, I’d feel like a meddling fool. And if he had genuine feelings for Spark, I imagined he would react as I had when Lady Patience had tried to warn me away from Molly. The situation was complicated even more by my growing friendship with the young man. His pride still made him prickly, but it was evident that he was doing his best to become a solid sailor. He had become more adept at scrubbing out his own garments and generally tending to the tasks that servants had performed for him since his birth, though he was still uncertain of whether the crew was mocking him or joking with him when someone included him in a jest. His pride was a high wall for him to batter through, but he was trying.

  More than once now I had slipped the butterfly cloak from its storage and ghosted the deck beneath it. On a ship where there was precious little privacy, it gave me a tiny hidden space when I could sit where no one would tread on me and be ignored by all. My lengthy time as Chade’s spy had eroded forever all guilt I might feel at being a party to other people’s conversations, but I did not deliberately seek them out on the ship. Ant’s close friendship with our Divvytown navigator was certainly not my business, nor did I attempt to hear the morose conversations between Althea and Brashen on the aft deck.

  On the evening when I found my usual quiet place occupied by two of the Divvytown sailors having a smoke, I drifted forward soundlessly toward the foredeck. I halted what I hoped was a safe distance away and felt mild alarm to see Kennitsson stretched full length on the deck. I took two more cautious steps and could see that his eyes were closed, but his chest was rising and falling in the slow and steady rhythm of someone in a deep sleep.

  Paragon spoke as softly as a parent by a sleeping child’s bed. ‘I know you’re there.’

  ‘I supposed you might,’ I said as softly.

  ‘Come closer. I’d like to talk to you.’

  ‘Thank you, but I think I’d best talk to you from here.’

  ‘As you wish.’

  I nodded silently. I hunkered down on the deck, my back to his railing, leaned my head back and looked up at the stars.

  ‘What?’ the ship demanded. He had crossed his arms and was looking over his shoulder at me.

  His face was so like mine as it had been in those years that I wasn’t sure if I were talking to him or myself. ‘Once, a long time ago, I tried to walk away from everything. From my family, from my duty. For a time, it seemed to make me happy. But it didn’t, really.’

  ‘You are referring to me restoring myself. To becoming the two dragons who have been trapped in this wood for six of your generations.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You think I will be unhappy?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just think that you might want to reconsider. You have a family. You are loved. You are—’

  ‘I am trapped.’

  ‘I was, too. But—’

  ‘I do not intend to remain a ship. Save your breath, human.’ After a moment, he added, ‘You may resemble me, but I am not you. My circumstances are completely different. And I did not ask to awaken to this servitude.’

  I thought of saying that I’d never desired the role my family had demanded of me. Then I wondered if I had. I watched Kennitsson’s chest rise and fall slowly. Very slowly. I started to go down on one knee beside him but the ship spoke. ‘He’s fine. Don’t wake him.’

  The small charm engraved with his father’s profile lay in the hollow of his neck, the fine silver chain pressed firmly against his flesh. I thought of how much I’d dislike having anything that snug around my throat.

  ‘It doesn’t bother him,’ Paragon told me.

&nbs
p; ‘Can it speak to him?’

  ‘Why do you care? It’s nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It might be.’ Tread carefully, Fitz. I tried to wonder if discussing it with the ship were less volatile than bringing it up to Althea. I drew a careful breath. ‘There is a young woman on your deck named Spark. She is under my protection.’

  The ship gave a snort of disdain. ‘I know her. She pleases me. And she scarcely needs your protection.’

  ‘She’s very capable, but I don’t wish to see her forced into circumstances where she has to defend herself. If it came to that, I don’t think it would go well for Kennitsson.’

  ‘What are you implying?’ the ship demanded and I felt the sudden press of his mind against my defences. I thickened my walls, too late. The ship’s upper lip lifted in what was almost a wolfish snarl. ‘You think so little of him?’

  ‘I’ve never heard anyone deny what his father did to Althea. And the wizardwood charm he wears is filled with his father’s thoughts. Why should I not be concerned?’

  ‘Because he is not his father! He does not carry his father’s memories.’ The ship paused and added ominously, ‘I carry them. I took them so that no one else would have to bear them.’

  And then I was thrown face down on the rough wood of the deck. The skin was torn from my palms and knees by the impact. I tried to rise but a man’s weight was suddenly on my back, his thick forearm like a bar of iron against my throat. I struggled to rise but he was bigger than me, and heavier. His beard rasped against the side of my face and his voice was a growl as he said, ‘Such a tender little bit of manflesh you are. Buck as you will; I’ll tame you. I relish a lively ride.’ A hand gripped the hair on top of my head and pressed my face down against the wood. I tried to seize his arm and take it away from my throat, but the thick embroidered sleeves of his shirt slipped and slid in my grasp.