The Complete Farseer Trilogy Omnibus

by Robin Hobb

  Verity, wait! But my act of groping after him broke the tenuous Skill contact, and I had no choice but to do as he had advised.

  We travelled on, through increasingly unpleasant weather. We all looked forward to getting home long before we arrived there. Burrich had, I believe, overlooked Hands’ abilities until that trip. Hands had a quiet competence that inspired trust in horses as well as dogs. Eventually he easily replaced both Cob and me in the Buckkeep stables, and the friendship that grew between Burrich and Hands caused me to be more aware of my aloneness than I care to admit.

  Galen’s death was considered a tragic thing at Buckkeep court. Those who had known him least spoke mostly kindly about him. Obviously the man had overstrained himself, for his heart to fail him so young. There was some talk of naming a warship after him, as if he were a fallen hero, but Verity never recognized the idea and it never came to pass. His body was sent back to Farrow for burial, with all honour. If Shrewd suspected anything of what had gone on between Verity and Galen, he kept it well hidden. Neither he nor even Chade ever mentioned it to me. The loss of our Skillmaster, with not even an apprentice to replace him, was no trivial thing, especially with the Red Ships on our horizons. That was what was openly discussed, but Verity flatly refused to consider Serene or any of the others Galen had trained.

  I never found out if Shrewd had given me over to Regal. I never asked him, nor even mentioned my suspicions to Chade. I suppose I didn’t want to know. I tried not to let it affect my loyalties. But in my heart, when I said, My king, I meant Verity.

  The timbers Rurisk had promised came to Buckkeep even more slowly than I did, for they had to be dragged overland to the Vin River before they could be rafted down to Turlake, and thence down the Buck River to Buckkeep. They arrived by midwinter and were all Rurisk had said they would be. The first completed warship was named after him. I think he would have understood that, but not quite approved of it.

  King Shrewd’s plan had succeeded. It had been many years since Buckkeep had had a queen of any kind, and Kettricken’s arrival stirred interest in court life. The tragic death of her brother on her wedding eve, and the brave way she had continued despite it captured the imagination of the people. Her unmistakable admiration for her new husband made Verity a romantic hero even to his own folk. They were a striking couple; her youth and pale beauty setting off Verity’s quiet strength. Shrewd displayed them at balls that attracted every minor noble from every duchy, and Kettricken spoke with intense eloquence of the need for all to band together to defeat the Red Ship Raiders. So Shrewd raised his monies, and even in the storms of winter, the fortification of the Six Duchies began. More towers were constructed, and folk volunteered to man them. Shipwrights vied for the honour of working on the warships, and Buckkeep Town was swollen with volunteers to man the ships. For a brief time that winter, folk believed in the legends they created, and it seemed the Red Ships could be defeated by sheer will alone. I mistrusted that mood, but watched as Shrewd promoted it, and wondered how he would sustain it when the realities of the Forgings began again.

  Of one other I must speak, one dragged into that conflict and intrigue only by his loyalty to me. To the end of my days, I will bear the scars he gave me. His worn teeth sank deeply into my hand several times before he managed to drag me from that pool. How he did it, I will never know. But his head still rested on my chest when they found us; his mortal bonds to this world broken. Nosy was dead. I believe he gave his life freely, recalling that we had been good to one another, when we were puppies. Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But we grieve for many years.

  Epilogue

  ‘You are wearied,’ my boy says. He is standing at my elbow and I do not know how long he has been there. He reaches forward slowly, to lift the pen from my lax grip. Wearily I regard the faltering tail of ink it has tracked down my page. I have seen that shape before, I think, but it was not ink then. A trickle of drying blood on the deck of a Red Ship, and mine the hand that spilled it? Or was it a tendril of smoke rising black against a blue sky as I rode too late to warn a village of a Red Ship Raid? Or poison swirling and unfurling yellowly in a simple glass of water, poison I had handed someone, smiling all the while? The artless curl of a strand of woman’s hair left upon my pillow? Or the trail a man’s heels left in the sand as we dragged the bodies from the smouldering tower at Sealbay? The track of a tear down a mother’s cheek as she clutched her Forged infant to her despite his angry cries? Like Red Ships, the memories come without warning, without mercy. ‘You should rest,’ the boy says again, and I realize I am sitting, staring at a line of ink on a page. It makes no sense. Here is another sheet spoiled, another effort to set aside.

  ‘Put them away,’ I tell him, and do not object as he gathers all the sheets and stacks them haphazardly together. Herbery and history, maps and musings, all a hodge-podge in his hands as they are in my mind. I can no longer recall what it was I set out to do. The pain is back, and it would be so easy to quiet it. But that way lies madness, as has been proven so many times before me. So instead I send the boy to find two leaves of Carryme, and ginger root and peppermint to make a tea for me. I wonder if one day I will ask him to fetch three leaves of that Chyurdan herb.

  Somewhere, a friend says softly, ‘No.’

  Copyright

  HarperVoyager

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  Copyright © Robin Hobb 1995

  Cover illustration © Jackie Morris

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  Royal Assassin

  Book Two of the Farseer Trilogy

  ROBIN HOBB

  Dedication

  For Giles

  and for Raphael and Freddy,

  the Princes of Assassins

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  One: Siltbay

  Two: The Homecoming

  Three: Renewing Ties

  Four: Dilemmas

  Five: Gambit

  Six: Forged Ones

  Seven: Encounters

  Eight: The Queen Awakes

  Nine: Guards and Bonds

  Ten: Fool’s Errand

  Eleven: Lone Wolves

  Twelve: Tasks

  Thirteen: Hunting

  Fourteen: Winterfest

  Fifteen: Secrets

  Sixteen: Verity’s Ships

  Seventeen: Interludes

  Eighteen: Elderlings

  Nineteen: Messages

  Twenty: Mishaps

  Twenty-One: Dark Days

  Twenty-Two: Burrich

  Twenty-Three: Threats

  Twenty-Four: Neatbay

  Twenty-Five: Buckkeep

  Twenty-Six: Skilling

  Twenty-Seven: Conspiracy

  Twenty-Eight: Treasons and Traitors

  Twenty-Nine: Escapes and Captures

  Thirty:
Dungeons

  Thirty-One: Torture

  Thirty-Two: Execution

  Thirty-Three: Wolf Days

  Epilogue

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Dreams and Awakenings

  Why is it forbidden to write down specific knowledge of the magics? Perhaps because we all fear that such knowledge would fall into the hands of one not worthy to use it. Certainly there has always been a system of apprenticeship to ensure that the understanding of magic is passed only to those trained and judged worthy of such knowledge. While this seems a laudable attempt to protect us from unworthy practitioners of arcane lore, it ignores the fact that the magics are not derived from this specific knowledge. The predilection for a certain type of magic is either inborn or lacking. For instance, the ability for the magics known as the Skill is tied closely to blood relationship to the royal Farseer line, though it may also occur as a ‘wild strain’ amongst folk whose ancestors came from both the Inland tribes and the Outislanders. One trained in the Skill is able to reach out to another’s mind, no matter how distant, and know what he is thinking. Those who are strongly Skilled can influence that thinking, or have converse with that person. For the conducting of a battle, or the gathering of information, it is a most useful tool.

  Folklore tells of an even older magic, much despised now, known as the Wit. Few will admit a talent for this magic, hence it is always said to be the province of the folk in the next valley, or the ones who live on the other side of the far ridge. I suspect it was once the natural magic of those who lived on the land as hunters rather than as settled folk; a magic for those who felt kinship with the wild beasts of the woods. The Wit, it is said, gave one the ability to speak the tongues of the beasts. It was also warned that those who practised the Wit too long or too well became whatever beast they had bonded to. But this may be only legend.

  There are the Hedge magics, though I have never been able to determine the source of this name, which are both verified and suspect, including palm reading, water gazing, the interpretation of crystal reflections, and a host of other skills that attempt to predict the future. In a separate unnamed category are the magics that cause physical effects, such as invisibility, levitation, giving motion or life to inanimate objects – all the magics of the old legends, from the Flying Chair of the Widow’s Son to the North Wind’s bewitched tablecloth. I know of no people who claim these magics as their own. They seem to be solely the stuff of legend, ascribed to folk living in ancient times or distant places, or beings of mythical or near mythical reputation: dragons, giants, the Elderlings, the Others, pecksies.

  I pause to clean my pen. My writing wanders from spidery to blobbish on this poor paper. But I will not use good parchment for these words; not yet. I am not sure they should be written. I ask myself, why put this to paper at all? Will not this knowledge be passed down by word of mouth to those who are worthy? Perhaps. But perhaps not. What we take for granted now, the knowing of these things, may be a wonder and a mystery someday to our descendants.

  There is very little in any of the libraries on magic. I work laboriously, tracing a thread of knowledge through a patchwork quilt of information. I find scattered references, passing allusions, but that is all. I have gathered it, over these last few years, and stored it in my head, always intending to commit my knowledge to paper. I will put down what I know from my own experience, as well as what I have ferreted out. Perhaps to provide answers for some other poor fool, in times to come, who might find himself as battered by the warring of the magics within him as I have been.

  But when I sit down to the task, I hesitate. Who am I to set my will against the wisdom of those who have gone before me? Shall I set down in plain lettering the methods by which a Wit-gifted one can expand his range, or can bond a creature to himself? Shall I detail the training one must undergo before being recognized as a Skilled one? The hedge wizardries and legendary magics have never been mine. Have I any right to dig out their secrets and pin them to paper like so many butterflies or leaves collected for study?

  I try to consider what one might do with such knowledge, unjustly gained. It leads me to consider what this knowledge has gained for me. Power, wealth, the love of a woman? I mock myself. Neither the Skill nor the Wit has ever offered any such to me. Or if they did, I had not the sense nor ambition to seize them when offered.

  Power. I do not think I ever wanted it for its own sake. I thirsted for it, sometimes, when I was ground down, or when those close to me suffered beneath ones who abused their powers. Wealth. I never really considered it. From the moment that I, his bastard grandson, pledged myself to King Shrewd, he always saw to it that all my needs were fulfilled. I had plenty to eat, more education than I sometimes cared for, clothes both simple and annoyingly fashionable, and often enough a coin or two of my own to spend. Growing up in Buckkeep, that was wealth enough and more than most boys in Buckkeep Town could claim. Love? Well. My horse Sooty was fond of me, in her own placid way. I had the true-hearted loyalty of a hound named Nosy, and that took him to his grave. I was given the fiercest of loves by a terrier pup, and it was likewise the death of him. I wince to think of the price willingly paid for loving me.

  Always I have possessed the loneliness of one raised amidst intrigues and clustering secrets, the isolation of a boy who can not trust the completeness of his heart to anyone. I could not go to Fedwren, the court scribe who praised me for my neat lettering and well-inked illustrations, and confide that I was already apprenticed to the Royal Assassin, and thus could not follow his writing trade. Nor could I divulge to Chade, my master in the diplomacy of the knife, the frustrating brutality I endured trying to learn the ways of the Skill from Galen the Skillmaster. And to no one did I dare speak openly of my emerging proclivity for the Wit, the ancient beast magic, said to be a perversion and a taint to any who used it.

  Not even to Molly.

  Molly was that most cherished of items: a genuine refuge. She had absolutely nothing to do with my day to day life. It was not just that she was female, though that was mystery enough to me. I was raised almost entirely in the company of men, bereft not only of my natural mother and father, but of any blood relations who would openly acknowledge me. As a child, my care was entrusted to Burrich, the gruff Stablemaster who had once been my father’s right-hand man. The stable hands and the guards were my daily companions. Then as now, there were women in the guard companies, though not so many then as now. But like their male comrades, they had duties to perform, and lives and families of their own when they were not on watch. I could not claim their time. I had no mother, nor sisters or aunts of my own. There were no women who offered me the special tenderness said to be the province of women.

  None save Molly.

  She was but a year or two older than myself, and growing the same way a sprig of greenery forces its way up through a gap in the cobblestones. Neither her father’s near constant drunkenness and frequent brutality nor the grinding chores of a child trying to maintain the pretence of both home and family business could crush her. When I first met her, she was as wild and wary as a fox cub. Molly Nosebleed she was called among the street children. She often bore the marks of the beatings her father gave her. Despite his cruelty, she cared for him. I never understood that. He would grumble and berate her even as she tottered him home after one of his binges and put him to bed. And when he awoke, he never had any remorse for his drunkenness and harsh words. There were only more criticisms: why hadn’t the chandlery been swept and fresh strewing herbs put on the floor? Why hadn’t she tended the bee hives, when they were nearly out of honey to sell? Why had she let the fire go out under the tallow pot? I was mute witness more times than I care to remember.

  But through it all, Molly grew. She flowered, one sudden summer, into a young woman who left me in awe of her capable ways and womanly charms. For her part, she seemed totally unaware of how her eyes could meet mine and turn my tongue to leather in my mouth. No magic I possessed, no Skill, no
Wit, was proof against the accidental touch of her hand against mine, nor could defend me against the awkwardness that overwhelmed me at the quirk of her smile.

  Should I catalogue her hair flowing with the wind, or detail how the colour of her eyes shifted from dark amber to rich brown depending on her mood and the hue of her gown? I would catch a glimpse of her scarlet skirts and red shawl amongst the market throng, and suddenly be aware of no one else. These are magics I witnessed, and though I might set them down on paper, no other could ever work them with such skill.

  How did I court her? With a boy’s clumsy gallantries, gaping after her like a simpleton watching the whirling discs of a juggler. She knew I loved her before I did. And she let me court her, although I was a few years younger than she, and not one of the town boys and possessed of small prospects as far as she knew. She thought I was the scribe’s errand boy, a part-time helper in the stables, a keep runner. She never suspected I was the Bastard, the unacknowledged son who had toppled Prince Chivalry from his place in the line of succession. That alone was a big enough secret. Of my magics and my other profession, she knew nothing.

  Maybe that was why I could love her.

  It was certainly why I lost her.

  I let the secrets and failures and pains of my other lives keep me too busy. There were magics to learn, secrets to ferret out, men to kill, intrigues to survive. Surrounded by them, it never occurred to me that I could turn to Molly for a measure of the hope and understanding that eluded me everywhere else. She was apart from these things, unsullied by them. I carefully kept preserved from her any touch of them. I never tried to draw her into my world. Instead, I went to hers, to the fishing and shipping port town where she sold candles and honey in her shop, and shopped in the market and, sometimes, walked on the beaches with me. To me, it was enough that she existed for me to love. I did not even dare to hope she might return that feeling.