Assassin’s Quest. Robin Hobb
table and set it there to thicken. ‘Chade and the wolf guided them to me. I wanted to go with them, but I couldn’t. I’d only have slowed them down. My leg … I knew I couldn’t keep up with the horses for long, and riding double in that weather would have exhausted the horses. I had to just let them go.’ A silence. Then he growled, lower than a wolf’s growl, ‘If ever I found out who betrayed us to Regal …’
‘I did.’
His eyes locked on mine, a look of horror and incredulity on his face. I looked at my hands. They were starting to tremble.
‘I was stupid. It was my fault. The Queen’s little maid, Rosemary. Always about, always underfoot. She must have been Regal’s spy. She heard me tell the Queen to be ready, that King Shrewd would be going with her. She heard me tell Kettricken to dress warmly. Regal would have to guess from that that she would be fleeing Buckkeep. He’d know she’d need horses. And perhaps she did more than spy. Perhaps she took a basket of poisoned treats to an old woman. Perhaps she greased a stair-tread she knew her Queen would soon descend.’
I forced myself to look up from the spikes, to meet Burrich’s stricken gaze. ‘And what Rosemary did not overhear, Justin and Serene did. They were leeched onto the King, sucking Skill-strength out of him, and privy to every thought he Skilled to Verity, or had from him. Once they knew what I was doing, serving as King’s Man, they began to Skill-spy on me as well. I did not know such a thing could be done. But Galen had discovered how, and taught it to his students. You remember Will, Hostler’s son? The coterie member? He was the best at it. He could make you believe he wasn’t even there when he was.’
I shook my head, tried to rattle from it my terrifying memories of Will. He brought back the shadows of the dungeon, the things I still refused to recall. I wondered if I had killed him. I didn’t think so. I didn’t think I’d got enough poison into him. I looked up to find Burrich watching me intently.
‘That night, at the very last moment, the King refused to go,’ I told him quietly. ‘I had thought of Regal as a traitor so long, I had forgotten that Shrewd would still see him as a son. What Regal did, taking Verity’s crown when he knew his brother was alive … King Shrewd didn’t want to go on living, knowing Regal was capable of that. He asked me to be King’s Man, to lend him the strength to Skill a farewell to Verity. But Serene and Justin were waiting.’ I paused, new pieces of the puzzle falling into place. ‘I should have known it was too easy. No guards on the King. Why? Because Regal didn’t need them. Because Serene and Justin were leeched onto him. Regal was finished with his father. He had crowned himself King-in-Waiting; there was no more good to be had out of Shrewd for him. So they drained King Shrewd dry of Skill-strength. They killed him. Before he could even bid Verity farewell. Probably Regal had told them to be sure he did not Skill to Verity again. So then I killed Serene and Justin. I killed them the same way they had killed my king. Without a chance of fighting back, without a moment of mercy.’
‘Easy. Easy now.’ Burrich crossed swiftly to me, put his hands on my shoulders and pushed me down in a chair. ‘You’re shaking as if you’re going into a seizure. Calm yourself.’
I could not speak.
‘This is what Chade and I could not puzzle out,’ Burrich told me. ‘Who had betrayed our plan? We thought of everyone. Even the Fool. For a time we feared we had sent Kettricken off in the care of a traitor.’
‘How could you think that? The Fool loved King Shrewd as no one else did.’
‘We could think of no one else who knew all our plans,’ Burrich said simply.
‘It was not the Fool who was our downfall. It was I.’ And that, I think, was the moment when I came fully back to myself. I had said the most unsayable thing, faced my most unfaceable truth. I had betrayed them all. ‘The Fool warned me. He said I would be the death of kings, if I did not learn to leave things alone. Chade warned me. He tried to make me promise I would set no more wheels in motion. But I would not. So my actions killed my king. If I had not been helping him to Skill, he would not have been so open to his killers. I opened him up, reaching for Verity. But those two leeches came in instead. The King’s assassin. Oh, in so many, many ways, Shrewd. I am so sorry, my king. So sorry. But for me, Regal would have had no reason to kill you.’
‘Fitz.’ Burrich’s voice was firm. ‘Regal never needed a reason to kill his father. He needed only to run out of reasons to keep him alive. And you had no control over that.’ A sudden frown creased his brow. ‘Why did they kill him, right then? Why did they not wait until they had the Queen as well?’
I smiled at him. ‘You saved her. Regal thought he had the Queen. They thought they’d stopped us when they kept you from getting horses out of the stables. Regal even bragged of it to me, when I was in my cell. That she’d had to leave with no horses. And with no warm winter things.’
Burrich grinned hard. ‘She and the Fool took what had been packed for Shrewd. And they left on two of the best horses ever to come out of Buckkeep’s stables. I’ll wager they got to the Mountains safely, boy. Sooty and Rud are probably grazing in Mountain pastures now.’
It was too thin a comfort. That night I went out and ran with the wolf, and Burrich made no rebuke to me. But we could not run far enough, nor fast enough, and the blood we shed that night was not the blood I wished to see run, nor could the hot fresh meat fill the void inside me.
So I remembered my life and who I had been. As the days passed, Burrich and I began to speak openly, as friends again. He gave over his dominance of me, but not without mockingly expressing his regrets for that. We recalled our old ways with one another, old ways of laughing together, old ways of disagreeing. But as things steadied between us and became normal, we were both reminded, all the more sharply, of all we no longer had.
There was not enough work in a day to busy Burrich. This was a man who had had full authority over all of Buckkeep’s stables and the horses, hounds and hawks that inhabited them. I watched him invent tasks to fill the hours, and knew how much he pined for the beasts he had overseen for so long. I missed the bustle and folk of court, but hungered most keenly for Molly. I invented conversations I would have had with her, gathered meadowsweet and daysedge flowers because they smelled like her, and lay down at night recalling the touch of her hand on my face. But these were not the things we spoke of. Instead, we put our pieces together to make a whole, of sorts. Burrich fished and I hunted, there were hides to scrape, shirts to wash and mend, water to haul. It was a life. He tried to speak to me, once, of how he had come to see me in the dungeon, to bring me the poison. His hands worked with small twitching motions as he spoke of how he had had to walk away, to leave me inside that cell. I could not let him go on. ‘Let’s go fishing,’ I suddenly proposed. He took a deep breath and nodded. We went fishing and spoke no more that day.
But I had been caged, and starved, and beaten to death. From time to time, when he looked at me, I knew he saw the scars. I shaved around the seam down my cheek, and watched the hair grow in white above my brow where my scalp had been split. We never spoke about it. I refused to think about it. But no man could have come through that unchanged.
I began to dream at night. Short vivid dreams, frozen moments of fire, searing pain, hopeless fear. I awoke, cold sweat sleeking my hair, queasy with fear. Nothing remained of those dreams when I sat up in darkness, not the tiniest thread by which I could unravel them. Only the pain, the fear, the anger, the frustration. But above all, the fear. The overwhelming fear that left me shaking and gulping for air, my eyes tearing, sour bile up the back of my throat.
The first time it happened, the first time I sat bolt upright with a wordless cry, Burrich rolled from his bed and put his hand on my shoulder, to ask if I was all right. I shoved him away from me so savagely he crashed into the table and nearly overset it. Fear and anger crested into an instant of fury when I would have killed him simply because he was where I could reach him. At that moment I rejected and despised myself so completely that I desired only to destroy everything that was me, or bordered on myself. I repelled savagely at the entire world, almost displacing my own consciousness. Brother, brother, brother, Nighteyes yelped desperately within me, and Burrich staggered back with an inarticulate cry. After a