Robin Hobb - Royal Assassin

"I know my duty," I said quietly.

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

"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.

"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?"

Burrich cleared his throat. "She came for herbs," he said uneasily. "I could not help her, I did not have what she wanted. Then the Fool came, and she stayed to help me with him."

"Patience and Lacey have herbs. Lots of them," I pointed out.

"That is what I told her." He turned away from me, and began clearing away the things he had used to work on the Fool. "She did not wish to go to them." There was something in his voice, almost prodding, pushing me to the next question.

"She's going away," I said in a small voice. "She's going away." I sat down on a chair before Burrich's fire and clenched my hands between my knees. I became aware I was rocking back and forth, tried to stop.

"Did you succeed?" the Fool asked quietly.

I stopped rocking. I swear that for an instant I had no idea what he was talking about. "Yes," I said quietly. "Yes, I think I did." I had succeeded at losing Molly, too. Succeeded at wearing away her loyalty and her love, taking her for granted, succeeded at being so logical and practical and loyal to my king that I had just lost any chance of ever having a life of my own. I looked at Burrich. "Did you love Patience?" I asked suddenly. "When you decided to leave?"

The Fool started, then visibly goggled. So there were some secrets even he did not know. Burrich's face went as dark as I had ever seen it. He crossed his arms on his chest, as if to restrain himself. He might kill me, I thought. Or maybe he sought only to hold some pain inside himself. "Please," I added, "I have to know."

He glared at me, then spoke carefully. "I am not a changeable man," he told me. "If I had loved her, I would love her still."

So. It would never go away. "But, still, you decided—"

"Someone had to decide. Patience would not see it could not be. Someone had to end the torment for us both."