Robin Hobb - Royal Assassin

I sat on the edge of it.

I found I was shaking as if with an ague. A seizure, I told myself. I must calm myself or risk a seizure. Did I want the Fool to see me twitching and gasping? I didn't care. Nothing mattered, except finding out if that was my Molly, and if so, had she perished? I had to know. I had to know if she had died, and if she had died, how she had died. Never had the knowing of something been so essential to me.

The Fool crouched on the rug like a pale toad. He wet his lips and smiled at me. Pain sometimes can wring such a smile from a man. "It's a very glad song, the one they sing about Siltbay," he observed. "A triumphant song. The villagers won, you see. Didn't win life for themselves, no, but clean death. Well, death anyway. Death, not Forging. At least that's something. Something to make a song about and hold on to these days. That's how it is in Six Duchies now. We kill our own so the Raiders can't, and then we make victory songs about it. Amazing what folk will take comfort in when there's nothing else to hold on to."

My vision softened. I knew suddenly that I dreamed. "I'm not even here," I said faintly. "This is a dream. I dream that I am King Shrewd."

He held his pale hand up to the firelight, considered the bones limned so plainly in the thin flesh. "If you say so, my liege, it must be so. I, too, then, dream you are King Shrewd. If I pinch you, perhaps, shall I awaken myself?"

I looked down at my hands. They were old and scarred. I closed them, watched veins and tendons bulge beneath the papery surface, felt the sandy resistance of my own swollen knuckles. I'm an old man now, I thought to myself. This is what it really feels like to be old. Not sick, where one might get better. Old. When each day can only be more difficult, each month is another burden to the body. Everything was slipping sideways. I had thought, briefly, that I was fifteen. From somewhere came the scent of scorching flesh and burning hair. No, rich beef stew. No, Jonqui's healing incense. The mingling scents made me nauseous. I had lost track of who I was, of what was important. I scrabbled at the slippery logic, trying to surmount it. It was hopeless. "I don't know," I whispered. "I don't understand any of this."

"Ah," said the Fool. "As I told you. You can only understand a thing when you become it."

"Is this what it means to be King Shrewd, then?" I demanded. It shook me to my core. I had never seen him like this, racked by the pains of age but still relentlessly confronted by the pains of his subjects. "Is this what he must endure, day after day?"

"I fear it is, my liege," the Fool replied gently. "Come. Let me help you back into your bed. Surely, tomorrow you will feel better."

"No. We both know I will not." I did not speak those terrible words. They came from King Shrewd's lips, and I heard them, and knew that this was the debilitating truth King Shrewd bore every day. I was so terribly tired. Every part of me ached. I had not known that flesh could be so heavy, that the mere bending of a finger could demand a painful effort. I wanted to rest. To sleep again. Was it I, or Shrewd? I should let the Fool put me to bed, let my king have his rest. But the Fool kept holding that one key morsel of information just above my snapping jaws. He juggled away the one mote of knowledge I must possess to be whole.

"Did she die there?" I demanded.

He looked at me sadly. He stooped abruptly, picked up his rat scepter again. A tiny pearl of a tear trickled down Ratsy's cheek. He focused on it and his eyes went afar again, wandering across a tundra of pain. He spoke in a whisper. "A woman in Siltbay. A drop of water in the current of all the women of Siltbay. What might have befallen her? Did she die? Yes. No. Badly burned, but alive. Her arm severed at the shoulder. Cornered and raped while they killed her children, but left alive. Sort of." The Fool's eyes became even emptier. It was as if he read aloud from a roster. His voice had no inflection. "Roasted alive with the children when the burning structure fell on them. Took poison as soon as her husband awoke her. Choked to death on smoke. And died of an infection in a sword wound only a few days later. Died of a sword thrust. Strangled on her own blood as she was raped. Cut her own throat after she had killed the children while Raiders were hacking her door down. Survived, and gave birth to a Raider's child the next summer. Was found wandering days later, badly burned, but recalling nothing. Had her face burned and her hands hacked oft, but lived a short—"

"Stop!" I commanded him. "Stop it! I beg you, stop."

He paused and drew a breath. His eyes came back to me, focused on me. "Stop it?" He sighed. He put his face into his hands, spoke through muffling fingers. "Stop it? So shrieked the women of Siltbay. But it is done already, my liege. We cannot stop what's already happening. Once it's come to pass, it's too late." He lifted his face from his hands. He looked very weary.

"Please," I begged him. "Cannot you tell me of the one woman I saw?" I suddenly could not recall her name, only that she was very important to me.

He shook his head, and the small silver bells on his cap jingled wearily. "The only way to find out would be to go there." He looked up at me. "If you command it, I shall do so."

"Summon Verity," I told him instead. "I have instructions for him."

"Our soldiers cannot arrive in time to stop this raid," he reminded me. "Only to help to douse the fires and assist the folk there in picking from the ruins what is left to them."

"Then so they shall do," I said heavily.

"First, let me help you return to your bed, my king. Before you take a chill. And let me bring you food."

"No, Fool," I told him sadly. "Shall I eat and be warm, while the bodies of children are cooling in the mud? Fetch me instead my robe and buskins. And then be off to find Verity."

The Fool stood his ground boldly. "Do you think the discomfort you inflict on yourself will give even one child another breath, my liege? What happened at Siltbay is done. Why must you suffer?"

"Why must I suffer?" I found a smile for the Fool. "Surely that is the same question that every inhabitant of Siltbay asked tonight of the fog. I suffer, my fool, because they did. Because I am king. But more, because I am a man, and I saw what happened there. Consider it, Fool. What if every man in the Six Duchies said to himself, `Well, the worst that can befall them has already happened. Why should I give up my meal and warm bed to concern myself with it?' Fool, by the blood that is in me, these are my folk. Do I suffer more tonight than any one of them did? What is the pain and trembling of one man compared with what happened at Siltbay? Why should I shelter myself while my folk are slaughtered like cattle?"

"But two words are all I need say to Prince Verity." The Fool vexed me with more words. `Raiders' and `Siltbay', and he knows as much as any man needs to. Let me rest you in your bed, my lord, and then I shall race to him with those words."

"No." A fresh cloud of pain blossomed in the back of my skull. It tried to push the sense from my thoughts, but I held firm. I forced my body to walk to the chair beside the hearth. I managed to lower myself into it. "I spent my youth defining the borders of the Six Duchies to any who challenged them. Should my life be too valuable to risk now, when there is so little left of it, and all of that riddled with pain? No, Fool. Fetch my son to me at once. He shall Skill for me, since my own strength for it is at an end this night. Together, we shall consider what we see, and make our decisions as to what must be done. Now go. GO!"

The Fool's feet pattered on the stone floor as he fled.

I was left alone with myself. Myselves. I put my hands to my temples. I felt a painful smile crease my face as I found myself. So, boy. There you are. My king slowly turned his attention to me. He was weary, but he reached his Skill toward me to touch my mind as softly as blowing spiderweb. I reached clumsily, attempting to complete the Skill bond and it all went awry. Our contact tattered, fraying apart like rotten cloth. And then he was gone.