Robin Hobb: Assassin's Apprentice

“Here, Burrich,” Jason said matter-of-factly. “This pup’s for you, now.” He turned away from me. I watched with interest as he broke a corner as big as his fist off a dark loaf, and then drew his belt knife to take a wedge of cheese off a wheel. He pushed these into my hands, and then stepping to the fire, began sawing a man-sized portion of meat off the joint. I wasted no time in filling my mouth with bread and cheese. Beside me, the man called Burrich set down his mug and glared around at Jason.

“What’s this?” he asked, sounding very much like the man in the warm chamber. He had the same unruly blackness to his hair and beard, but his face was angular and narrow. His face had the color of a man much outdoors. His eyes were brown rather than black, and his hands were long-fingered and clever. He smelled of horses and dogs and blood and leathers.

“He’s yours to watch over, Burrich. Prince Verity says so.”

“Why?”

“You’re Chivalry’s man, ain’t you? Care for his horse, his hounds, and his hawks?”

“So?”

“So, you got his little bastid, at least until Chivalry gets back and does otherwise with him.” Jason offered me the slab of dripping meat. I looked from the bread to the cheese I gripped, loath to surrender either, but longing for the hot meat, too. He shrugged at seeing my dilemma, and with a fighting man’s practicality, flipped the meat casually onto the table beside my hip. I stuffed as much bread into my mouth as I could and shifted to where I could watch the meat.

“Chivalry’s bastard?”

Jason shrugged, busy with getting himself bread and meat and cheese of his own. “So said the old plowman what left him here.” He layered the meat and cheese onto a slab of bread, took an immense bite, and then spoke through it. “Said Chivalry ought to be glad he’d seeded one child, somewhere, and should feed and care for him himself now.”

An unusual quiet bloomed suddenly in the kitchen. Men paused in their eating, gripping bread or mugs or trenchers, and turned eyes to the man called Burrich. He himself set his mug carefully away from the edge of the table. His voice was quiet and even, his words precise. “If my master has no heir, ’tis Eda’s will, and no fault of his manhood. The Lady Patience has always been delicate, and—”

“Even so, even so,” Jason was quickly agreeing. “And there sits the very proof that there’s nowt wrong with him as a man, as is all I was saying, that’s all.” He wiped his mouth hastily on his sleeve. “As like to Prince Chivalry as can be, as even his brother said but a while ago. Not the Crown Prince’s fault if his Lady Patience can’t carry his seed to term. . .”

But Burrich had stood suddenly. Jason backed a hasty step or two before he realized I was Burrich’s target, not him. Burrich gripped my shoulders and turned me to the fire. When he firmly took my jaw in his hand and lifted my face to his, he startled me, so that I dropped both bread and cheese. Yet he paid no mind to this as he turned my face toward the fire and studied me as if I were a map. His eyes met mine, and there was a sort of wildness in them, as if what he saw in my face were an injury I’d done him. I started to draw away from that look, but his grip wouldn’t let me. So I stared back at him with as much defiance as I could muster, and saw his upset masked suddenly with a sort of reluctant wonder. And lastly he closed his eyes for a second, hooding them against some pain. “It’s a thing that will try her lady’s will to the edge of her very name,” Burrich said softly.

He released my jaw and stooped awkwardly to pick up the bread and cheese I’d dropped. He brushed them off and handed them back to me. I stared at the thick bandaging on his right calf and over his knee that had kept him from bending his leg. He reseated himself and refilled his mug from a pitcher on the table. He drank again, studying me over the rim of his mug.

“Who’d Chivalry get him on?” a man at the other end of the table asked incautiously.

Burrich swung his gaze to the man as he set his mug down. For a moment he didn’t speak, and I sensed that silence hovering again. “I’d say it was Prince Chivalry’s business who the mother was, and not for kitchen talk,” Burrich said mildly.

“Even so, even so,” the guard agreed abruptly, and Jason nodded like a courting bird in agreement. Young as I was, I still wondered what kind of man this was who, with one leg bandaged, could quell a room full of rough men with a look or a word.

“Boy don’t have a name,” Jason volunteered into the silence. “Just goes by ‘boy’.”

This statement seemed to put everyone, even Burrich, at a loss for words. The silence lingered as I finished bread and cheese and meat, and washed it down with a swallow or two of beer that Burrich offered me. The other men left the room gradually, in twos and threes, and still he sat there, drinking and looking at me. “Well,” he said at long last. “If I know your father, he’ll face up to it square and do what’s right. But Eda only knows what he’ll think is the right thing to do. Probably whatever hurts the most.” He watched me silently a moment longer. “Had enough to eat?” he asked at last.

I nodded, and he stood stiffly, to swing me off the table and onto the floor. “Come on, then, Fitz,” he said, and moved out of the kitchen and down a different corridor. His stiff leg made his gait ungainly, and perhaps the beer had something to do with it as well. Certainly I had no trouble in keeping up. We came at last to a heavy door, and a guard who nodded us through with a devouring stare at me.

Outside, a chill wind was blowing. All the ice and snow that had softened during the day had gone back to sharpness with the coming of night. The path cracked under my feet, and the wind seemed to find every crack and gap in my garments. My feet and leggings had been warmed by the kitchen’s fire, but not quite dried, so the cold seized on them. I remember darkness, and the sudden tiredness that came over me, a terrible weepy sleepiness that dragged at me as I followed the strange man with the bandaged leg through the chill, dark courtyard. There were tall walls around us, and guards moved intermittently atop them, dark shadows visible only as they blotted the stars occasionally from the sky. The cold bit at me, and I stumbled and slipped on the icy pathway. But something about Burrich did not permit me to whimper or beg quarter from him. Instead I followed him doggedly. We reached a building and he dragged open a heavy door.

Warmth and animal smells and a dim yellow light spilled out. A sleepy stable boy sat up in his nest of straw, blinking like a rumpled fledgling. At a word from Burrich he lay down again, curling up small in the straw and closing his eyes. We moved past him, Burrich dragging the door to behind us. He took the lantern that burned dimly by the door and led me on.

I entered a different world then, a night world where animals shifted and breathed in stalls, where hounds lifted their heads from their crossed forepaws to regard me with lambent eyes green or yellow in the lantern’s glow. Horses stirred as we passed their stalls. “Hawks are down at the far end,” Burrich said as we passed stall after stall. I accepted it as something he thought I should know.

“Here,” he said finally. “This’ll do. For now, anyway. I’m jigged if I know what else to do with you. If it weren’t for the Lady Patience, I’d be thinking this a fine god’s jest on the master. Here, Nosy, you just move over and make this boy a place in the straw. That’s right, you cuddle up to Vixen, there. She’ll take you in, and give a good slash to any that think to bother you.”

I found myself facing an ample box stall, populated with three hounds. They had roused and lay, stick tails thumping in the straw at Burrich’s voice. I moved uncertainly in amongst them and finally lay down next to an old bitch with a whitened muzzle and one torn ear. The older male regarded me with a certain suspicion, but the third was a half-grown pup, and Nosy welcomed me with ear lickings, nose nipping, and much pawing. I put an arm around him to settle him, and then cuddled in amongst them as Burrich had advised. He threw a thick blanket that smelled much of horse down over me. A very large gray horse in the next stall stirred suddenly, thumping a heavy hoof against the partition, and then hanging his head over to see what the night excitement was about. Burrich absently calmed him with a touch.