Robin Hobb: Assassin's Apprentice

“And this will make the people like him more, support his future kingship more? That he fathered a child on some wild woman before he married his Queen?” Verity sounded confused by the logic.

I heard the sourness in Regal’s voice. “So the King seems to think. Does he care nothing for the disgrace? But I suspect Chivalry will feel differently about using his bastard in such a way. Especially as it regards dear Patience. But the King has ordered that the bastard be brought to Buckkeep when you return.” Regal looked down on me as if ill satisfied.

Verity looked briefly troubled, but nodded. A shadow lay over Burrich’s features that the yellow lamplight could not lift.

“Has my master no say in this?” Burrich ventured to protest. “It seems to me that if he wants to settle a portion on the family of the boy’s mother, and set him aside, then, why surely for the sake of my Lady Patience’s sensibilities, he should be allowed that discretion—”

Prince Regal broke in with a snort of disdain. “The time for discretion was before he rolled the wench. The Lady Patience is not the first woman to have to face her husband’s bastard. Everyone here knows of his existence; Verity’s clumsiness saw to that. There’s no point to trying to hide him. And as far as a royal bastard is concerned, none of us can afford to have such sensibilities, Burrich. To leave such a boy in a place like this is like leaving a weapon hovering over the King’s throat. Surely even a houndsman can see that. And even if you can’t, your master will.”

An icy harshness had come into Regal’s voice, and I saw Burrich flinch from his voice as I had seen him cower from nothing else. It made me afraid, and I drew the blanket up over my head and burrowed deeper into the straw. Beside me, Vixen growled lightly in the back of her throat. I think it made Regal step back, but I cannot be sure. The men left soon after, and if they spoke any more than that, no memory of it lies within me.

Time passed, and I think it was two, or perhaps three weeks later that I found myself clinging to Burrich’s belt and trying to wrap my short legs around a horse behind him as we left that chill village and began what seemed to me an endless journey down to warmer lands. I suppose at some point Chivalry must have come to see the bastard he had sired and must have passed some sort of judgment on himself as regarded me. But I have no memory of such a meeting with my father. The only image I carry of him in my mind is from his portrait on the wall in Buckkeep. Years later I was given to understand that his diplomacy had gone well indeed, securing a treaty and peace that lasted well into my teens and earning the respect and even fondness of the Chyurda.

In truth, I was his only failure that year, but I was a monumental one. He preceded us home to Buckkeep, where he abdicated his claim to the throne. By the time we arrived, he and Lady Patience were gone from court, to live as the Lord and Lady of Withywoods. I have been to Withywoods. Its name bears no relationship to its appearance. It is a warm valley, centered on a gently flowing river that carves a wide plain that nestles between gently rising and rolling foothills. A place to grow grapes and grain and plump children. It is a soft holding, far from the borders, far from the politics of court, far from anything that had been Chivalry’s life up to then. It was a pasturing out, a gentle and genteel exile for a man who would have been King. A velvet smothering for a warrior and a silencing of a rare and skilled diplomat.

And so I came to Buckkeep, sole child and bastard of a man I’d never know. Prince Verity became King-in-Waiting and Prince Regal moved up a notch in the line of succession. If all I had ever done was to be born and discovered, I would have left a mark across all the land for all time. I grew up fatherless and motherless in a court where all recognized me as a catalyst. And a catalyst I became.

Here are many legends about Taker, the first Outislander to claim Buckkeep as the First Duchy and the founder of the royal line. One is that the raiding voyage he was on was his first and only foray out from whatever cold harsh island bore him. It is said that upon seeing the timbered fortifications of Buckkeep, he had announced, “If there’s a fire and a meal there, I shan’t be leaving again.” And there was, and he didn’t.

But family rumor says that he was a poor sailor, made sick by the heaving water and salt-fish rations that other Outislanders throve upon. That he and his crew had been lost for days upon the water, and if he had not managed to seize Buckkeep and make it his own, his own crew would have drowned him. Nevertheless, the old tapestry in the Great Hall shows him as a well-thewed stalwart grinning fiercely over the prow of his vessel as his oarsmen propel him toward an ancient Buckkeep of logs and poorly dressed stone.

Buckkeep had begun its existence as a defensible position on a navigable river at the mouth of a bay with excellent anchorage. Some petty landchief, whose name has been lost in the mists of history, saw the potential for controlling trade on the river and built the first stronghold there. Ostensibly, he had built it to defend both river and bay from the Outislander raiders who came every summer to plunder up and down the river. What he had not figured on were the raiders that infiltrated his fortifications by treachery. The towers and walls became their toehold. They moved their occupations and domination up the river, and rebuilding his timber fort into towers and walls of dressed stone, finally made Buckkeep the heart of the First Duchy, and eventually the capital of the kingdom of the Six Duchies.

The ruling house of the Six Duchies, the Farseers, were descended from those Outislanders. They had, for several generations, kept up their ties with the Outislanders, making courting voyages and returning home with plump dark brides of their own folk. And so the blood of the Outislanders still ran strong in the royal lines and the noble houses, producing children with black hair and dark eyes and muscled stocky limbs. And with those attributes went a predilection for the Skill, and all the dangers and weaknesses inherent in such blood. I had my share of that heritage, too.

But my first experience of Buckkeep held nothing of history or heritage. I knew it only as an end place for a journey, a panorama of noise and people, carts and dogs and buildings and twisting streets that led finally to an immense stone stronghold on the cliffs that overlooked the city sheltered below it. Burrich’s horse was weary, and his hooves slipped on the often slimy cobbles of the city streets. I held on grimly to Burrich’s belt, too weary and aching even to complain. I craned my head up once to stare at the tall gray towers and walls of the keep above us. Even in the unfamiliar warmth of the sea breeze, it looked chill and forbidding. I leaned my forehead against his back and felt ill in the brackish iodine smell of the immense water. And that was how I came to Buckkeep.

Burrich had quarters over the stables, not far from the mews. It was there he took me, along with the hounds and Chivalry’s hawk. He saw to the hawk first, for it was sadly bedraggled from the trip. The dogs were overjoyed to be home and were suffused with a boundless energy that was very annoying to anyone as weary as I. Nosy bowled me over a half-dozen times before I could convey to his thickskulled hound’s mind that I was weary and half-sick and in no mood for play. He responded as any pup would, by seeking out his former littermates and immediately getting himself into a semiserious fight with one of them that was quelled by a shout from Burrich. Chivalry’s man he might be, but when he was at Buckkeep, he was the master for hounds, hawks, and horses.