Robin Hobb - Assassin's Apprentice

“Why?”

Lacey sighed. “Because it would make her feel better. And that would make my life much easier. There’s nothing worse than being maid to someone as heartsick as Lady Patience. She longs desperately for you to be good at something. She keeps trying you out, hoping that you’ll manifest some sudden talent so that she can flout you about and tell folk, ‘There, I told you he had it in him.’ Now, I’ve had boys of my own, and I know boys aren’t that way. They don’t learn, or grow, or have manners when you’re looking at them. But turn away, and turn back, and there they are, smarter, taller, and charming everyone but their own mothers.”

I was a little lost. “You want me to learn to play this so Patience will be happy?”

“So she can feel she’s given you something.”

“She gave me Smithy. Nothing she can ever give me will be better than him.”

Lacey looked surprised at my sudden sincerity. So was I. “Well. You might tell her that. But you might also try to learn to play the sea pipes or recite a ballad or sing one of the old prayers. That she might understand better.”

After Lacey left, I sat thinking, caught between anger and wistfulness. Patience wished me to be a success and felt she must discover something I could do. As if, before her, I had never done or accomplished anything. But as I mulled over what I had done, and what she knew of me, I realized that her image of me must be a rather flat one. I could read and write, and take care of a horse or dog. I could also brew poisons, make sleeping drafts, smuggle, lie, and do sleight of hand, none of which would have pleased her even if she had known. So, was there anything to me, other than being a spy or assassin?

The next morning I arose early and sought Fedwren. He was pleased when I asked to borrow brushes and colors from him. The paper he gave me was better than practice sheets, and he made me promise to show him my efforts. As I made my way up the stairs I wondered what it would be like to apprentice with him. Surely it could not be any harder than what I had been set to lately.

But the task I had set myself proved harder than any Patience had put me to. I could see Smithy asleep on his cushion. How could the curve of his back be different from the curve of a rune, the shades of his ears so different from the shading of the herbal illustrations I painstakingly copied from Fedwren’s work. But they were, and I wasted sheet after sheet of paper until I suddenly saw that it was the shadows around the pup that made the curves of his back and the line of his haunch. I needed to paint less, not more, and put down what my eye saw rather than what my mind knew.

It was late when I washed out my brushes and set them aside. I had two that pleased, and a third that I liked, though it was soft and muzzy, more like a dream of a puppy than a real puppy. More like what I sensed than what I saw, I thought to myself.

But when I stood outside Lady Patience’s door, I looked down at the papers in my hand and suddenly saw myself as a toddler presenting crushed and wilted dandelions to his mother. What fitting pastime was this for a youth? If I were truly Fedwren’s apprentice, then exercises of this sort would be appropriate, for a good scriber must illustrate and illuminate as well as scribe. But the door opened before I knocked and there I was, my fingers smudged still with paint and the pages damp in my hand.

I was wordless when Patience irritably told me to come inside, that I was late enough already. I perched on the edge of a chair with a crumpled cloak and some half finished bit of stitchery. I set my paintings to one side of me, atop a stack of tablets.

“I think you could learn to recite verse, if you chose to,” she remarked with some asperity. “And therefore you could learn to compose verse, if you chose to. Rhythm and meter are no more than . . . is that the puppy?”

“It’s meant to be,” I muttered, and could not remember feeling more wretchedly embarrassed in my life.

She lifted the sheets carefully and examined each one in turn, holding them close and then at arm’s length. She stared longest at the muzzy one. “Who did these for you?” she asked at last. “Not that it excuses your being late. But I could find good use for someone who can put on paper what the eye sees, with the colors so true. That is the trouble with all the herbals I have; all the herbs are painted the same green, no matter if they are gray or tinged pink as they grow. Such tablets are useless if you are trying to learn from them—”

“I suspect he’s painted the puppy himself, ma’am,” Lacey interrupted benignly.

“And the paper, this is better than what I’ve had to—” Patience paused suddenly. “You, Thomas?” (And I think that was the first time she remembered to use the name she had bestowed on me.) “You paint like this?”

Before her incredulous look, I managed a quick nod. She held up the pictures again. “Your father could not draw a curved line, save it was on a map. Did your mother draw?”

“I have no memories of her, lady.” My reply was stiff. I could not recall that anyone had ever been brave enough to ask me such a thing before.

“What, none? But you were six years old. You must remember something — the color of her hair, her voice, what she called you. . . .” Was that a pained hunger in her voice, a curiosity she could not quite bear to satisfy?

Almost, for a moment, I did remember. A smell of mint, or was it . . . it was gone. “Nothing, lady. If she had wanted me to remember her, she would have kept me, I suppose.” I closed my heart. Surely I owed no remembrance to the mother who had not kept me, nor ever sought me since.

“Well.” For the first time I think Patience realized she had taken our conversation into a difficult area. She stared out the window at a gray day. “Someone has taught you well,” she observed suddenly, too brightly.

“Fedwren.” When she said nothing, I added, “The court scribe, you know. He would like me to apprentice to him. He is pleased with my letters, and works with me now on the copying of his images. When we have time, that is. I am often busy, and he is often out questing after new paper reeds.”

“Paper reeds?” she asked distractedly.

“He has a bit of paper. He had several measures of it, but little by little he has used it. He got it from a trader, who had it from another, and yet another before him, so he does not know where it first came from. But from what he was told, it was made of pounded reeds. The paper is a much better quality than any we make; it is thin, flexible, and does not crumble so readily with age, yet it takes ink well, not soaking it up so that the edges of runes blur. Fedwren says that if we could duplicate it, it would change much. With a good, sturdy paper, any man might have a copy of tablet lore from the keep. Were paper cheaper, more children could be taught to write and to read both, or so he says. I do not understand why he is so—”

“I did not know any here shared my interest.” A sudden animation lit the lady’s face. “Has he tried paper made from pounded lily root? I have had some success with that. And also with paper created by first weaving and then wet-pressing sheets made with threads of bark from the kinue tree. It is strong and flexible, yet the surface leaves much to be desired. Unlike this paper. . .”

She glanced again at the sheets in her hand and fell silent. Then she asked hesitantly, “You like the puppy this much?”

“Yes,” I said simply, and our eyes suddenly met. She stared into me in the same distracted way that she often stared out the window. Abruptly, her eyes brimmed with tears.

“Sometimes, you are so like him that . . .” She choked. “You should have been mine! It isn’t fair, you should have been mine!”