Robin Hobb - The Complete Farseer Trilogy - Assassin’s Apprentice, Royal Assassin, Assassin’s Quest

I shook my head mutely.

‘Dog whip.’

I looked at him blankly. There was nothing in my experience or Nosy’s to tell me how to react to this. He must have seen my confusion. He smiled genially and his voice remained friendly, but I sensed something hidden in his manner, something waiting.

‘It’s a tool, fitz. A teaching device. When you get a pup that won’t mind – when you say to a pup, “come here”, and the pup refuses to come – well, a few sharp lashes from this and the pup learns to listen and obey the first time. Just a few sharp cuts is all it takes to make a pup learn to mind.’ He spoke casually as he lowered the whip and let the short lash dance lightly over the floor. Neither Nosy nor I could take our eyes off it, and when he suddenly flipped the whole object at Nosy, the pup gave a yelp of terror and leaped back from it, and then rushed to cower behind me.

And Burrich sank down slowly, covering his eyes as he folded himself onto a bench by the fireplace. ‘Oh, Eda,’ he breathed, between a curse and a prayer. ‘I guessed, I suspected, when I saw you running together like that, but damn El’s eyes, I didn’t want to be right. I didn’t want to be right. I’ve never hit a pup with that damn thing in my life. Nosy had no reason to fear it. Not unless you’d been sharing minds with him.’

Whatever the danger had been, I sensed that it had passed. I sank down to sit beside Nosy, who crawled up into my lap and nosed at my face anxiously. I quieted him, suggesting we wait to see what happened next. Boy and pup, we sat, watching Burrich’s stillness. When he finally raised his face, I was astounded to see that he looked as if he had been crying. ‘Like my mother,’ I remember thinking, but oddly I cannot now recall an image of her weeping. Only of Burrich’s grieved face.

‘Fitz. Boy. Come here,’ he said softly, and this time there was something in his voice that could not be disobeyed. I rose and went to him, Nosy at my heels. ‘No,’ he said to the pup, and pointed to a place by his boot, but me he lifted onto the bench beside him.

‘Fitz,’ he began, and then paused. He took a deep breath and started again. ‘Fitz, this is wrong. It’s bad, very bad, what you’ve been doing with this pup. It’s unnatural. It’s worse than stealing or lying. It makes a man less than a man. Do you understand me?’

I looked at him blankly. He sighed, and tried again.

‘Boy, you’re of the royal blood. Bastard or not, you’re Chivalry’s own son, of the old line. And this thing you’re doing, it’s wrong. It’s not worthy of you. Do you understand?’

I shook my head mutely.

‘There, you see. You’re not talking any more. Now talk to me. Who taught you to do this?’

I tried. ‘Do what?’ My voice felt creaky and rough.

Burrich’s eyes grew rounder. I sensed his effort at control. ‘You know what I mean. Who taught you to be with the dog, in his mind, seeing things with him, letting him see with you, telling each other things?’

I mulled this over for a moment. Yes, that was what had been happening. ‘No one,’ I answered at last. ‘It just happened. We were together a lot,’ I added, thinking that might explain it.

Burrich regarded me gravely. ‘You don’t speak like a child,’ he observed suddenly. ‘But I’ve heard that was the way of it, with those who had the old Wit. That from the beginning, they were never truly children. They always knew too much, and as they got older, they knew even more. That was why it was never accounted a crime, in the old days, to hunt them down and burn them. Do you understand what I’m telling you, fitz?’

I shook my head, and when he frowned at my silence, I forced myself to add, ‘But I’m trying. What is the old Wit?’

Burrich looked incredulous, then suspicious. ‘Boy!’ he threatened me, but I only looked at him. After a moment, he conceded my ignorance.

‘The Wit,’ he began slowly. His face darkened, and he looked down at his hands as if remembering an ancient sin. ‘It’s the power of the beast blood, just as the Skill comes from the line of kings. It starts out like a blessing, giving you the tongues of the animals. But then it seizes you and draws you down, makes you a beast like the rest of them. Until finally there’s not a shred of humanity in you, and you run and give tongue and taste blood, as if the pack were all you had ever known. Until no man could look on you and think you had ever been a man.’ His voice had become lower and lower as he spoke, and he had not looked at me, but had turned to the fire and stared into the failing flames there. ‘There’s some as say a man takes on the shape of a beast then, but he kills with a man’s passion rather than a beast’s simple hunger. Kills for the killing …

‘Is that what you want, fitz? To take the blood of kings that’s in you, and drown it in the blood of the wild hunt? To be as a beast among beasts, simply for the sake of the knowledge it brings you? Worse yet, think on what comes before. Will the scent of fresh blood touch off your temper, will the sight of prey shut down your thoughts?’ His voice grew softer still, and I heard the sickness he felt as he asked me, ‘Will you wake fevered and asweat because somewhere a bitch is in season and your companion scents it? Will that be the knowledge you take to your lady’s bed?’

I sat small beside him. ‘I do not know,’ I said in a little voice.

He turned to face me, outraged. ‘You don’t know?’ he growled. ‘I tell you where it will lead, and you say you don’t know?’

My tongue was dry in my mouth and Nosy cowered at my feet. ‘But I don’t know,’ I protested. ‘How can I know what I’ll do, until I’ve done it? How can I say?’

‘Well, if you can’t say, I can!’ he roared, and I sensed then in full how he had banked the fires of his temper, and also how much he’d drunk that night. ‘The pup goes and you stay. You stay here, in my care, where I can keep an eye on you. If Chivalry will not have me with him, it’s the least I can do for him. I’ll see that his son grows up a man, and not a wolf. I’ll do it if it kills both of us!’

He lurched from the bench to seize Nosy by the scruff of the neck. At least, such was his intention. But the pup and I sprang clear of him. Together we rushed for the door, but the latch was fastened and before I could work it, Burrich was upon us. Nosy he shoved aside with his boot; me he seized by a shoulder and propelled me away. ‘Come here, pup,’ he commanded, but Nosy fled to my side. Burrich stood panting and glaring by the door, and I caught the growling undercurrent of his thoughts, the fury that taunted him to smash us both and be done with it. Control overlay it, but that brief glimpse was enough to terrify me. And when he suddenly sprang at us, I repelled at him with all the force of my fear.

He dropped as suddenly as a bird stoned in flight, and sat for a moment on the floor. I stooped and clutched Nosy to me. Burrich slowly shook his head as if shaking raindrops from his hair. He stood, towering over us. ‘It’s in his blood,’ I heard him mutter to himself. ‘From his damned mother’s blood, and I shouldn’t be surprised. But the boy has to be taught.’ And then, as he looked me full in the eye, he warned me, ‘Fitz. Never do that to me again. Never. Now, give me that pup.’

He advanced on us again, and as I felt the lap of his hidden wrath, I could not contain myself. I repelled at him again. But this time my defence was met by a wall that hurled it back at me, so that I stumbled and sank down, almost fainting, my mind pressed down by blackness. Burrich stooped over me. ‘I warned you,’ he said softly, and his voice was like the growling of a wolf. Then, for the last time, I felt his fingers grip Nosy’s scruff. He lifted the pup bodily, and carried him, not roughly, to the door. The latch that had eluded me he worked swiftly, and in moments I heard the heavy tromp of his boots down the stair.