Assassin's Apprentice (8 page)

“I hear the King said he was to have training, yes, and a horse to learn horsemanship on. And that is enough for me, and
it should be more than enough for you, Brant. And from what I hear, you were told to fetch him here, and then to report to Master Tullume, who has errands for you. Isn’t that what you heard?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Brant’s pugnaciousness was suddenly transformed into bobbing agreement.

“And while you’re “hearing’ all this vital gossip, I might point out to you that no wise man tells all he knows. And that he who carries tales has little else in his head. Do you understand me, Brant?”

“I think so, ma’am.”

“You think so? Then I shall be plainer. Stop being a nosy little gossip and attend to your chores. Be diligent and willing, and perhaps folk will start gossiping that you are my “pet.’ I could see that you are kept too busy for gossip.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You, boy.” Brant was already hurrying up the path as she rounded on me. “Follow me.”

The old woman didn’t wait to see if I obeyed or not. She simply set out at a businesslike walk across the open practice fields that had me trotting to keep up. The packed earth of the field was baked hard and the sun beat down on my shoulders. Almost instantly, I was sweating. But the woman appeared to find no discomfort in her rapid pace.

She was dressed all in gray: a long dark gray overtunic, lighter gray leggings, and over all a gray apron of leather that came nearly to her knees. A gardener of some sort, I surmised, though I wondered at the soft gray boots she wore.

“I’ve been sent for lessons . . . with Hod,” I managed to pant out.

She nodded curtly. We reached the shade of the armory and my eyes widened gratefully after the glare of the open courts.

“I’m to be taught arms and weaponry,” I told her, just in case she had mistaken my original words.

She nodded again and pushed open a door in the barnlike structure that was the outer armory. Here, I knew, the practice weapons were kept. The good iron and steel were up in the keep itself. Within the armory was a gentle half-light, and a slight coolness, along with a smell of wood and sweat and fresh-strewn reeds. She did not hesitate, and I followed her to a rack that supported a supply of peeled poles.

“Choose one,” she told me, the first words she’d spoken since directing me to follow her.

“Hadn’t I better wait for Hod?” I asked timidly.

“I am Hod,” she replied impatiently. “Now pick yourself a stave, boy. I want a bit of time alone with you, before the others come. To see what you’re made of and what you know.”

It did not take her long to establish that I knew next to nothing and was easily daunted. After but a few knocks and parries with her own brown rod, she easily caught mine a clip that sent it spinning from my stung hands.

“Hm,” she said, not harshly nor kindly. The same sort of noise a gardener might make over a seed potato that had a bit of blight on it. I quested out toward her and found the same sort of quietness I’d encountered in the mare. She had none of
Burrich’s guardedness toward me. I think it was the first time I realized that some people, like some animals, were totally unaware of my reaching out toward them. I might have quested farther into her mind, except that I was so relieved at not finding any hostility that I feared to stir any. So I stood small and still before her inspection.

“Boy, what are you called?” she demanded suddenly.

Again. “Fitz.”

She frowned at my soft words. I drew myself up straighter and spoke louder. “Fitz is what Burrich calls me.”

She flinched slightly. “He would. Calls a bitch a bitch, and a bastard a bastard, does Burrich. Well . . . I suppose I see his reasons. Fitz you are, and Fitz you’ll be called by me as well. Now. I shall show you why the pole you selected was too long for you, and too thick. And then you shall select another.”

And she did, and I did, and she took me slowly through an exercise that seemed infinitely complex then, but by the end of the week was no more difficult than braiding my horse’s mane. We finished just as the rest of her students came trooping in. There were four of them, all within a year or two of my age, but all more experienced than I. It made for an awkwardness, as there were now an odd number of students, and no one particularly wanted the new one as a sparring partner.

Somehow I survived the day, though the memory of how fades into a blessedly vague haze. I remember how sore I was when she finally dismissed us; how the others raced up the path and back to the keep while I trailed dismally behind them, berating myself
for ever coming to the King’s attention. It was a long climb to the keep, and the hall was crowded and noisy. I was too weary to eat much. Stew and bread, I think, were all I had, and I had left the table and was limping toward the door, thinking only of the warmth and quiet of the stables, when Brant again accosted me.

“Your chamber is ready,” was all he said.

I shot a desperate look at Burrich, but he was engaged in conversation with the man next to him. He didn’t notice my plea at all. So once more I found myself following Brant, this time up a wide flight of stone steps, into a part of the keep I had never explored.

We paused on a landing and he took up a candelabra from a table there and kindled its tapers. “Royal family lives down this wing,” he casually informed me. “The King has a bedroom big as the stable at the end of this hallway.” I nodded, blindly believing all he told me, though I later found that an errand boy such as Brant would never have penetrated the royal wing. That would be for more important lackeys. Up another flight he took me and again paused. “Visitors get rooms here,” he said, gesturing with the light, so that the wind of his motion set the flames to streaming. “Important ones, that is.”

And up another flight we went, the steps perceptibly narrowing from the first two. At the next landing we paused again, and I looked with dread up an even narrower and steeper flight of steps. But Brant did not take me that way. Instead we went down this new wing, three doors down, and then he slid a
latch on a plank door and shouldered it open. It swung heavily and not smoothly. “Room hasn’t been used in a while,” he observed cheerily. “But now it’s yours and you’re welcome to it.” And with that he set the candelabra down on a chest, plucked one candle from it, and left. He pulled the heavy door closed behind him as he went, leaving me in the semidarkness of a large and unfamiliar room.

Somehow I refrained from running after him or opening the door. Instead, I took up the candelabra and lit the wall sconces. Two other sets of candles set the shadows writhing back into the corners. There was a fireplace with a pitiful effort at a fire in it. I poked it up a bit, more for light than for heat, and set to exploring my new quarters.

It was a simple square room with a single window. Stone walls, of the same stone as that under my feet, were softened only by a tapestry hung on one wall. I held my candle high to study it, but could not illuminate much. I could make out a gleaming and winged creature of some sort, and a kingly personage in supplication before it. I was later informed it was King Wisdom being befriended by the Elderling. At the time it seemed menacing to me. I turned aside from it.

Someone had made a perfunctory effort at freshening the room. There was a scattering of clean reeds and herbs on the floor, and the feather bed had a fat, freshly shaken look to it. The two blankets on it were good wool. The bed curtains had been pulled back and the chest and bench that were the other furnishings had been dusted. To my inexperienced eyes, it was a rich room indeed. A real bed, with coverings and hangings about
it, and a bench with a cushion to it, and a chest to put things in were more furniture than I could recall having to myself before. That they were for my exclusive use made them larger somehow. There was also the fireplace, that I boldly added another piece of wood to, and the window, with an oak seat before it, shuttered now against the night air, but probably looking out over the sea.

The chest was a simple one, cornered with brass fittings. The outside of it was dark, but when I opened it, the interior was light-colored and fragrant. Inside the chest I found my limited wardrobe, brought up from the stables. Two nightshirts had been added to it, and a woolen blanket was rolled up in the corner of the chest. That was all. I took out a nightshirt and closed the chest.

I set the nightshirt down on the bed and then clambered up myself. It was early to be thinking of sleep, but my body ached and there seemed nothing else for me to do. Down in the stable room, by now Burrich would be sitting and drinking and mending harness or whatever. There would be a fire in the hearth, and the muffled sounds of horses as they shifted in their stalls below. The room would smell of leather and oil and Burrich himself, not dank stone and dust. I pulled the nightshirt over my head and nudged my clothes to the foot of the bed. I nestled into the feather bed; it was cool and my skin stood up in goose bumps. Slowly my body heat warmed it and I began to relax. It had been a full and strenuous day. Every muscle I possessed seemed to be both aching and tired. I knew
I should rise once more, to put the candles out, but I could not summon the energy. Nor the willpower to blow them out and let a deeper darkness flood the chamber. So I drowsed, half-lidded eyes watching the struggling flames of the small hearth fire. I idly wished for something else, for any situation that was neither this forsaken chamber nor the tenseness of Burrich’s room. For a restfulness that perhaps I had once known somewhere else but could no longer recall. And so I drowsed into oblivion.

4

Apprenticeship

A
STORY IS TOLD OF
King Victor, he who conquered the inland territories that became eventually the Duchy of Farrow. Very shortly after adding the lands of Sandsedge to his rulings, he sent for the woman who would, had Victor not conquered her land, have been the Queen of Sandsedge. She traveled to Buckkeep in much trepidation, fearing to go, but fearing more the consequences to her people if she appealed to them to hide her. When she arrived, she was both amazed and somewhat chagrined that Victor intended to use her not as a servant but as a tutor to his children, that they might learn both the language and customs of her folk. When she asked him why he chose to have them learn of her folk’s ways, he replied, “A ruler must be of all his people, for one can only rule what one knows.” Later she became the willing wife of his eldest son and took the name Queen Graciousness at her coronation.

I awoke to sunlight in my face. Someone had entered my chamber and opened the window shutters to the day. A basin, cloth, and jug of water had been left on top of the chest. I was grateful for them, but not even washing my face refreshed me. Sleep had left me sodden and I recall feeling uneasy that someone could enter my chamber and move freely about without awakening me.

As I had guessed, the window looked out over the sea, but I didn’t have much time to devote to the view. A glance at the sun told me that I had overslept. I flung on my clothes and hastened down to the stables without pausing for breakfast.

But Burrich had little time for me that morning. “Get back up to the keep,” he advised me. “Mistress Hasty already sent Brant down here to look for you. She’s to measure you for clothing. Best go find her quickly; she lives up to her name, and won’t appreciate your upsetting her morning routine.”

My trot back up to the keep reawakened all my aches of the day before. Much as I dreaded seeking out this Mistress Hasty and being measured for clothing I was certain I didn’t need, I was relieved not to be on horseback again this morning.

After querying my way up from the kitchens, I finally found Mistress Hasty in a room several doors down from my bedchamber. I paused shyly in the door and peered in. Three tall windows were flooding the room with sunlight and a mild salt breeze. Baskets of yarn and dyed wool were stacked against one wall, while a tall shelf on another wall held a rainbow of cloth goods. Two young women were talking over a loom, and in the far corner a lad not much older than I was rocking to the gentle pace of a spinning wheel. I had no doubt that the woman with her broad back to me was Mistress Hasty.

The two young women noticed me and paused in their
conversation. Mistress Hasty turned to see where they stared, and a moment later I was in her clutches. She didn’t bother with names or explaining what she was about. I found myself up on a stool, being turned and measured and hummed over, with no regard for my dignity or indeed my humanity. She disparaged my clothes to the young women, remarked very calmly that I quite reminded her of young Chivalry, and that my measurements and coloring were much the same as his had been when he was my age. She then demanded their opinions as she held up bolts of different goods against me.

“That one,” said one of the loom women. “That blue quite flatters his darkness. It would have looked well on his father. Quite a mercy that Patience never has to see the boy. Chivalry’s stamp is much too plain on his face to leave her any pride at all.”

And as I stood there, draped in wool goods, I heard for the first time what every other person in Buckkeep knew full well. The weaving women discussed in detail how the word of my existence had reached Buckkeep and Patience long before my father could tell her himself, and of the deep anguish it caused her. For Patience was barren, and though Chivalry had never spoken a word against her, all guessed how difficult it must be for an heir such as he to have no child to eventually assume his title. Patience took my existence as the ultimate rebuke, and her health, never sound after so many miscarriages, completely broke along with her spirit. It was for her sake as well as for propriety that Chivalry had given up his throne and taken his invalid wife back to the warm and gentle lands that were her home
province. Word was that they lived well and comfortably there, that Patience’s health was slowly mending, and that Chivalry, substantially quieter a man than he had been before, was gradually learning stewardship of his vineyard-rich valley. A pity that Patience blamed Burrich as well for Chivalry’s lapse in morals, and had declared she could no longer abide the sight of the man. For between the injury to his leg and Chivalry’s abandonment of him, old Burrich just wasn’t the man he had been. Was a time when no woman of the keep walked quickly past him; to catch his eye was to make yourself the envy of nearly anyone old enough to wear skirts. And now? Old Burrich, they called him, and him still in his prime. And so unfair, as if any manservant had any say over what his master did. But it was all to the good anyway, they supposed. And didn’t Verity, after all, make a much better king-in-waiting than had Chivalry? So rigorously noble was Chivalry that he made all others feel slatternly and stingy in his presence; he’d never allowed himself a moment’s respite from what was right, and while he was too chivalrous to sneer at those who did, one always had the feeling that his perfect behavior was a silent reproach to those with less self-discipline. Ah, but then here was the bastard, now, though, after all those years, and well, here was the proof that he hadn’t been the man he’d pretended to be. Verity, now there was a man among men, a king folk could look to and see as royalty. He rode hard, and soldiered alongside his men, and if he was occasionally drunk or had at times been less than discreet, well, he owned up to it, honest as his name. Folk could understand a
man like that, and follow him.

To all this I listened avidly, if mutely, while several fabrics were held against me, debated, and selected. I gained a much deeper understanding of why the keep children left me to play alone. If the women considered that I might have thoughts or feelings about their conversation, they showed no sign of it. The only remark I remember Mistress Hasty making to me specifically was that I should take greater care in washing my neck. Then Mistress Hasty shooed me from the room as if I were an annoying chicken, and I found myself finally heading to the kitchens for some food.

That afternoon I was back with Hod, practicing until I was sure my stave had mysteriously doubled its weight. Then food, and bed, and up again in the morning and back to Burrich’s tutelage. My learning filled my days, and any spare time I found was swallowed up with the chores associated with my learning, whether it was tack care for Burrich, or sweeping the armory and putting it back in order for Hod. In due time I found not one, or even two, but three entire sets of clothing, including stockings, set out one afternoon on my bed. Two were of fairly ordinary stuff, in a familiar brown that most of the children my age seemed to wear, but one was of thin blue cloth, and on the breast was a buck’s head, done in silver thread. Burrich and the other men-at-arms wore a leaping buck as their emblem. I had only seen the buck’s head on the jerkins of Regal and Verity. So I looked at it and wondered, but wondered, too, at the slash of red stitching that cut it diagonally, marching right over the design.

“It means you’re a bastard,” Burrich told me bluntly when I
asked him about it. “Of acknowledged royal blood, but a bastard all the same. That’s all. It’s just a quick way of showing you’ve royal blood, but aren’t of the true line. If you don’t like it, you can change it. I am sure the King would grant it. A name and a crest of your own.”

“A name?”

“Certainly. It’s a simple enough request. Bastards are rare in the noble houses, especially so in the King’s own. But they aren’t unheard-of.” Under guise of teaching me the proper care of a saddle, we were going through the tack room, looking over all the old and unused tack. Maintaining and salvaging old tack was one of Burrich’s odder fixations. “Devise a name and a crest for yourself, and then ask the King—”

“What name?”

“Why, any name you like. This looks like it’s ruined; someone put it away damp and it mildewed. But we’ll see what we can do with it.”

“It wouldn’t feel real.”

“What?” He held an armload of smelly leather out toward me. I took it.

“A name I just put to myself. It wouldn’t feel like it was really mine.”

“Well, what do you intend to do, then?”

I took a breath. “The King should name me. Or you should.” I steeled myself. “Or my father. Don’t you think?”

Burrich frowned. “You get the most peculiar notions. Just think about it yourself for a while. You’ll come up with a name that
fits.”

“Fitz,” I said sarcastically, and I saw Burrich clamp his jaw.

“Let’s just mend this leather,” he suggested quietly.

We carried it to his workbench and started wiping it down. “Bastards aren’t that rare,” I observed. “And in town, their parents name them.”

“In town, bastards aren’t so rare,” Burrich agreed after a moment. “Soldiers and sailors whore around. It’s a common way for common folk. But not for royalty. Or for anyone with a bit of pride. What would you have thought of me, when you were younger, if I’d gone out whoring at night, or brought women up to the room? How would you see women now? Or men? It’s fine to fall in love, Fitz, and no one begrudges a young woman or man a kiss or two. But I’ve seen what it’s like down to Bingtown. Traders bring pretty girls or well-made youths to the market like so many chickens or so many potatoes. And the children they end up bearing may have names, but they don’t have much else. And even when they marry, they don’t stop their . . . habits. If ever I find the right woman, I’ll want her to know I won’t be looking at another. And I’ll want to know all my children are mine.” Burrich was almost impassioned.

I looked at him miserably. “So what happened with my father?”

He suddenly looked weary. “I don’t know, boy. I don’t know. He was young, just twenty or so. And far from home, and trying to shoulder a heavy burden. Those are neither reasons nor excuses. But it’s as much as either of us will ever know.”

And that was that.

My life went ’round in its settled routine. There were evenings that I spent in the stables, in Burrich’s company, and more rarely, evenings that I spent in the Great Hall when some traveling minstrel or puppet show arrived. Once in a great while I could slip out for an evening down in town, but that meant paying the next day for missed sleep. Afternoons were inevitably spent with some tutor or instructor. I came to understand that these were my summer lessons, and that in winter I would be introduced to the kind of learning that came with pens and letters. I was kept busier than I had ever been in my young life. But despite my schedule, I found myself mostly alone.

Loneliness.

It found me every night as I vainly tried to find a small and cozy spot in my big bed. When I had slept above the stables in Burrich’s rooms, my nights had been muzzy, my dreams heathery with the warm and weary contentment of the well-used animals that slept and shifted and thudded in the night below me. Horses and dogs dream, as anyone who has ever watched a hound yipping and twitching in dream pursuit well knows. Their dreams had been like the sweet rising waft from a baking of good bread. But now, isolated in a room walled with stone, I finally had time for all those devouring, aching dreams that are the portion of humans. I had no warm dam to cozy against, no sense of siblings or kin stabled nearby. Instead I would lie awake and wonder about my father and my mother, and how both could have dismissed me from their lives so easily. I heard the talk that others exchanged so
carelessly over my head, and interpreted their comments in my own terrifying way. I wondered what would become of me when I was grown and old King Shrewd dead and gone. I wondered, occasionally, if Molly Nosebleed and Kerry missed me, or if they accepted my sudden disappearance as easily as they had accepted my coming. But mostly I ached with loneliness, for in all that great keep, there were none I sensed as friend. None save the beasts, and Burrich had forbidden me to have any closeness with them.

One evening I had gone wearily to bed, only to torment myself with my fears until sleep grudgingly pulled me under. Light in my face awoke me, but I came awake knowing something was wrong. I hadn’t slept long enough, and this light was yellow and wavering, unlike the whiteness of the sunlight that usually spilled in my window. I stirred unwillingly and opened my eyes.

He stood at the foot of my bed, holding aloft a lamp. This in itself was a rarity at Buckkeep, but more than the buttery light from the lamp held my eyes. The man himself was strange. His robe was the color of undyed sheep’s wool that had been washed, but only intermittently and not recently. His hair and beard were about the same color and their untidiness gave the same impression. Despite the color of his hair, I could not decide how old he was. There are some poxes that will scar a man’s face with their passage. But I had never seen a man marked as he was, with scores of tiny pox scars, angry pinks and reds like small burns, and livid even in the lamp’s yellow light. His hands were all bones and tendons wrapped in papery white skin. He was peering at me, and even in the lamplight, his eyes were
the most piercing green I had ever seen. They reminded me of a cat’s eyes when it is hunting something; the same combination of joy and fierceness. I pulled my quilt up higher under my chin.

“You’re awake,” he said. “Good. Get up and follow me.”

He turned abruptly from my bedside and walked away from the door, to a shadowed corner of my room between the hearth and the wall. I didn’t move. He glanced back at me, held the lamp higher. “Hurry up, boy,” he said irritably, and rapped the stick he leaned on against my bedpost.