Assassin 3 - Royal Assassin (50 page)

There is no place so dark as the open water at
night. Fellow and foe were indistinguishable in the dark. A man
leaped onto me; I caught at the leather of his foreign harness,
bore him down, and strangled him. After the numbness that had
briefly clenched me, there was a savage relief in his terror
beating against me. I think it happened quickly: When I
straightened up, the other boat was pulling away from us. She had
only about half her oarsmen, and there was still fighting on our
decks, but she was leaving her men. Our master was shouting at us
to finish them and be after the Red-Ship. It was a useless command.
By the time we had killed them and thrown them off our decks, the
other ship was lost in the darkness. Justin was down, throttled and
battered, alive, but incapable of Skilling to Verity just then. In
any case, one bank of our oars was a splintered mess. Our master
cursed us all soundly as the oars were redistributed and shipped,
but it was too late. He shouted us down to stillness, but we could
hear nothing, and see nothing. I stood on my sea chest and turned
slowly in a complete circle. Empty black water. Of the oared
vessel, no sign. But even more strange to me was what I spoke
aloud. The white ship was at anchor. But she's gone,
too!

Around me, heads turned to stare at me. White
ship?

Are you all right, Fitz?

A Red-Ship, boy, it was a Red-Ship we
fought.

Speak not of a white ship. To see a white ship
is to see your own death. Bad luck. This last was hissed to me by
Nonge. I opened my mouth to object that I had seen an actual ship,
not some vision of disaster. He shook his head at me and then
turned away to stare out over the empty water. I closed my mouth
and sat down slowly. No one else had seen it. Nor did any of the
others speak of the terrible fear that had gripped us and changed
our battle plans to panic. When we got back, to town that night,
the way it was told in the taverns was that we had come up on the
ship, engaged battle, only to have the Red-Ship flee us. No
evidence remained of that encounter but some shattered oars, some
injuries, and some Outislander blood on our decks.

When I privately conferred with both Verity and
Nighteyes, neither had seen anything. Verity told me that I had
excluded him as soon as we sighted the other vessel. Nighteyes was
miffed to admit that I had completely closed myself to him as well.
Nonge would say nothing to me of white ships; he was not much for
conversation on any topic. Later I found mention of the white ship
in a scroll of old legends. There it was an accursed ship, where
the souls of drowned sailors unworthy of the sea would work forever
for a merciless master. I was forced to set aside all mention of it
or be thought mad.

The rest of the summer, the Red-Ships evaded the
Rurisk. We would catch sight of them, and give chase, but never
managed to run one down. Once it was our good fortune to chase one
that had just raided. She threw her captives overboard to lighten
herself and fled us. Of twelve folk they threw in, we rescued nine,
and returned them unForged to their village. The three who drowned
before we reached them were mourned, but all agreed it was a better
fate than Forging.

The other ships had much the same luck. The
Constance came upon Raiders in the midst of attacking a village.
They didn't manage a quick victory, but had the foresight to damage
the beached Red-Ship so that the Raiders could not make a clean
escape. It took days to hunt them all down, for they scattered into
the woodlands when they saw what had been done to their ship. The
other vessels had similar experiences: we gave chase, we drove off
Raiders, the other ships even had some few successes at sinking
raiding vessels, but we captured no more intact ships that
summer.

So, the Forgings were reduced, and each time we
sent a ship down, we told ourselves it was one less. But it never
seemed to make a difference in how many remained. In one sense, we
brought hope to the folk of Six Duchies. In another way, we gave
them despair, for despite all we did, we could not drive the threat
of Raiders from our shore.

For me, that long summer was a time of terrible
isolation and incredible closeness. Verity was often with me, yet I
found I could never seem to sustain the contact once any sort of
fighting had begun. Verity himself was aware of the maelstrom of
emotions that threatened to overwhelm me each time our crew
engaged. He ventured the theory that in attempting to defend
against the thoughts and feelings of others, I set up my boundaries
so firmly that not even he could breach them. He also suggested
that this might mean I was strong in the Skill, stronger than he
was even, but so sensitized that to let down my barriers during a
battle drowned me in the consciousnesses of everyone around me. It
was an interesting theory, but one that offered no practical
solutions to the problem. Still, in the days when I carried Verity
about, I developed a feel for him that I had for no other man, save
perhaps Burrich. With chilling familiarity, I knew how the Skill
hunger gnawed at him.

When I was a boy, Kerry and I had one day
climbed a tall cliff over the ocean. When we reached the top and
looked out over it, he confessed to me an almost overwhelming
impulse to fling himself off. I think this was akin to what Verity
felt. The pleasure of the Skill enticed him, and he longed to fling
all of himself, every ounce of his being, out into its web. His
close contact with me only fed it. And yet we did too much good for
the Six Duchies for him to give it up, even though the Skill was
eating him hollow. Perforce I shared with him many of his hours at
his lonely tower window, the hard chair where he sat, the weariness
that destroyed his appetite for food, even the deep bone aches of
inactivity. I witnessed how he wasted away.

I do not know that it is good to know someone so
well. Nighteyes was jealous, and said so plainly. At least with him
it was an open anger about being slighted, as he saw it. It was a
more difficult thing with Molly.

She could see no real reason why I had to be
away so much. Why did I, of all people, have to crew on one of the
warships? The reason I was able to give her, that Verity wished me
to, satisfied her not at all. Our brief times together began to
have a predictable pattern. We would come together in a storm of
passion, find peace in each other briefly, and then begin to
wrangle about things. She was lonely, she hated being a servant,
the little bit of money she could set aside for herself grew
terribly slowly, she missed me, why did I have to be gone so much
when I was the only thing that made her life bearable? I approached
her once with the offer of what money I had earned aboard the ship,
but she stiffened as if I had called her a whore. She would take
nothing of mine until we were joined in marriage before all. And I
could offer her no real hope as to when that might happen. I still
had never found the moment in which to reveal Shrewd's plans for
Celerity and me. We were apart so much, we lost the threads of one
another's day-to-day lives, and when we did come together, we
always rechewed the bitter rinds of the same arguments over and
over.

One night, when I came to her, I found her with
her hair bound back all in red ribbons and graceful silver earrings
shaped like willow leaves dangling against her bare neck. Clad as
she was in her simple white nightgown, the sight of her took my
breath away. Later, during a quieter moment when we had breath for
speaking, I complimented her on the earrings. Artlessly, she told
me that when Prince Regal had last come to buy candles of her, he
had gifted her with them, for he said he was so pleased with what
she created that he scarcely felt he paid her what such finely
scented candles were worth. She smiled proudly as she told me this,
her fingers toying with my warrior's queue while her own hair and
ribbons tangled wildly upon the pillows. I do not know what she saw
in my face, but it widened her eyes and she drew back from
me:

You will take gifts from Regal? I asked her
coldly. You will not accept from me coin that I have honestly
earned, but you take jewelry from that ...

I teetered on the edge of treason, but could
find no word to express what I thought of him.

Molly's eyes narrowed, and it was my turn to
draw back. What should I have said to him? `No, sir, I cannot
accept your largesse, until you marry me'? There is not between
Regal and me what there is between us. This was a perquisite from a
customer, such as is often given to a skilled craftsman. Why did
you think he gave them to me? In exchange for my favors?

We stared at one another, and after a time I
managed to speak what she was almost willing to accept as an
apology. But then I made the mistake of suggesting that perhaps he
had given them to her solely because he knew it would vex me. And
then she wanted to know how Regal might know what was between us;
and did I think her work so poor that a largesse such as the
earrings was not due her? Suffice to say that we mended our
quarrels as well as we could in the short time we had left
together. But a mended pot is never as sound as a whole one, and I
returned to the ship as lonely as if I had had no time at all with
her.

In the times when I leaned on my oar and kept
perfect rhythm and tried to think of nothing at all, I often found
myself missing Patience and Lacey, Chade, Kettricken, or even
Burrich. The few times I was able to call on our queen-in-waiting
that summer, I always found her on her tower-top garden. It was a
beautiful place, but despite her efforts, it was nothing like the
other Buckkeep gardens had ever been. There was too much of the
Mountains in her for her ever to convert entirely to our ways.
There was a honed simplicity to how she arranged and trained the
plants. Simple stones had been added, and bare driftwood branches
twisted and smoothed by the sea rested against them in stark
beauty. I could have meditated calmly there, but it was not a place
to loll in the warm wind of summer, and I suspected that was how
Verity had recalled it. She kept herself busy there, and enjoyed
it, but it did not bond her to Verity as she had once believed it
would. She was as beautiful as ever, but always her blue eyes were
clouded gray with a preoccupation and a worry. Her brow was
furrowed so often that when she did relax her face, one saw the
pale lines of the skin the sun had never reached. In the times I
spent with her there, she often dismissed most of her ladies, and
then quizzed me about the Rurisk's activities as thoroughly as if
she were Verity himself. When I had finished reporting to her,
often she folded her lips into a firm line and went to stare out
over the top of the tower wall and beyond to the sea touching the
edge of the sky. Toward the end of summer, as she was staring so
one afternoon, I ventured close to her to ask to be excused from
her presence to return to my ship. She scarcely seemed to hear what
I had asked. Instead, she said softly, There has to be a final
solution. Nothing, no one can go on like this. There must be a way
to make an end of this.

Autumn storms come soon, my lady queen. Already,
frost has touched some of your vines. Storms are never far behind
the first chilling, and with them comes peace for us.

Peace? Ha. She snorted in disbelief. Is it peace
to lie awake and wonder who will die next, where will they attack
next year? That is not peace. That is a torture. There must be a
way to put an end to the Red-Ships. And I intend to find
it.

Her words sounded almost like a
threat.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

Interludes

OF STONE WERE their bones made, of the sparkling
veined stone of the Mountains. Their flesh was made of the shining
salts of the earth. But their hearts were made of the hearts of
wise men.

They came from afar, those men, a long and
trying way. They did not hesitate to lay down the lives that had
become a weariness to them. They ended their days and began
eternities, they put aside flesh and donned stone, they let fall
their weapons and rose on new wings. Elderlings.

When the King finally summoned me, I went to
him. True to my promise to myself, I had not voluntarily gone to
his chambers since that afternoon. Bitterness still ate at me over
his arrangements with Duke Brawndy concerning Celerity and me. But
a summons from one's king was not a thing to be ignored, regardless
of what anger churned inside me still.

He sent for me on an autumn morning. It had been
at least two months since I had last stood before King Shrewd. I
had ignored the wounded looks the Fool flung at me when I
encountered him, and turned aside Verity's occasional query as to
why I had not sought out Shrewd's chamber. It was easy enough.
Wallace still guarded his door like a serpent on the hearth, and
the King's poor health was no secret from anyone. No one was
admitted to his rooms before noon anymore. So I told myself this
morning summons betokened something important.

I had thought the morning would belong to me. An
unseasonably early and vicious autumn storm had pounded us for two
days. The driving wind was merciless, while drenching rain promised
that anyone in an open boat would be fully occupied with bailing. I
had spent the evening before in the tavern with the rest of the
Rurisk's crew, toasting the storm and wishing the Red-Ships the
full kiss of it. I had come back to the Keep to tumble soddenly
into my bed, certain that I could sleep as long as I wished the
next morning. But a determined page had battered my door until
sleep forsook me, and then delivered to me the King's formal
summons.