Royal Assassin

  Behind me, the jays took flight. The man blazed out a curse and lunged past me toward the cage. I managed to get entangled with him so that we both fell. The crow had made it as far as the cage door. I shook myself clear of the merchant and jumped to my feet, jarring the cage to spook the bird out into the free air. He beat his wings laboriously, but they carried him to the roof of a nearby inn. As the merchant lumbered to his feet the crow opened his threadbare wings and cawed derisively.

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  “There’s a whole cageful of my wares gone!” he began accusingly, but I caught up my cloak and pointed to a tear in it. “My master’s going to be angry over this!” I exclaimed, and matched him glare for glare.

  He glanced up at the crow. The bird had huffed its feathers against the storm and sidled into the shelter of a chimney. He’d never catch that bird again. Behind me, the wolf whined suddenly.

  “Nine coppers!” the merchant offered suddenly, desperately. He’d sold nothing that day, I’d wager.

  “I told you, I’ve no way to take him home!” I countered. I tugged up my hood, glanced at the sky. “Storm’s here,” I announced as the thick wet flakes began to fall. This would be nasty weather, too warm to freeze, too cold to melt. By daylight, the streets would be shining with ice. I turned to go.

  “Give me your six damned coppers, then!” the merchant bellowed in frustration.

  I fumbled them out hesitatingly. “And will you cart him to where I live?” I asked as he snatched them out of my hand.

  “Carry him yourself, boy. You’ve robbed me and you know it. ”

  With that, he seized up his cage of doves and pigeons and heaved it into the cart. The empty crow’s cage followed. He ignored my angry remonstrance as he climbed up on the seat and shook the pony’s reins. The old beast dragged the creaking cart off, into the thickening snow and dusk. The market around us was abandoned. The only traffic now were folk hurrying home through the storm, collars and cloaks tight against the wet wind and blowing snow.

  “Now what am I to do with you?” I asked the wolf.

  Let me out. Free me.

  I can’t. Not safe. If I turned a wolf loose here in the heart of town, he’d never find his way to the woods alive. There were too many dogs that would pack up to bring him down, too many men who would shoot him for his hide. Or for being a wolf. I bent toward the cage, intending to heft it and see how heavy it was. He lunged at me, teeth bared.

  Get back! I was instantly angry. It was contagious.

  I’ll kill you. You’re the same as he was, a man. You’d keep me in this cage, would you? I’ll kill you, I’ll rip your belly out and tussle with your guts.

  You’ll get back! I pushed at him, hard, and he cowered away again. He snarled and whined his confusion at what I had done, but he shrank away from me into the corner of his cage. I seized the cage, lifted it. It was heavy, and the frantic shifting of his weight didn’t make it any easier. But I could carry it. Not very far, and not for long. But if I took it in stages, I could get him out of the town. Full grown, he’d probably weigh as much as I did. But he was skinny, and young. Younger than I had guessed at first glance.

  I heaved the cage up, held it against my chest. If he went for me now, he could do some damage. But he only whined and cowered back from me into the far corner. It made it very awkward to carry him.

  How did he catch you?

  I hate you.

  How did he catch you?

  He remembered a den, and two brothers. A mother who brought him fish. And blood and smoke and his brothers and mother became smelly hides for the boot man. He was dragged out last and thrown into a cage that smelled like ferrets, and kept alive on carrion. And hate. Hate was what he had throve upon.

  You were whelped late, if your mother was feeding you on the fish runs.

  He sulked at me.

  All the roads were uphill, and the snow was starting to stick. My worn boots slid on the icy cobbles, and my shoulders ached with the awkward burden of the cage. I feared I would start trembling. I had to stop frequently to rest. When I did, I firmly refused to think about what I was doing. I told myself that I would not bond with this wolf, or any other creature. I had promised myself. I was just going to feed this cub up and then turn him loose somewhere. Burrich need never know. I would not have to face his disgust. I hefted the cage up again. Who would have thought such a mangy little cub could be so heavy?

  Not mangy. Indignant. Bugs. The cage is full of bugs.

  So I wasn’t imagining that itching on my chest. Wonderful. I’d have to bathe again tonight, unless I wanted to share my bed with fleas the rest of the winter.

  I had reached the edge of Buckkeep Town. From here, there were only a scattering of houses, and the road would be steeper. Much steeper. Once again I lowered the cage to the snowy ground. The cub huddled in it, small and miserable without anger and hate to sustain him. He was hungry. I made a decision.

  I’m going to take you out. I’m going to carry you.

  Nothing from him. He watched me steadily as I worked the catch on the cage and swung the door open. I had thought he would charge past me and vanish into the night and the falling snow. Instead he crouched where he was. I reached into the cage and seized him by the scruff to drag him out. In a flash he was on me, driving into my chest, jaws going wide for my throat. I got my arm up just in time to shove my forearm crossways into his jaws. I kept my grip on the scruff of his neck and pushed my arm hard into his mouth, deeper than he liked. His hind legs tore at my belly, but my jerkin was thick enough to divert most of the damage. In an instant we were rolling over and over in the snow, both snapping and snarling like mad things. But I had the weight and the leverage and the experience of tussling with dogs for years. I got him on his back and held him there, helpless, while his head thrashed back and forth and he called me vile names that humans have no words for. When he had exhausted himself I leaned forward over him. I gripped his throat and leaned down to stare into his eyes. This was a physical message he understood. I added to it. I am the Wolf. You are the Cub. You will obey me!

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  I held him there staring into his eyes. He quickly looked away, but still I held him, until he looked back up at me and I saw the change in them. I let go of him and stood up and stepped away. He lay still. Get up. Come here. He rolled over and came to me, belly low to the ground, tail between his legs. When he got close to me, he fell over on his side and then showed his belly. He whined softly.

  After a moment I relented. It’s all right. We just had to understand each other. I don’t intend to hurt you. Come with me now. I reached over to scratch his chest, but when I touched him, he yelped. I felt the red flash of his pain.

  Where are you hurt?

  I saw the brass-bound club of the cage man. Everywhere.

  I tried to be gentle as I felt him over. Old scabs, lumps on his ribs. I stood, and kicked the cage savagely aside from our path. He came and leaned against my leg. Hungry. Cold. So tired. His feelings were bleeding over into mine again. When I touched him, it was difficult to separate my thoughts from his. Was it my outrage over how he had been treated, or his own? I decided it didn’t matter. I gathered him up carefully and stood. Without the cage, held close to my chest, he didn’t weigh nearly as much. He was mostly fur and long growing bones. I regretted the force I’d used on him, but also knew that it was the only language he would have recognized. “I’ll take care of you,” I forced myself to say aloud.

  Warm, he thought gratefully, and I took a moment to pull my cloak over him. His senses were feeding mine. I could smell myself, a thousand times stronger than I wanted to. Horses and dogs and wood smoke and beer and a trace of Patience’s perfume. I did my best to block out my awareness of his senses. I snugged him to me and carried him up the steep path to Buckkeep. I knew of a disused cottage. An old pig man had once lived in it, out back behind the granaries. No one l
ived there now. It was too tumbledown, and too far from everyone else at Buckkeep. But it would suit my purposes. I’d put him there, with some bones to gnaw and some boiled grain, and some straw to bed down in. A week or two, maybe a month, and he’d be healed up and strong enough to care for himself. Then I’d take him out west of Buckkeep and turn him loose.

  Meat?

  I sighed. Meat, I promised. Never had any beast sensed my thoughts so completely, or expressed his own to me so clearly. It was good that we would not be around one another for long. Very good that he’d be leaving soon.

  Warm, he contradicted me. He set his head atop my shoulder and fell asleep, his muzzle snuffling damply against my ear.

  5

  Gambit

  CERTAINLY THERE IS an ancient code of conduct, and certainly its customs were harsher than ours today. But I would venture that we have not wandered so far from those customs so much as put a veneer over them. A warrior’s word is still his bond, and among those who serve side by side, there is nothing so foul as one who lies to his comrades, or leads them into dishonor. The laws of hospitality still forbid those who have shared salt at a man’s table to shed blood on his floor.

  Winter deepened around Buckkeep Castle. The storms came in off the sea, to pound us with icy fury and then depart. Snow usually fell in their wake, great dumps of it that iced the battlements like sweet paste on nut cakes. The great darks of the long nights grew longer, and on clear nights the stars burned cold over us. After my long journey home from the Mountain Kingdom, the ferocity of the winter didn’t threaten me as it once had. As I went my daily rounds to the stable and to the old pig hut, my cheeks might burn with cold and my eyelashes cling together with frost, but I always knew that home and a warm hearth were close by. The storms and the deep colds that snarled at us like wolves at the door were also the watch beasts that kept the Red-Ships away from our shores.

  Time dragged for me. I called on Kettricken each day, as Chade had suggested, but our restiveness was too much alike for us. I am sure I irritated her as much as she did me. I dared not spend too many hours with the cub, lest we bond. I had no other fixed duties. There were too many hours to the day, and all were filled with my thoughts of Molly. Nights were the worst, for then my sleeping mind was beyond my control, and my dreams were full of my Molly, my bright red-skirted candlemaker, now gone so demure and drab in serving-girl blue. If I could not be near her by day, my dreaming self courted her with an earnestness and energy that my waking self had never mustered the courage for. When we walked the beaches after a storm, her hand was in mine. I kissed her competently, without uncertainty, and met her eyes with no secrets to hide. No one could keep her from me. In my dreams.

  At first, Chade’s training of me seduced me into spying upon her. I knew which room on the servants’ floor was hers, I knew which window was hers. I learned, without intention, the hours of her comings and goings. It shamed me to stand where I might hear her step upon the stairs and catch a brief glimpse of her going out on her market errands, but try as I might, I could not forbid myself to be there. I knew who her friends were among the serving women. Though I might not speak to her, I could greet them, and have a chance bit of talk with them, hoping always for some stray mention of Molly. I yearned after her hopelessly. Sleep eluded me, and food held no interest for me. Nothing held any interest for me.

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  I was sitting one evening in the guardroom off the kitchen. I had found a place in the corner where I could lean against the wall and prop my boots up on the opposite bench to discourage company. A mug of ale that had gone warm hours ago sat in front of me. I lacked even the ambition to drink myself into a stupor. I was looking at nothing, attempting not to think, when the bench was jerked out from under my propped feet. I nearly fell from my seat, then recovered to see Burrich seating himself opposite me. “What ails you?” he asked without niceties. He leaned forward and pitched his voice for me alone. “Have you had another seizure?”

  I looked back at the table. I spoke as quietly. “A few trembling fits, but no real seizures. They only seem to come on me if I strain myself. ”

  He nodded gravely, then waited. I looked up to find his dark eyes on me. The concern in them touched something in me. I shook my head, my voice suddenly gone. “It’s Molly,” I said after a moment.

  “You haven’t been able to find where she went?”

  “No. She’s here, at Buckkeep, working as a maid for Patience. But Patience won’t let me see her. She says …”

  Burrich’s eyes had widened at my first words. Now he glanced around us, then tossed his head at the door. I arose and followed him as he led me back to his stables, and then up to his room. I sat down at his table, before his hearth, and he brought out his good Tilth brandy and two cups. Then he set out his leather-mending tools. And his perpetual pile of harness to be mended. He handed me a halter that needed a new strap. For himself, he laid out some fancy work on a saddle skirt. He drew up his own stool and looked at me. “This Molly. I’ve seen her then, in the washer courts with Lacey? Carries her head proud? Red glint to her coat?”

  “Her hair,” I corrected him grudgingly.

  “Nice wide hips. She’ll bear easily,” he said with approval.

  I glared at him. “Thank you,” I said icily.

  He shocked me by grinning. “Get angry. I’d rather you were that than self-pitying. So. Tell me. ”

  And I told him. Probably much more than I would have in the guardroom, for here we were alone, the brandy went warm down my throat, and the familiar sights and smells of his room and work were all around me. Here, if anywhere in my life, I had always been safe. It seemed safe to reveal to him my pain. He did not speak or make any comments. Even after I had talked myself out, he kept his silence. I watched him rub dye into the lines of the buck he had incised in the leather.

  “So. What should I do?” I heard myself ask.

  He set down his work, drank off his brandy, and then refilled his cup. He looked about his room. “You ask me, of course, because you have noted my rare success at providing myself with a fond wife and many children?”

  The bitterness in his voice shocked me, but before I could react to it, he gave a choked laugh. “Forget I said that. Ultimately, the decision was mine, and done a long time ago. FitzChivalry, what do you think you should be doing?”

  I stared at him morosely.

  “What made things go wrong in the first place?” When I did not reply, he asked me, “Did not you yourself just tell me that you courted her as a boy, when she considered your offer a man’s? She was looking for a man. So don’t go sulking about like a thwarted child. Be a man. ” He drank down half his brandy, then refilled both our cups.

  “How?” I demanded.

  “The same way you’ve shown yourself a man elsewhere. Accept the discipline, live up to the task. So you cannot see her. If I know anything of women, it does not mean she does not see you. Keep that in mind. Look at yourself. Your hair looks like a pony’s winter coat, I’ll wager you’ve worn that shirt a week straight, and you’re thin as a winter foal. I doubt you’ll regain her respect that way. Feed yourself up, groom yourself daily, and in Eda’s name, get some exercise instead of moping about the guardroom. Set yourself some tasks and get onto them. ”

  I nodded slowly to the advice. I knew he was right. But I could not help protesting, “But all of that will do me no good if Patience will still not permit me to see Molly. ”

  “In the long run, my boy, it is not about you and Patience. It is about you and Molly. ”

  “And King Shrewd,” I said wryly.

  He glanced up at me quizzically.

  “According to Patience, a man cannot be sworn to a King and give his heart fully to a woman as well. ‘You cannot put two saddles on one horse,’ she told me. This from a woman who married a King-in-Waiting, and was content with whatever time he had for her. ” I reached to hand Burrich the
mended halter.

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  He did not take it. He had been in the act of lifting his brandy cup. He set it down on the table so sharply that the liquid leaped and slopped over the edge. “She said that to you?” he asked me hoarsely. His eyes bored into mine.

  I nodded slowly. “She said it would not be honorable to expect Molly to be content with whatever time the King left to me as my own. ”

  Burrich leaned back in his chair. A chain of conflicting emotions dragged across his features. He looked aside into the hearthfire, and then back at me. For a moment he seemed on the verge of speaking. Then he sat up, drank off his brandy in one gulp, and abruptly stood. “It’s too quiet up here. Let’s go down to Buckkeep Town, shall we?”

  The next day I arose and ignored my pounding head to set myself the task of not behaving like a lovesick boy. A boy’s impetuosity and carelessness were what had lost her to me. I resolved to attempt a man’s restraint. If biding my time was my only path to her, I would take Burrich’s advice and use that time well.

  So I arose each day early, before even the morning cooks were up. In the privacy of my room, I stretched and then worked through sparring drills with an old stave. I would work myself into sweat and dizziness, and then go down to the baths to steam myself. Slowly, very slowly, my stamina began to return. I gained weight and began to rebuild the muscle on my bones. The new clothing that Mistress Hasty had inflicted on me began to fit. I was still not free of the tremors that sometimes assailed me. But I had fewer seizures, and always managed to return to my rooms before I could shame myself by falling. Patience told me that my color was better, while Lacey delighted in feeding me at every opportunity. I began to feel myself again.

  I ate with the guards each morning, where quantity consumed was always of more importance than manners. Breakfast was followed with a trip to the stables, to take Sooty out for a snowy canter to keep her in condition. When I returned her to the stables, there was a homey comfort in taking care of her myself. Before our misadventures in the Mountain Kingdom, Burrich and I had been on bad terms over my use of the Wit. I had been all but barred from the stables. So there was more than satisfaction in rubbing her down and seeing to her grain myself. There was the busyness of the stables, the warm smells of the beasts, and the gossip of the Keep as only the stable hands could tell it. On fortunate days, Hands or Burrich would take time to stop and talk with me. And on other days, busy days, there was the bittersweet satisfaction of seeing them conferring over a stallion’s cough, or doctoring the ailing boar that some farmer had brought up to the Keep. On those days they had little time for pleasantries and, without intending it, excluded me from their circle. It was as it had to be. I had moved on to another life. I could not expect the old one to be held ajar for me forever.