Assassin’s Quest

I’m going to kill Regal. And his coterie. I’m going to kill all of them, for all they did to me, and all they took from me.

Regal? There is meat we cannot eat. I do not understand the hunting of men.

I took my image of Regal and combined it with his images of the animal trader who had caged him when he was a cub and beat him with a brass-bound club.

Nighteyes considered that. Once I got away from him, I was smart enough to stay away from him. To hunt that one is as wise as to go hunting a porcupine.

I cannot leave this alone, Nighteyes.

I understand. I am the same about porcupines.

And so he perceived my vendetta with Regal as equivalent to his weakness for porcupines. I found myself accepting my stated goals with less equanimity. Having stated them, I could not imagine turning aside for anything else. My words from the night before came back to rebuke me. What had happened to all my fine speeches to Burrich, about living a life for myself? Well, I hedged, and perhaps I would, if I survived tying up these loose ends. It was not that I could not live my own life. It was that I could not stomach the idea of Regal going about thinking he had defeated me, yes, and stolen the throne from Verity. Revenge, plain and simple, I told myself. If I was ever going to put the fear and shame behind me, I had to do this.

You can come in now, I offered.

Why would I want to?

I did not have to turn and see that Nighteyes had already come down to the hut. He came to sit beside me, then peered into the hut.

Phew! You fill your den with such stinks, no wonder your nose works so poorly.

He crept into the hut cautiously and began a prowling tour of the interior. I sat on the doorstep, watching him. It had been a time since I had looked at him as anything other than an extension of myself. He was full grown now, and at the peak of his strength. Another might say he was a grey wolf. To me, he was every colour a wolf could be, dark-eyed, dark-muzzled, buff at the base of his ears and throat, his coat peppered with stiff, black guard-hairs, especially on his shoulders and the flat of his rump. His feet were huge, and spread even wider when he ran over crusted snow. He had a tail that was more expressive than many a woman’s face, and teeth and jaws that could easily crack a deer’s leg bones. He moved with that economy of strength that perfectly healthy animals have. Just watching him salved my heart. When his curiosity was mostly satisfied, he came to sit beside me. After a few moments, he stretched out in the sun and closed his eyes. Keep watch?

‘I’ll watch over you,’ I assured him. His ears twitched at my spoken words. Then he sank into a sun-soaked sleep.

I rose quietly and went inside the hut. It took a remarkably short time for me to take stock of my possessions. Two blankets and a cloak. I had a change of clothes, warm woolly things ill-suited to summer travel. A brush. A knife and whetstone. Flint firestone. A sling. Several small cured hides from game we had taken. Sinew thread. A hand-axe. A small kettle and several spoons. The last were the recent work of Burrich’s whittling. There was a little sack of meal, and one of flour. The leftover honey. A bottle of elderberry wine.

Not much to begin this venture with. I was facing a long overland journey to Tradeford. I had to survive that before I could plan how to get past Regal’s guards and Skill coterie and kill him. I considered carefully. It was not yet the height of summer. There was time to gather herbs and dry them, time to smoke fish and meat for travelling rations. I needn’t go hungry. For now, I had clothing and the other basics. But eventually I’d need some coin. I had told Chade and Burrich that I could make my own way, on my skills with animals and scribing skills. Perhaps those abilities could get me as far as Tradeford.

It might have been easier if I could have remained FitzChivalry. I knew boatmen who plied the river trade, and I could have worked my passage to Tradeford. But that FitzChivalry had died. He couldn’t very well go looking for work at the docks. I could not even visit the docks, for fear of being recognized. I lifted my hand to my face, recalling what Burrich’s looking glass had shown me. A streak of white in my hair to remind me where Regal’s soldiers had laid my scalp open. I fingered the new configuration of my nose. There was also a fine seam down my right cheek under my eye, where Regal’s fist had split my face. No one would remember a Fitz that bore these scars. I would let my beard grow. And if I shaved my hair back from my brow as the scribes did, that might be enough change to put off the casual glance. But I would not deliberately venture among those who had known me.

I’d be afoot. I’d never made an extended journey on foot.

Why can’t we just stay right here? A sleepy inquiry from Nighteyes. Fish in the creek, game in the woods behind the hut. What more do we need? Why must we go?

I must. I must do this to be a man again.

You truly believe you wish to be a man again? I sensed his disbelief but also his acceptance that I would try. He stretched lazily without getting up, spreading wide the toes of his forepaws. Where are we going?

Tradeford. Where Regal is. A far journey up the river.

Are there wolves there?

Not in the city itself, I am sure. But there are wolves in Farrow. There are wolves in Buck still, too. Just not around here.

Save we two, he pointed out. And added, I should like to find wolves where we go.

Then he sprawled over and went back to sleep. That was part of what it meant to be a wolf, I reflected. He would worry no more until we left. Then he would simply follow me and trust his survival to our abilities.

But I had become too much a man again to do as he did. I began to gather provisions the very next day. Despite Nighteyes’ protest, I hunted for more than we needed to eat each day. And when we were successful, I did not let him gorge, but jerked some of the meat, and smoked some of it. I had enough leather skill from Burrich’s perpetual harness mending to make myself soft boots for the summer. I greased my old boots well and set them aside for winter use.

During the days, while Nighteyes dozed in the sun, I gathered my herbs. Some were the common medicinal herbs I wished to have on hand: willowbark for fever, raspberry root for cough, plantain for infection, nettle for congestion, and the like. Others were not so wholesome. I made a small cedar box and filled it. I gathered and stored the poisons as Chade had taught me: water-hemlock, deathcap mushroom, nightshade, elderberry pith, baneberry and heartseize. I chose as best I could, for ones that were tasteless and odourless, for ones that could be rendered as fine powders and clear liquids. Also I harvested elfbark, the powerful stimulant Chade had used to help Verity survive his sessions of Skilling.

Regal would be surrounded and protected by his coterie. Will was the one that I most feared, but I would underestimate none of them. I had known Burl as a big husky boy and Carrod had been something of a dandy with the girls. But those days were long past. I had seen what Skill use had made of Will. It had been long since I had made contact with either Carrod or Burl, and I would make no assumptions about them. They were all trained in the Skill, and though my natural talent had once seemed much stronger than theirs, I had found out the hard way that they knew ways of using the Skill that not even Verity had understood. If I were Skill attacked by them, and survived, I would need the elfbark to restore myself.

I made a second case, large enough to hold my poison box, but otherwise designed like a scribe’s case, to thus create the guise of a wandering scribe. The case would proclaim me as that to the chance acquaintance. Quills for pens I obtained from a nesting goose we ambushed. Some of the powders for pigments I could make, and I fashioned bone tubes and stoppers to hold them. Nighteyes grudgingly furnished me hair for coarse brushes. Finer brushes I attempted with rabbit hair, but with only partial satisfaction. It was very discouraging. A proper scribe was expected by folk to have the inks, brushes and pens of his trade. I reluctantly concluded that Patience had been right when she told me I wrote a fine hand, but could not claim the skills of a full scribe. I hoped my supplies would suffice for any work I might pick up on the way to Tradeford.

There came a time when I knew I was as well provisioned as I could be and that I should leave soon, to have the summer weather for travelling. I was eager for revenge, and yet strangely reluctant to leave this cabin and life. For the first time that I could recall, I arose from sleep when I awoke naturally, and ate when I was hungry. I had no tasks save those I set myself. Surely it would not hurt if I took a bit of time to recover my physical health. Although the bruises of my dungeon time had long faded, and the only external signs of my injuries were scars, I still felt oddly stiff some mornings. Occasionally, my body would shock me with a twinge when I leaped after something, or turned my head too quickly. A particularly strenuous hunt would leave me trembling and dreading a seizure. It would be wiser, I decided, to be fully healed before I departed.

So we lingered a time. The days were warm, the hunting was good. As the days slipped by, I made peace with my body. I was not the physically hardened warrior I had been the summer before, but I could keep pace with Nighteyes through a night’s hunting. When I sprang to make a kill, my actions were quick and sure. My body healed, and I set behind me the pains of the past, acknowledging them, but not dwelling on them. The nightmares that had plagued me were shed like the last remnants of Nighteyes’ winter coat. I had never known a life so simple. I had finally made peace with myself.

No peace lasts long. A dream came to wake me. Nighteyes and I arose before dawn, hunted, and together killed a brace of fat rabbits. This particular hillside was riddled with their warrens, and catching enough to fill ourselves had degenerated quickly to a silly game of leaping and digging. It was past dawn before we left off our play. We flung ourselves down in dappling birch shade, fed again from our kills and drowsed off. Something, perhaps the uneven sunlight on my closed eyelids, had plunged me into a dream.

I was back in Buckkeep. In the old watchroom, I sprawled on a cold stone floor in the centre of a circle of hard-eyed men. The floor beneath my cheek was sticky-slick with cooling blood. As I panted open-mouthed, the smell and the taste of it combined to fill my senses. They were coming for me again, not just the man with the leather-gloved fists, but Will, elusive invisible Will, slipping silently past my walls to creep into my mind. ‘Please, wait, please,’ I begged them. ‘Stop, I beg you. I am nothing you need fear or hate. I’m only a wolf. Just a wolf, no threat to you. I’ll do you no harm, only let me be gone. I’m nothing to you. I’ll never trouble you again. I’m only a wolf.’ I lifted my muzzle to the sky and howled.

My own howling woke me.

I rolled to my hands and knees, shook myself all over and then came to my feet. A dream, I told myself. Only a dream. Fear and shame washed over me, dirtying me in their passage. In my dream I had pleaded for mercy as I had not in reality. I told myself I was no craven. Was I? It seemed I could still smell and taste the blood.

Where are you going? Nighteyes asked lazily. He lay deeper in the shade and his coat camouflaged him surprisingly well there.

Water.

I went to the stream, splashed sticky rabbit blood from my face and hands, and then drank deeply. I washed my face again, dragging my nails through my beard to get the blood out. Abruptly I decided I couldn’t stand the beard. I didn’t intend to go where I expected to be recognized anyway. I went back to the shepherd’s hut to shave.

At the door, I wrinkled my nose at the musty smell. Nighteyes was right; sleeping inside had dampened my sense of smell. I could hardly believe I had abided in here. I padded in reluctantly, snorting out the man smells. It had rained a few nights ago. Damp had got into my dried meat and soured some of it. I sorted it out, wrinkling my nose at how far gone it was. Maggots were working in some of it. As I checked the rest of my meat supply carefully, I pushed aside a nagging sense of uneasiness. It was not until I took out the knife and had to clean a fine dusting of rust from it that I admitted it to myself.

It had been days since I had been here.

Possibly weeks.

I had no idea of time’s passage. I looked at the spoiled meat, at the dust that overlay my scattered possessions. I felt my beard, shocked at how much it had grown. Burrich and Chade had not left me here days ago. It had been weeks. I went to the door of the hut and looked out. Grass stood tall where there had been pathways across the meadow to the stream and Burrich’s fishing spot. The spring flowers were long gone, the berries green on the bushes. I looked at my hands, at dirt ingrained in the skin of my wrists, old blood caked and dried under my nails. At one time, eating raw flesh would have disgusted me. Now the notion of cooking meat seemed peculiar and foreign. My mind veered away and I did not want to confront myself. Later, I heard myself pleading, tomorrow, later, go find Nighteyes.

You are troubled, little brother?

Yes. I forced myself to add, You cannot help me with this. It is man trouble, a thing I must solve for myself.

Be a wolf instead, he advised lazily.

I did not have the strength to say either yes or no to that. I let it go by me. I looked down at myself, at my stained shirt and trousers. My clothing was caked with dirt and old blood, and my trousers tattered off into rags below my knees. With a shudder, I recalled the Forged ones and their ragged garments. What had I become? I tugged at the collar of my shirt and then averted my face from my own stink. Wolves were cleaner than this. Nighteyes groomed himself daily.

I spoke it aloud, and the rustiness of my voice only added to it. ‘As soon as Burrich left me here, alone, I reverted to something less than an animal. No time, no cleanliness, no goals, no awareness of anything save eating and sleeping. This was what he was trying to warn me about, all those years. I did just what he had always feared I would do.’

Laboriously I kindled a fire in the hearth. I hauled water from the stream in many trips and heated as much as I could. The shepherds had left a heavy rendering kettle at the hut, and this held enough to half-fill a wooden trough outside. While the water heated, I gathered soapwort and horsetail grass. I could not remember that I had ever before been this dirty. The coarse horsetail grass scrubbed off layers of skin with the grime before I was satisfied I was clean. There were more than a few fleas floating in the water. I also discovered a tick on the back of my neck and burned him off with an ember twig from my fire. When my hair was clean, I combed it out and then bound it back once more in a warrior’s tail. I shaved in the glass Burrich had left me, and then stared at the face there. Tanned brow and pale chin.

By the time I had heated more water and soaked and pounded my clothes clean, I was starting to understand Burrich’s fanatical and constant cleanliness. The only way to save what was left of my trousers would be to hem them up at the knee. Even then, there was not much wear left in them. I extended my spree to my bedding and winter clothing as well, washing the musty smell out of them. I discovered that a mouse had borrowed from my winter cloak to make a nest. That, too, I mended as well as I could. I looked up from draping wet leggings on a bush to find Nighteyes watching me.

You smell like a man again.

Is that good or bad?

Better than smelling like last week’s kill. Not so good as smelling like a wolf. He stood and stretched, bowing low to me and spreading his toes wide against the earth. So. You do wish to be a man after all. Do we travel soon?

Yes. We travel west, up the Buck River.

Oh. He sneezed suddenly, then abruptly fell over on his side, to roll about on his back in the dust like a puppy. He wiggled happily, working it well into his coat, and then came to his feet to shake it all out again. His blithe acceptance of my sudden decision was a burden. What was I taking him into?

Nightfall found me with every garment I owned and all my bedding still damp. I had sent Nighteyes hunting alone. I knew he would not soon return. The moon was full and the night sky clear. Plenty of game would be moving about tonight. I went inside the hut and built up the fire enough to make hearth cakes from the last of the meal. Weevils had got into the flour and spoiled it. Better to eat the meal now than to waste it similarly. The simple cakes with the last of the grainy honey from the pot tasted incredibly good. I knew I had best expand my diet to include more than meat and a handful of greens each day. I made an odd tea from the wild mint and the tips of the new nettle growth, and that, too, tasted good.

I brought in an almost-dry blanket and spread it out before the hearth. I lay on it, drowsing and staring into the fire. I quested for Nighteyes, but he disdained to join me, preferring his fresh kill and the soft earth under an oak at the edge of the meadow. I was as alone, and as human, as I had been in months. It felt a little strange, but good.

It was when I rolled over and stretched that I saw the packet left on the chair. I knew every item in the hut by heart. This had not been here when last I was. I picked it up and snuffed at it, and found Burrich’s scent faintly upon it, and my own. A moment later I realized what I had done and rebuked myself for it. I had best start behaving as if there were always witnesses to my actions, unless I wished to be killed as a Witted one again.

It was not a large bundle. It was one of my shirts, somehow taken from my old clothes chest, a soft brown one I’d always favoured, and a pair of leggings. Bundled up inside the shirt was a small earthenware pot of Burrich’s unguent that he used for cuts, burns and bruises. Four silver bits in a little leather pouch; he’d worked a buck in the stitching on the front. A good leather belt. I sat staring at the design he’d worked into that. There was a buck, antlers lowered to fight, similar to the crest Verity had suggested for me. On the belt, it was fending off a wolf. Difficult to miss that message.

I dressed before the fire, feeling wistful that I had missed his visit, and yet relieved that I had. Knowing Burrich, he’d probably felt much the same at hiking up here and then finding me gone. Had he brought me these presentable clothes because he wanted to persuade me to return with him? Or to wish me well on my way? I tried not to wonder what his intent had been, or his reaction to the abandoned hut. Clothed again, I felt much more human. I hung the pouch and my sheath knife from the belt and cinched it around my waist. I pulled a chair up before the fire and sat in it.

I stared into the fire. I finally allowed myself to think about my dream. I felt a strange tightening in my chest. Was I a coward? I was not sure. I was going to Tradeford to kill Regal. Would a coward do that? Perhaps, my traitor mind told me, perhaps a coward would, if it was easier than seeking out one’s king. I pushed that thought from my mind.

It came right back. Was killing Regal the right thing to do, or merely what I wished to do? Why should that matter? Because it did. Maybe I should be going to find Verity instead.

Silly to think about any of it, until I knew if Verity were still alive. If I could Skill to Verity, I could find out. But I had never been able to Skill predictably. Galen had seen to that, with the abuse that had taken my strong natural talent for Skill and turned it into a fickle and frustrating thing. Could that be changed? I’d need to be able to Skill well, if I wanted to get past the coterie to Regal’s throat. I’d have to learn to control it. Was the Skill something one could teach oneself to master? How could one learn a thing if one did not even know the full scope of it? All the ability that Galen had neither beaten into nor out of me, all the knowledge that Verity had never had time to teach me: how was I to learn all that on my own? It was impossible.

I did not want to think of Verity. That, as much as anything, told me that I should. Verity. My prince. My king now. Linked by blood and the Skill, I had grown to know him as I knew no other man. Being open to the Skill, he had told me, was as simple as not being closed to it. His Skill-warring with the Raiders had become his life, draining away his youth and vitality. He had never had the time to teach me to control my talent, but he had given me what lessons he could in the infrequent chances he had. His Skill-strength was such that he could impose a touch on me, and be one with me for days, sometimes weeks. And once, when I had sat in my prince’s chair, in his study before his worktable, I had Skilled to him. Before me had been the tools of his map-making and the small personal clutter of the man who waited to be king. That one time, I had thought of him, longed for him to be home to guide his kingdom, and had simply reached out and Skilled to him. So easily, without preparation or even real intent. I tried to put myself in that same frame of mind. I had not Verity’s desk nor clutter to put him in mind, but if I closed my eyes, I could see my prince. I took a breath and tried to call forth his image.

Verity was broader of shoulder than I but not quite of my height. My uncle shared with me the dark eyes and hair of the Farseer family, but his eyes were set more deeply than mine, and his unruly hair and beard were shot through with grey. When I was a boy, he had been well-muscled and hard, a stocky man who wielded a sword as easily as a pen. These later years had wasted him. He had been forced to spend too much time physically idle as he used his Skill-strength to defend our coastline from the Raiders. But even as his muscle had dwindled, his Skill-aura had increased, until to stand before him now was like standing before a blazing hearth. When I was in his presence, I was much more aware of his Skill now than his body. For his scent, I called to mind the piquancy of the coloured inks he used when he made his maps, the smell of fine vellum, and, too, the edge of elfbark that was often on his breath. ‘Verity,’ I said softly aloud, and felt the word echo within me, bouncing off my walls.

I opened my eyes. I could not reach out of myself until I lowered my walls. Visualizing Verity would do nothing for me until I opened a way for my Skill to go forth, and his to enter my mind. Very well. That was easy enough. Just relax. Stare into the fire and watch the tiny sparks that rode upward on the heat. Dancing floating sparks. Relax the vigilance. Forget how Will had slammed his Skill-strength against that wall and nearly made it give way. Forget that holding the wall was all that had kept my mind my own while they hammered away at my flesh. Forget that sickening sense of violation the time that Justin had forced his way into me. The way Galen had scarred and crippled my Skill ability the time he had abused his position as Skillmaster to force his control on my mind.

As clearly as if Verity were beside me, I heard again my prince’s words. ‘Galen has scarred you. You’ve walls I can’t begin to penetrate, and I am strong. You’d have to learn to drop them. That’s a hard thing.’ And those words to me had been years ago, before Justin’s invasion, before Will’s attacks. I smiled bitterly. Did they know they had succeeded at un-Skilling me? They’d probably never even given it thought. Someone, somewhere, should make a record of that. Someday a Skilled king might find it handy, to know that if you hurt a Skilled one badly enough with the Skill, you could seal him up inside himself and render him powerless in that area.