Assassin 3 - Royal Assassin

A Jas-Scan
Production

               
Version 1
[if you make corrections, please
change the version to a higher number]

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PROLOGUE

Dreams and
Awakenings

WHY IS IT forbidden to write down
specific knowledge of the magics? Perhaps because we all fear that
such knowledge would fall into the hands of one not worthy to use
it. Certainly there has always been a system of apprenticeship to
ensure that specific knowledge of magic is passed only to those
trained and judged worthy of such knowledge. While this seems a
laudable attempt to protect us from unworthy practitioners of
arcane lore, it ignores the fact that the magics are not derived
from this specific knowledge. The predilection for a certain type
of magic is either inborn or lacking. For instance, the ability for
the magics known as the Skill is tied closely to blood relationship
to the royal Farseer line, though it may also occur as a wild
strain among folk whose ancestors came from both the inland tribes
and the Outislanders. One trained in the Skill is able to reach out
to another's mind, no matter how distant, and know what he is
thinking. Those who are strongly Skilled can influence that
thinking, or have converse with that person. For the conducting of
a battle, or the gathering of information, it is a most useful
tool.

Folklore tells of an even older magic, much
despised now, known as the Wit. Few will admit a talent for this
magic, hence it is always said to be the province of the folk in
the next valley, or the ones who live on the other side of the far
ridge. I suspect it was once the natural magic of those who lived
on the land as hunters rather than as settled folk; a magic for
those who felt kinship with the wild beasts of the woods. The Wit,
it is said, gave one the ability to speak the tongues of the
beasts. It was also warned that those who practiced the Wit too
long or too well became whatever beast they had bonded to. But this
may be only legend.

There are the Hedge magics, though I have never
been able to determine the source of this name. These are magics
both verified and suspect, including palm reading, water gazing,
the interpretation of crystal reflections, and a host of other
magics that attempt to predict the future. In a separate unnamed
category are the magics that cause physical effects, such as
invisibility, levitation, giving motion or life to inanimate
objects
–
all
the magics of
the old legends, from the Flying Chair of the Widow's Son to the
North Wind's Magic Tablecloth. I know of no people who claim these
magics as their own. They seem to be solely the stuff of legend,
ascribed to folk living in ancient times or distant places, or
beings of mythical or near-mythical reputation: dragons, giants,
the Elderlings, the Others, pecksies.

I pause to clean my pen. My writing wanders from
spidery to blobbish on this poor paper. But I will not use good
parchment for these words; not yet. I am not sure they should be
written. I ask myself, why put this to paper at all? Will not this
knowledge be passed down by word of mouth to those who are worthy?
Perhaps. But perhaps not. What we take for granted now, the knowing
of these things, may be a wonder and a mystery someday to our
descendants.

There is very little in any of the
libraries on magic. I work laboriously, tracing a thread of
knowledge through a patchwork quilt of information. I find
scattered references, passing allusions, but that is all. I have
gathered it, over these last few years, and stored it in my head,
always intending to commit my knowledge to paper. I will put down
what I know from my own experience, as well as what I have ferreted
out. Perhaps to provide answers for some other poor fool, in times
to come, who might find himself as battered by the warring of the
magics within him as I have been.

But when I sit down to the task, I
hesitate. Who am I to set my will against the wisdom of those who
have gone before me? Shall I set down in plain lettering the
methods by which a Witgifted one can expand her range, or can bond
a creature to himself? Shall I detail the training one must undergo
before being recognized as a Skilled one? The Hedge wizardries and
legendary magics have never been mine. Have I any right to dig out
their secrets and pin them to paper like so many butterflies or
leaves collected for study?

I try to consider what one might do with such
knowledge, unjustly gained. It leads me to consider what this
knowledge has gained for me. Power, wealth, the love of a woman? I
mock myself. Neither the Skill nor the Wit has ever offered any
such to me. Or if they did, I had not the sense nor ambition to
seize them when offered.

Power. I do not think I ever wanted it
for its own sake. I thirsted for it, sometimes, when I was ground
down, or when those close to me suffered beneath ones who abused
their powers. Wealth. I never really considered it. From the moment
that I, his bastard grandson, pledged myself to King Shrewd, he
always saw that all my needs were fulfilled. I had plenty to eat,
more education than I sometimes cared for, clothes both simple and
those annoyingly fashionable, and often enough a coin or two of my
own to spend. Growing up in Buckkeep, that was wealth enough and
more than most boys in Buckkeep Town could claim. Love? Well. My
horse Sooty was fond enough of me, in her own placid way. I had the
truehearted loyalty of a hound named Nosy, and that took him to his
grave. I was given the fiercest of loves by a terrier pup, and it
was likewise the death of him. I wince to think of the price
willingly paid for loving me.

Always I have possessed the loneliness of one
raised amid intrigues and clustering secrets, the isolation of a
boy who cannot trust the completeness of his heart to anyone. I
could not go to Fedwren, the court scribe, who praised me for my
neat lettering and well-inked illustrations, and confide that I was
already apprenticed to the royal assassin, and thus could not
follow his writing trade. Nor could I divulge to Chade, my master
in the Diplomacy of the Knife, the frustrating brutality I endured
trying to learn the ways of the Skill from Galen the Skill Master.
And to no one did I dare speak openly of my emerging proclivity for
the Wit, the ancient beast magic, said to be a perversion and a
taint to any who used it.

Not even to Molly.

Molly was that most cherished of items: a
genuine refuge. She had absolutely nothing to do with my day-to-day
life. It was not just that she was female, though that was mystery
enough to me. I was raised almost entirely in the company of men,
bereft not only of my natural mother and father, but of any blood
relations that would openly acknowledge me. As a child, my care was
entrusted to Burrich, the gruff stablemaster who had once been my
father's right-hand man. The stable hands and the guards were my
daily companions. Then as now, there were women in the guard
companies, though not so many then as now. But like their male
comrades, they had duties to perform, and lives and families of
their own when they were not on watch. I could not claim their
time. I had no mother, nor sisters or aunts of my own. There were
no women who offered me the special tenderness said to be the
province of women.

None save Molly.

She was but a year or two older than myself, and
growing the same way a sprig of greenery forces its way up through
a gap in the cobblestones. Neither her father's near-constant
drunkenness and frequent brutality nor the grinding chores of a
child trying to maintain the pretense of both home and family
business could crush her. When I first met her, she was as wild and
wary as a fox cub. Molly Nosebleed she was called among the street
children. She often bore the marks of the beatings her father gave
her. Despite his cruelty, she cared for him. I never understood
that. He would grumble and berate her even as she tottered him home
after one of his binges and put him to bed. And when he awoke, he
never had any remorse for his drunkenness and harsh words. There
were only more criticisms: Why hadn't the chandlery been swept and
fresh strewing herbs put on the floor? Why hadn't she tended the
beehives, when they were nearly out of honey to sell? Why had she
let the fire go out under the tallow pot? I was mute witness more
times than I care to remember.

But through it all, Molly grew. She flowered,
one sudden summer, into a young woman who left me in awe of her
capable ways and womanly charms. For her part, she seemed totally
unaware of how her eyes could meet mine and turn my tongue to
leather in my mouth. No magic I possessed, no Skill, no Wit, was
proof against the accidental touch of her hand against mine, nor
could defend me against the awkwardness that overwhelmed me at the
quirk of her smile.

Should I catalog her hair flowing with the wind,
or detail how the color of her eyes shifted from dark amber to rich
brown depending on her mood and the color of her gown? I would
catch a glimpse of her scarlet skirts and red shawl among the
market throng, and suddenly be aware of no one else. These are
magics I witnessed, and though I might set them down on paper, no
other could ever work them with such skill.

How did I court her? With a boy's clumsy
gallantries, gaping after her like a simpleton watching the
whirling disks of a juggler. She knew I loved her before I did. And
she let me court her, although I was a few years younger than she,
and not one of the town boys and possessed of small prospects as
far as she knew. She thought I was the scribe's errand boy, a
part-time helper in the stables, a Keep runner. She never suspected
I was the Bastard, the unacknowledged son that had toppled Prince
Chivalry from his place in the line of succession. That alone was a
big enough secret. Of my magics and my other profession, she knew
nothing.

Maybe that was why I could love her.

It was certainly why I lost her.

I let the secrets and failures and pains of my
other lives keep me too busy. There were magics to learn, secrets
to ferret out, men to kill, intrigues to survive. Surrounded by
them, it never occurred to me that I could turn to Molly for a
measure of the hope and understanding that eluded me everywhere
else.

She was apart from these things, unsullied by
them. I carefully preserved her from any touch of them. I never
tried to draw her into my world. Instead, I went to hers, to the
fishing and shipping port town where she sold candles and honey in
her shop, and shopped in the market, and, sometimes, walked on the
beaches with me. To me, it was enough that she existed for me to
love. I did not even dare to hope she might return that
feeling.

There came a time when my training in the Skill
ground me into a misery so deep I did not think I could survive it.
I could not forgive myself for being unable to learn it; I could
not imagine that my failure might not matter to others. I cloaked
my despair in surly withdrawal. I let the long weeks pass, and
never saw her or even sent her word that I thought of her. Finally,
when there was no one else that I could turn to, I sought her. Too
late. I arrived at the Beebalm Chandlery in Buckkeep Town one
afternoon, gifts in hand, in time to see her leaving. Not alone.
With Jade, a fine broad-chested seaman, with a bold earring in one
ear and the sure masculinity of his superior years. Unnoticed,
defeated, I slunk away and watched them walk off arm in arm. I
watched her go, and I let her go, and in the months that followed,
I tried to convince myself that my heart had let her go as well. I
wonder what would have happened if I had run after them that
afternoon, if I had begged one last word of her. Odd, to think of
so many events turning upon a boy's misplaced pride and his
schooled acceptance of defeats. I set her out of my thoughts, and
spoke of her to no one. I got on with my life.

King Shrewd sent me as his assassin with a great
caravan of folk going to witness the pledging of the Mountain
Princess Kettricken as Prince Verity's bride. My mission was to
quietly cause the death of her older brother, Prince Rurisk, subtly
of course, so that she would be left the sole heir to the Mountain
throne. But what I found when I arrived there was a web of deceit
and lies engineered by my youngest uncle, Prince Regal, who hoped
to topple Verity from the line of succession and claim the Princess
as his own bride. I was the pawn he would sacrifice for this goal;
and I was the pawn who instead toppled the game pieces around him,
bringing his wrath and vengeance down on myself, but saving the
crown and the Princess for Prince Verity. I do not think this was
heroism. Nor do I think it was petty spite wreaked on one who had
always bullied and belittled me. It was the act of a boy becoming a
man, and doing what I had sworn to do years before I comprehended
the cost of such an oath. The price was my healthy young body, so
long taken for granted.

Long after I had defeated Regal's plot, I
lingered in a sickbed in the Mountain Kingdom. But finally a
morning came when I awoke and believed that my long illness was
finally over. Burrich had decided I was recovered enough to begin
the long journey back home to the Six Duchies. Princess Kettricken
and her entourage had left for Buckkeep weeks before, when the
weather was still fine. Now winter snows already smothered the
higher parts of the Mountain Kingdom. If we did not leave Jhaampe
soon, we would be forced to winter there. I was up early that
morning, doing my final packing, when the first small tremors
began. Resolutely, I ignored them. I was just shaky, I told myself,
with not having eaten breakfast yet, and the excitement of the
journey home. I donned the garments that Jonqui had furnished for
our winter journey through the Mountains and across the plains. For
me there was a long red shirt, padded with wool quilted into it.
The quilted trousers were green, but embroidered with red at the
waist and cuffs. The boots were soft, almost shapeless until my
feet were laced inside them. They were like sacks of soft leather,
padded with sheared wool and trimmed with fur. They fastened to the
feet with long wrappings of leather strips. My trembling fingers
made tying them a difficult task. Jonqui had told us they were
wonderful for the dry snow of the mountains, but to beware of
getting them wet.