The Complete Farseer Trilogy: Assassin’s Apprentice, Royal Assassin, Assassin’s Quest. Robin Hobb

I repeated to Burrich, and it was gratifying to see how well this small subterfuge worked. Relief flooded his face, then pride that he had taught me well. The topic instantly shifted from manners to the correct care of the wolfhound. If the lectures on manners had wearied me, the repetition of hound lore was almost painfully tedious. When he released me to go to my other lessons, I left with winged feet.

      I went through the rest of the day in a distracted haze that had Hod threatening me with a good whipping if I didn’t attend to what I was doing. Then she shook her head over me, sighed, and told me to run along and come back when I had a mind again. I was only too happy to obey her. The thought of actually leaving Buckkeep and journeying, journeying all the way to Neatbay was all I could fit inside my head. I knew I should wonder why I was going, but felt sure Chade would advise me soon. Would we go by land or by sea? I wished I had asked Burrich. The roads to Neatbay were not the best, I’d heard, but I wouldn’t mind. Sooty and I had never been on a long journey together. But a sea trip, on a real ship …

      I took the long way back to the keep, up a path that went through a lightly wooded bit of rocky hillside. Paper birches struggled there, and a few alder, but mostly it was nondescript brush. Sunlight and a light breeze were playing together in the higher branches, giving the day a fey and dappled air. I lifted my eyes to the dazzle of sun through the birch leaves, and when I looked down, the King’s Fool stood before me.

      I stopped in my tracks, astonished. Reflexively, I looked for the King, despite how ridiculous it would have been to find him here. But the Fool was alone. And outside, in the daylight! The thought made the hair on my arms and neck stand up in my tightened skin. It was common knowledge in the keep that the King’s Fool could not abide the light of day. Common knowledge. Yet, despite what every page and kitchen maid nattered knowingly, there stood the Fool, pale hair floating in the light breeze. The blue and red silk of his motley jacket and trousers were startlingly bright against his paleness. But his eyes were not as colourless as they were in the dim passages of the keep. As I received their stare from only a few feet away in the light of day, I perceived there was a blueness to them, very pale, as if a single drop of pale blue wax had fallen onto a white platter. The whiteness of his skin was an illusion also, for out here in the dappling sunlight I could see a pinkness suffused him from within. ‘Blood,’ I realized with a sudden quailing. ‘Red blood showing through layers of skin.’

      The Fool took no notice of my whispered comment. Instead, a finger was held aloft, as if to pause not only my thoughts but the very day around us. But I could not have focused my attention more completely on anything, and when he was satisfied of this, the Fool smiled, showing small, white separate teeth, like a baby’s new smile in a boy’s mouth.

      ‘Fitz!’ he intoned in a piping voice. ‘Fitz fitz fice fitz. Fatz sfitz.’ He stopped abruptly, and again gave me that smile. I stared back uncertainly, without word or movement.

      Again the finger soared aloft, and this time was shaken at me. ‘Fitz! Fitz fix fice fitz. Fats sfitzes.’ He cocked his head at me, and the movement sent the dandelion fluff of his hair wafting in a new direction.

      I was beginning to lose my fear of him. ‘Fitz,’ I said carefully, and tapped my chest with my forefinger. ‘Fitz, that’s me. Yes. My name is Fitz. Are you lost?’ I tried to make my voice gentle and reassuring so as not to alarm the poor creature. For surely he had somehow wandered off from the keep, and that was why he seemed so delighted to find a familiar face.

      He took a breath through his nose, and then shook his head violently, until his hair stood out all around his skull like a flame around a wind-blown candle. ‘Fitz!’ he said emphatically, his voice cracking a little. ‘Fitz fitzes fyces fitz. Fatzafices.’

      ‘It’s all right,’ I said soothingly. I crouched a bit, though in reality I was not that much taller than the Fool. I made a soft beckoning motion with my open hand. ‘Come along, then. Come along. I’ll show you the way back home. All right? Don’t be afraid now.’

      Abruptly the Fool dropped his hands to his sides. Then he lifted his face and rolled his eyes at the heavens. He looked back at me fixedly, and poked his mouth out as if he wanted to spit.

      ‘Come along, now.’ I beckoned to him again.

      ‘No,’ he said, quite plainly in an exasperated voice. ‘Listen to me, you idiot. Fitz fixes fyces fitz. Fatsafices.’

      ‘What?’ I asked, startled.

      ‘I said,’ he enunciated elaborately. ‘Fitz fixes fyce fits. Fat suffices.’ He bowed, turned, and began to walk away from me, up the trail.

      ‘Wait!’ I demanded. My ears were turning red with my embarrassment. How do you politely explain to someone that you had believed for years that he was a moron as well as a Fool? I couldn’t. So, ‘What does all that fitzy-ficeys stuff mean? Are you making fun of me?’

      ‘Hardly.’ He paused long enough to turn, and say, ‘Fitz fixes feists fits. Fat suffices. It’s a message, I believe. A calling for a significant act. As you are the only one I know who endures being called Fitz, I believe it’s for you. As for what it means, how should I know? I’m a Fool, not an interpreter of dreams. Good day.’ Again he turned away from me, but this time instead of continuing up the path, he stepped off it, into a clump of buckbrush. I hurried after him, but when I got to where he had left the path, he was gone. I stood still, peering into the open, sun-dappled woods, thinking I should see a bush still swaying from his passage, or catch a glimpse of his motley jacket. But there was no sign of him.

      And no sense at all to his silly message. I mulled over the strange encounter all the way back to the keep, but in the end I set it aside as a strange but random occurrence.

      Not that night, but the next, Chade called me. Burning with curiosity, I raced up the stairs. But when I reached the top I halted, knowing that my questions would have to wait. For there sat Chade at the stone table, Slink perched on top of his shoulders, and a new scroll half unwound on the table before him. A glass of wine weighted one end as his crooked finger travelled slowly down some sort of listing. I glanced at it as I passed. It was a list of villages and dates. Beneath each village name was a tally: so many warriors, so many merchants, so many sheep or casks of ale or measures of grain, and so on. I sat down on the opposite side of the table and waited. I had learned not to interrupt Chade.

      ‘My boy,’ he said softly, without looking up from the scroll. ‘What would you do if some ruffian walked up behind you and rapped you on the head? But only when your back was turned. How would you handle it?’

      I thought briefly. ‘I’d turn my back and pretend to be looking at something else. Only I’d have a long, thick stick in my hands. So when he rapped me, I’d spin around and break his head.’

      ‘Hmm. Yes. Well, we tried that. But no matter how nonchalant we are, the Outislanders always seem to know when we are baiting them and never attack. Well, actually, we’ve managed to fool one or two of the ordinary raiders. But never the Red Ship Raiders. And those are the ones we want to hurt.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because they are the ones that are hurting us the worst. You see, boy, we are used to being raided. You could almost say that we’ve adapted to it. Plant an extra acre, weave another bolt of cloth, raise an extra steer. Our farmers and townsfolk always try to put a bit extra by, and when someone’s barn gets burned or a warehouse is torched in the confusion of a raid, everyone turns out to raise the beams again. But the Red Ship Raiders aren’t just stealing, and destroying in the process of stealing. They’re destroying, and what they actually carry off with them seems almost incidental.’ Chade paused and stared at a wall as if seeing through it.

      ‘It makes no sense,’ he continued bemusedly, more to himself than to me. ‘Or at least no sense that I can unravel. It’s like killing a cow that bears a good calf every year. Red Ship Raiders torch the grain and hay still standing in the fields. They slaughter the stock they can’t carry off. Three weeks ago, in Tornsby, they set fire to the mill and slashed open the sacks of grain and flour there. Where’s the profit in that for them? Why do they risk their lives simply to destroy? They’ve made no effort to take and