The Farseer Series Books 2 and 3: Royal Assassin, Assassin’s Quest. Robin Hobb

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 upon 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 consciousness 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.

      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 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 had honestly earned, but you take jewellery 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 favours?’

      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 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 to ever 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 grey with preoccupation and 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.