Assassin’s Quest. Робин Хобб

take away more leaves naught but hunger on the table. It’s worst along the salt water. If a person goes out fishing, who knows what will happen to home before he returns? A farmer plants a field, knowing it won’t yield enough both for taxes and family, and that there will be less than half of it left standing if the Red Ships come to pay a call. There’s been a clever song made about a farmer who tells the tax-collector that the Red Ships have already done his job for him.’

      ‘Save that clever minstrels don’t sing it,’ Honey reminded him tartly.

      ‘Red Ships raid Buck’s coast as well, then,’ I said quietly.

      Josh gave a snort of bitter laughter. ‘Buck, Bearns, Rippon or Shoaks … I doubt the Red Ships care where one duchy ends and another begins. If the sea brushes up against it, they’ll raid there.’

      ‘And our ships?’ I asked softly.

      ‘The ones that have been taken away from us by the Raiders are doing very well. Those left defending us, well, they are as successful as gnats at bothering cattle.’

      ‘Does no one stand firm for Buck these days?’ I asked, and heard the despair in my own voice.

      ‘The Lady of Buckkeep does. Not only firmly, but loudly. There’s some as say all she does is cry out and scold, but others know that she doesn’t call on them to do what she hasn’t already done herself.’ Harper Josh spoke as if he knew this at first hand.

      I was mystified, but did not wish to appear too ignorant. ‘Such as?’

      ‘Everything they can. She wears no jewellery at all any more. It’s all been sold and put toward paying patrol ships. She sold off her own ancestral lands, and put the money to paying mercenaries to man the towers. It’s said she sold the necklace given her by Prince Chivalry, his grandmother’s rubies, to King Regal himself, to buy grain and timber for Buck villages that wanted to rebuild.’

      ‘Patience,’ I whispered. I had seen those rubies once, long ago, when we had first been getting to know one another. She had deemed them too precious a thing even to wear, but she had shown them to me and told me some day my bride might wear them. Long ago. I turned my head aside and struggled to control my face.

      ‘Where have you been sleeping this past year … Cob, that you know none of this?’ Honey demanded sarcastically.

      ‘I have been away,’ I said quietly. I turned back to the table and managed to meet her eyes. I hoped my face showed nothing.

      She cocked her head and smiled at me. ‘Where?’ she countered brightly.

      I did not like her much at all. ‘I’ve been living by myself, in the forest,’ I said at last.

      ‘Why?’ She smiled at me as she pressed me. I was certain she knew how uncomfortable she was making me.

      ‘Obviously, because I wished to,’ I said. I sounded so much like Burrich when I said it, I almost looked over my shoulder for him.

      She made a small mouth at me, totally unrepentant, but Harper Josh set his mug down on the table a bit firmly. He said nothing, and the look he gave her from his blind eyes was no more than a flicker, but she subsided abruptly. She folded her hands at the edge of the table like a rebuked child, and for a moment I thought her quashed, until she looked up at me from under her lashes. Her eyes met mine directly, and the little smile she shot me was defiant. I looked away from her, totally mystified as to why she wished to peck at me like this. I glanced at Piper, only to find her face bright red with suppressed laughter. I looked down at my hands on the table, hating the blush that suddenly flooded my face.

      In an effort to start the conversation again, I asked, ‘Are there any other new tidings from Buckkeep?’

      Harper Josh gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Not much new misery to tell. The tales are all the same, with only the names of the villages and towns different. Oh, but there is one small bit, a rich one. Word is now that King Regal will hang the Pocked Man himself.’

      I had been swallowing a sip of ale. I choked abruptly and demanded, ‘What?’

      ‘It’s a stupid joke,’ Honey declared. ‘King Regal has had it cried about that he will give gold coin reward to any who can turn over to him a certain man, much scarred with the pox, or silver coin to any man who can give information as to where he may be found.’

      ‘A pox-scarred man? Is that all the description?’ I asked carefully.

      ‘He is said to be skinny, and grey-haired, and to sometimes disguise himself as a woman.’ Josh chuckled merrily, never guessing how his words turned my bowels to ice. ‘And his crime is high treason. Rumour says the King blames him for the disappearance of Queen-in-Waiting Kettricken and her unborn child. Some say he is just a cracked old man who claims to have been an adviser to Shrewd, and as such he has written to the Dukes of the Coastal Duchies, bidding them be brave, that Verity shall return and his child inherit the Farseer throne. But rumour also says, with as much wit, that King Regal hopes to hang the Pocked Man and thus end all bad luck in the Six Duchies.’ He chuckled again, and I plastered a sick smile on my face and nodded like a simpleton.

      Chade, I thought to myself. Somehow Regal had picked up Chade’s trail. If he knew he was pock-scarred, what else might he know? He had obviously connected him to his masquerade as Lady Thyme. I wondered where Chade was now, and if he was all right. I wished with sudden desperation that I knew what his plans had been, what plot he had excluded me from. With a sudden sinking of heart, my perception of my actions flopped over. Had I driven Chade away from me, to protect him from my plans, or had I abandoned him just when he needed his apprentice?

      ‘Are you still there, Cob? I see your shadow still, but your place at the table’s gone very quiet.’

      ‘Oh, I’m here, Harper Josh!’ I tried to put some life into my words. ‘Just mulling over all you’ve told me, that’s all.’

      ‘Wondering what pocked old man he could sell to King Regal, by the look on his face,’ Honey put in tartly. I suddenly perceived that she saw her constant belittlement and stings as a sort of flirtation. I quickly decided I had had enough companionship and talk for an evening. I was too much out of practice at dealing with folk. I would leave now. Better they thought me odd and rude than that I stayed longer and made them curious.

      ‘Well, I thank you for your songs, and your conversation,’ I said as gracefully as I could. I fingered out a copper to leave under my mug for the boy. ‘And I had best take myself back to the road.’

      ‘But it’s full dark outside!’ Piper objected in surprise. She set down her mug and glanced at Honey, who looked shocked.

      ‘And cool, my lady,’ I observed blithely. ‘I prefer the night for walking. The moon’s close to full, which should be light enough on a road as wide as the river road.’

      ‘Have you no fear of the Forged ones?’ Harper Josh asked in consternation.

      Now it was my turn to be surprised. ‘This far inland?’

      ‘You have been living in a tree,’ Honey exclaimed. ‘All the roads have been plagued with them. Some travellers hire guards, archers and swordsmen. Others, such as we, travel in groups when we can, and only by day.’

      ‘Cannot the patrols at least keep them from the roads?’ I asked in astonishment.

      ‘The patrols?’ Honey sniffed disdainfully. ‘Most of us would as soon meet Forged ones as a pack of Farrow men with pikes. The Forged ones do not bother them, and so they do not bother the Forged ones.’

      ‘What, then, do they patrol for?’ I asked angrily.

      ‘Smugglers, mainly.’ Josh spoke before Honey could. ‘Or so they would have you believe. Many an honest traveller do they stop to search his belongings and take whatever they fancy, calling it contraband, or claiming it was reported stolen in the last town. Methinks Lord Bright does not pay them as well as they think they deserve, so they take whatever pay they are able.’

      ‘And