Assassin’s Apprentice. Робин Хобб

speak, and I sensed that silence hovering again. ‘I’d say it was Prince Chivalry’s business who the mother was, and not for kitchen talk,’ Burrich said mildly.

      ‘Even so, even so,’ the guard agreed abruptly, and Jason nodded like a courting bird in agreement. Young as I was, I still wondered what kind of man this was who, with one leg bandaged, could quell a room full of rough men with a look or a word.

      ‘Boy don’t have a name,’ Jason volunteered into the silence. ‘Just goes by “boy”.’

      This statement seemed to put everyone, even Burrich, at a loss for words. The silence lingered as I finished bread and cheese and meat, and washed it down with a swallow or two of beer that Burrich offered me. The other men left the room gradually, in twos and threes, and still he sat there, drinking and looking at me. ‘Well,’ he said at long last. ‘If I know your father, he’ll face up to it square and do what’s right. But Eda only knows what he’ll think is the right thing to do. Probably whatever hurts the most.’ He watched me silently a moment longer. ‘Had enough to eat?’ he asked at last.

      I nodded, and he stood stiffly, to swing me off the table and onto the floor. ‘Come on, then, fitz,’ he said, and moved out of the kitchen and down a different corridor. His stiff leg made his gait ungainly, and perhaps the beer had something to do with it as well. Certainly I had no trouble in keeping up. We came at last to a heavy door, and a guard who nodded us through with a devouring stare at me.

      Outside, a chill wind was blowing. All the ice and snow that had softened during the day had gone back to sharpness with the coming of night. The path cracked under my feet, and the wind seemed to find every crack and gap in my garments. My feet and leggings had been warmed by the kitchen’s fire, but not quite dried, so the cold seized on them. I remember darkness, and the sudden tiredness that came over me, a terrible weepy sleepiness that dragged at me as I followed the strange man with the bandaged leg through the chill, dark courtyard. There were tall walls around us, and guards moved intermittently on top of them, dark shadows visible only as they blotted the stars occasionally from the sky. The cold bit at me, and I stumbled and slipped on the icy pathway. But something about Burrich did not permit me to whimper or beg quarter from him. Instead I followed him doggedly. We reached a building and he dragged open a heavy door.

      Warmth and animal smells and a dim yellow light spilled out. A sleepy stable-boy sat up in his nest of straw, blinking like a rumpled fledgling. At a word from Burrich he lay down again, curling up small in the straw and closing his eyes. We moved past him, Burrich dragging the door to behind us. He took the lantern that burned dimly by the door and led me on.

      I entered a different world then, a night world where animals shifted and breathed in stalls, where hounds lifted their heads from their crossed forepaws to regard me with lambent eyes green or yellow in the lantern’s glow. Horses stirred as we passed their stalls. ‘Hawks are down at the far end,’ Burrich said as we passed stall after stall. I accepted it as something he thought I should know.

      ‘Here,’ he said finally. ‘This’ll do. For now, anyway. I’m jigged if I know what else to do with you. If it weren’t for the Lady Patience, I’d be thinking this a fine god’s jest on the master. Here, Nosy, you just move over and make this boy a place in the straw. That’s right, you cuddle up to Vixen, there. She’ll take you in, and give a good slash to any that think to bother you.’

      I found myself facing an ample box-stall, populated with three hounds. They had roused and lay, stick tails thumping in the straw at Burrich’s voice. I moved uncertainly in amongst them, and finally lay down next to an old bitch with a whitened muzzle and one torn ear. The older male regarded me with a certain suspicion, but the third was a half-grown pup, and Nosy welcomed me with ear lickings, nose nipping and much pawing. I put an arm around him to settle him, and then cuddled in amongst them as Burrich had advised. He threw a thick blanket that smelled much of horse down over me. A very large grey beast in the next stall stirred suddenly, thumping a heavy hoof against the partition, and then hanging his head over to see what the night excitement was about. Burrich calmed him absently with a touch.

      ‘It’s rough quarters here for all of us at this outpost. You’ll find Buckkeep a more hospitable place. But for tonight, you’ll be warm here, and safe.’ He stood a moment longer, looking down at us. ‘Horse, hound, and hawk, Chivalry. I’ve minded them all for you for many a year, and minded them well. But this by-blow of yours; well, what to do with him is beyond me.’

      I knew he wasn’t speaking to me. I watched him over the edge of the blanket as he took the lantern from its hook and wandered off, muttering to himself. I remember that first night well, the warmth of the hounds, the prickling straw, and even the sleep that finally came as the pup cuddled close beside me. I drifted into his mind and shared his dim dreams of an endless chase, pursuing a quarry I never saw, but whose hot scent dragged me onward through nettle, bramble and scree.

      And with the hound’s dream, the precision of the memory wavers like the bright colours and sharp edges of a drug dream. Certainly the days that follow that first night have no such clarity in my mind.

      I recall the spitting wet days of winter’s end as I learned the route from my stall to the kitchen. I was free to come and go there as I pleased. Sometimes there was a cook in attendance, setting meat onto the hearth-hooks or pummelling bread dough or breaching a cask of drink. More often, there was not, and I helped myself to whatever had been left out on the table, and shared generously with the pup that swiftly became my constant companion. Men came and went, eating and drinking, and regarding me with a speculative curiosity that I came to accept as normal. The men had a sameness about them, with their rough wool cloaks and leggings, their hard bodies and easy movements, and the crest of a leaping buck that each bore over his heart. My presence made some of them uncomfortable. I grew accustomed to the mutter of voices that began whenever I left the kitchen.

      Burrich was a constant in those days, giving me the same care he gave to Chivalry’s beasts; I was fed, watered, groomed and exercised, said exercise usually coming in the form of trotting at his heels as he performed his other duties. But those memories are blurry and details, such as those of washing or changing garments, have probably faded with a six-year-old’s calm assumptions of such things as normal. Certainly I remember the hound pup, Nosy. His coat was red and slick and short, and bristly in a way that prickled me through my clothes when we shared the horse blanket at night. His eyes were green as copper ore, his nose the colour of cooked liver, and the insides of his mouth and tongue were mottled pink and black. When we were not eating in the kitchen, we wrestled in the courtyard or in the straw of the box-stall. Such was my world for however long it was I was there. Not too long, I think, for I do not recall the weather changing. All my memories of that time are of raw days and blustery wind, and snow and ice that partially melted each day but were restored by night’s freezes.

      One other memory I have of that time, but it is not sharp-edged. Rather it is warm and softly tinted, like a rich old tapestry seen in a dim room. I recall being roused from sleep by the pup’s wriggling and the yellow light of a lantern being held over me. Two men bent over me, but Burrich stood stiffly behind them and I was not afraid.

      ‘Now you’ve wakened him,’ warned the one, and he was Prince Verity, the man from the warmly-lit chamber of my first evening.

      ‘So? He’ll go back to sleep as soon as we leave. Damn him, he has his father’s eyes as well. I swear, I’d have known his blood no matter where I saw him. There’ll be no denying it to any that see him. But have neither you nor Burrich the sense of a flea? Bastard or not, you don’t stable a child among beasts. Was there no where else you could put him?’

      The man who spoke was like Verity around the jaw and eyes, but there the resemblance ended. This man was younger by far. His cheeks were beardless, and his scented and smoothed hair was finer and brown. His cheeks and forehead had been stung to redness by the night’s chill, but it was a new thing, not Verity’s weathered ruddiness. And Verity dressed as his men dressed, in practical woollens of sturdy weave and subdued colours. Only the crest on his breast showed brighter, in gold and silver thread. But the younger man with him gleamed in scarlets and primrose, and his cloak drooped with twice the width of cloth needed to cover a