Assassin’s Quest. Robin Hobb

voice was flat. ‘Nothing like that. A friend. You would probably say that I’ve found someone else to look after. Perhaps I have. Perhaps it’s time to give that where it is truly needed.’

      I looked into the fire, now. ‘Burrich. I truly needed you. You brought me back from the edge, back to being a man.’

      He snorted. ‘If I’d done right by you in the first place, you’d never have gone to the edge.’

      ‘No. I’d have gone to my grave instead.’

      ‘Would you? Regal would have had no charges of Wit magic to bring against you.’

      ‘He’d have found some excuse to kill me. Or just opportunity. He doesn’t really need an excuse to do what he wants.’

      ‘Perhaps. Perhaps not.’

      We sat watching the fire die. I reached up to my ear, fumbled with the catch on the earring. ‘I want to give this back to you.’

      ‘I would prefer that you kept it. Wore it.’ It was almost a request. It felt odd.

      ‘I don’t deserve whatever it is that this earring symbolizes to you. I haven’t earned it, I have no right to it.’

      ‘What it symbolizes to me is not something that is earned. It’s something I gave to you, deserved or not. Whether or not you wear that, you still take it with you.’

      I left the earring dangling from my ear. A tiny silver net with a blue gem trapped inside it. Once Burrich had given it to my father. Patience, all unknowing of its significance, had passed it on to me. I did not know if he wanted me to wear it for the same reason he had given it to my father. I sensed there was more about it, but he had not told me and I would not ask. Still, I waited, expecting a question from him. But he only rose and went back to his blankets. I heard him lie down.

      I wished he had asked me the question. It hurt that he hadn’t. I answered it anyway. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ I said into the darkened room. ‘All my life, I’ve always had tasks to do, masters to answer to. Now that I don’t … it’s a strange feeling.’

      I thought for a time that he wasn’t going to reply at all. Then he said abruptly, ‘I’ve known that feeling.’

      I looked up at the darkened ceiling. ‘I’ve thought of Molly. Often. Do you know where she went?’

      ‘Yes.’

      When he said no more than that, I knew better than to ask. ‘I know the wisest course is to let her go. She believes me dead. I hope that whoever she went to takes better care of her than I did. I hope he loves her as she deserves.’

      There was a rustling of Burrich’s blankets. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked guardedly.

      It was harder to say than I had thought it would be. ‘She told me when she left me that day that there was someone else. Someone that she cared for as I cared for my king, someone she put ahead of everything and everyone else in her life.’ My throat closed up suddenly. I took a breath, willing the knot in my throat away. ‘Patience was right,’ I said.

      ‘Yes, she was,’ Burrich agreed.

      ‘I can blame it on no one save myself. Once I knew Molly was safe, I should have let her go her own way. She deserves a man who can give her all his time, all his devotion …’

      ‘Yes, she does,’ Burrich agreed relentlessly. ‘A shame you didn’t realize that before you had been with her.’

      It is quite one thing to admit a fault to yourself. It is another thing entirely to have a friend not only agree with you, but point out the full depth of the fault. I didn’t deny it, or demand how he knew of it. If Molly had told him, I didn’t want to know what else she had said. If he had deduced it on his own, I didn’t want to know I had been that obvious. I felt a surge of something, a fierceness that made me want to snarl at him. I bit down on my tongue and forced myself to consider what I felt. Guilt and shame that it had ended in pain for her, and made her doubt her worth. And a certainty that no matter how wrong it had been, it had also been right. When I was sure of my voice, I said quietly, ‘I will never regret loving her. Only that I could not make her my wife in all eyes as she was in my heart.’

      He said nothing to that. But after a time, that separating silence became deafening. I could not sleep for it. Finally I spoke. ‘So. Tomorrow we go our own ways, I suppose.’

      ‘I suppose so,’ Burrich said. After a time, he added, ‘Good luck.’ He actually sounded as if he meant it. As if he realized how much luck I would need.

      I closed my eyes. I was so tired now. So tired. Tired of hurting people I loved. But it was done now. Tomorrow Burrich would leave and I would be free. Free to follow my heart’s desire, with no intervention from anyone.

      Free to go to Tradeford and kill Regal.

THREE The Quest

      The Skill is the traditional magic of the Farseer royalty. While it seems to run strongest in the royal bloodlines, it is not all that rare to discover it in a lesser strength in those distantly related to the Farseer line, or in those whose ancestry includes both Outislanders and Six Duchy folk. It is a magic of the mind, giving the practitioner the power to communicate silently with those at a distance from him. Its possibilities are many; at its simplest, it may be used to convey messages, to influence the thoughts of enemies (or friends) to sway them to one’s purposes. Its drawbacks are twofold: it requires a great deal of energy to wield it on a daily basis, and it offers to its practitioners an attraction that has been misnamed as a pleasure. It is more of a euphoric, one that increases in power proportionately with the strength and duration of Skilling. It can lure the practitioner into an addiction to Skilling, one which eventually saps all mental and physical strength, to leave the mage a great, drooling babe.

      Burrich left the next morning. When I awoke, he was up and dressed and moving about the hut, packing his things. It did not take him long. He took his personal effects, but left me the lion’s share of our provisions. There had been no drink the night before, yet we both spoke as softly and moved as carefully as if pained by the morning. We deferred to one another until it seemed to me worse than if we had not been speaking to one another at all. I wanted to babble apologies, to beg him to reconsider, to do something, anything, to keep our friendship from ending this way. At the same time, I wished him gone, wished it over, wished it to be tomorrow, a new day dawning and I alone. I held to my resolution as if gripping the sharp blade of a knife. I suspect he felt something of the same, for sometimes he would stop and look up at me as if about to speak. Then our eyes would meet and hold for a bit, until one or the other of us looked aside. Too much hovered unspoken between us.

      In a horribly short time he was ready to leave. He shouldered his pack and took up a stave from beside the door. I stood staring at him, thinking how odd he appeared thus: Burrich the horseman, afoot. The early summer sunlight spilling in the open door showed me a man at the end of his middle years, the white streak of hair that marked his scar foretelling the grey that had already begun to show in his beard. He was strong and fit, but his youth was unquestionably behind him. The days of his full strength he had spent watching over me.

      ‘Well,’ he said gruffly. ‘Farewell, Fitz. And good luck to you.’

      ‘Good luck to you, Burrich.’ I crossed the room quickly, and embraced him before he could step back.

      He hugged me back, a quick squeeze that nearly cracked my ribs, and then pushed my hair back from my face. ‘Go comb your hair. You look like a wild man.’ He almost managed a smile. He turned from me and strode away. I stood watching him go. I thought he would not look back, but on the far side of the pasture, he turned and lifted his hand. I raised mine in return. Then he was gone, swallowed into the woods. I sat for a time on the step, considering the place where I had last seen him. If I kept to my plan, it might be years before I saw him again. If I saw him again. Since I was six years old, he had