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

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СКАЧАТЬ a tavern. He was stonily sober, and his eyes were anxious. In the street outside the tavern, he stopped by a dying torch in a street sconce. ‘There’s still blood on your face,’ he told me, and stood me up straight. He took out his handkerchief, dipped it in a rain barrel, and wiped my face as he had not since I was a child. I swayed under his touch. I looked into his eyes, and forced my gaze to focus.

      ‘I’ve killed before,’ I said helplessly. ‘Why is this so different? Why does it sicken me like this, afterward?’

      ‘Because it does,’ he said softly. He put an arm around my shoulders, and I was surprised we were of a height. The walk back to Buckkeep was steep. Very long. Very quiet. He sent me to the baths, and told me to go to bed afterwards.

      I should have stayed in my own bed, but I had not the sense. Luckily the castle was abuzz, and one more drunk clambering up a staircase was not remarkable. Stupidly, I went to Molly’s room. She let me in. But when I tried to touch her, she pulled away from me. ‘You’re drunk,’ she told me, almost crying. ‘I told you, I promised myself to never kiss a drunk. Or be kissed by one.’

      ‘But I’m not drunk that way,’ I insisted.

      ‘There’s only one way to be drunk,’ she told me. And turned me out of her rooms, untouched.

      By noon the next day, I knew how much I had hurt her by not coming straight to her to find comfort. I could understand what she felt. But I also knew that what I had carried that night was nothing to take home to someone you loved. I wanted to explain that to her. But a boy came running up to me, to tell me I was needed on the Rurisk, and right now. I gave him a penny for his troubles and watched him dash off with it. Once, I had been the boy earning the penny. I thought of Kerry. I tried to remember him as the boy with the penny in his hand, running at my side, but forever now he was the Forged one dead on a table. No one, I told myself, had been taken for Forging yesterday.

      Then I headed down to the docks. On the way I stopped at the stable. I gave the crescent moon over into Burrich’s hands. ‘Keep this safe for me,’ I asked him. ‘And there will be a bit more, my crewshare from the raid. I want to have you hold it for me … what I make at doing this. It’s for Molly. So if ever I don’t come back, you be certain she gets it. She doesn’t like being a servant.’

      I hadn’t spoken so plainly of her to Burrich in a long time. A line creased his brow, but he took the bloodied moon. ‘What would your father say to me?’ he wondered aloud as I turned wearily away from him.

      ‘I don’t know,’ I told him bluntly. ‘I never knew him. Only you.’

      ‘FitzChivalry.’

      I turned back to him. Burrich met my eyes as he spoke. ‘I don’t know what he’d say to me. But I know I can say this for him, to you. I’m proud of you. It’s not the kind of work a man does that says he can be proud or not. It’s how he does it. Be proud of yourself.’

      ‘I will try,’ I told him quietly. I went back to my ship.

      Our next encounter with a Red Ship was a less decisive victory. We met them on the sea, and they were not surprised for they had seen us coming. Our master stood the course, and I think they were surprised when we began the engagement by ramming them. We sheared off a number of their oars, but missed the steering oar we had targeted. There was little damage to the ship itself; the Red Ships were as flexible as fish. Our grapples flew. We outnumbered them, and the master intended to use that advantage. Our warriors boarded them, and half our oarsmen lost their heads and jumped in too. It became a chaos that spread briefly to our own decks. It took every bit of will I could muster to withstand the vortex of emotions that engulfed us, but I stayed with my oar as I had been ordered. Nonge, at his oar, watched me strangely. I gripped my oar and ground my teeth until I could find myself. I muttered a curse when I discovered that I’d lost Verity again.

      I think our warriors let up a bit when they knew we had reduced their crew to where they could no longer manage their vessel. It was a mistake. One of the Raiders set fire to their own sail while a second one attempted to chop through their own planking. I guess they hoped the fire would spread and they could take us down with them. Certainly at the end they fought with no care for the damage they took to their ship or their own bodies. Our fighters finally finished them, and we got the fire put out, but the prize we towed back to Buckkeep was smoking and damaged, and man for man, we had lost more lives than they had. Still, it was a victory, we told ourselves. This time, when the others went out drinking, I had the sense to seek out Molly. And early the next morning, I found an hour or two for Nighteyes. We went hunting together, good clean hunting, and he tried to persuade me to run away with him. I made the mistake of telling him that he could leave if he wished, meaning only the best for him, and hurt his feelings. It took me another hour to convey to him what I had meant. I went back to my ship wondering if my ties were worth the effort it took to keep them intact. Nighteyes assured me they were.

      That was the last clear victory for the Rurisk. It was far from the last battle of the summer. No, the clear, pleasant weather stretched impossibly long before us, and every fine day was a day when I might kill someone. I tried not to count them as days on which I might be killed. We had many skirmishes, and gave pursuit many times, and it did seem there were fewer raids attempted in the area we regularly patrolled. Somehow that only made it all the more frustrating. And there were successful raids for the Red Ships, times when we put into a town but an hour or so after they had left, and could do no more than help stack bodies or put out fires. Then Verity would roar and curse in my mind that he could not get messages more swiftly, that there were not enough ships and watches to be everywhere. I would rather have faced the fury of a battle than Verity’s savage frustration racking through my brain. There was never any end in sight, save the respite that bad weather might bring us. We could not even put an accurate number to the Red Ships that plagued us, for they were painted identically, and as like as peas in a pod. Or drops of blood on the sand.

      While I was an oarsman on the Rurisk that summer, we had one other encounter with a Red Ship that is worth telling for the strangeness of it. On a clear summer night, we had been tumbled from our beds in the crew-shed and sent racing toward our ship. Verity had sensed a Red Ship lurking off Buck Point. He wanted us to overtake it in the dark.

      Justin stood in our prow, Skill linked to Serene in Verity’s tower. Verity was a wordless mumble in my mind as he felt our way through the dark toward the ship he sensed. And something else? I could feel him groping out, beyond the Red Ship, like a man feeling forward in the darkness. I sensed his uneasiness. We were allowed no talk, and our oars were muffled as we came closer. Nighteyes whispered to me that he had scent of them, and then we spotted them. Long and low and dark, the Red Ship was cutting through the water ahead of us. A sudden cry went up from their deck; they had seen us. Our master shouted to us to lay into our oars, but as we did, a sick wave of fear engulfed me. My heart began to hammer, my hands to tremble. The terror that swept through me was a child’s nameless fear of things lurking in the dark, a helpless fear. I gripped my oar but could find no strength to ply it.

      ‘Korrikska,’ I heard a man groan in a thick Outislander accent. I think it was Nonge. I became aware I was not the only one unmanned. There was no steady beat to our oars. Some sat on their sea-chests, head bowed over their oars, while others rowed frantically, but out of rhythm, the blades of the oars skipping and slapping against the water. We skittered on the surface like a crippled pond-skater while the Red Ship forged purposefully toward us. I lifted up my eyes and watched my death coming for me. The blood hammered so in my ears that I could not hear the cries of the panic-stricken men and women about me. I could not even take a breath. I lifted up my eyes to the heavens.

      Beyond the Red Ship, almost glowing on the black water, was a white ship. This was no raiding vessel; this was a ship, easily three times the size of the Red Ship, her two СКАЧАТЬ