Royal Assassin (33 page)

Brother!

He came, slashing teeth and weight hitting our tangled struggle like a battering ram. We all went down in the snow then, and the impact loosened the Forged one’s grip enough that I caught a whistle of air into my lungs. My head cleared, and suddenly I had heart to fight again, to ignore pain and damage, to fight! I swear I saw myself, face purpled from strangling, the rich blood streaming and soaking and the smell so maddening. I bared my teeth. Then Cub bore the one down and away from me. He attacked him with a speed no man could match, slashing and snapping and leaping clear before the grasping hands could seize his coat. He darted back in suddenly.

I know that I knew when Cub’s jaws closed in his throat. I felt that death rattle in my own jaws and the swift spurting blood that drenched my muzzle and flowed out over my jowls. I shook my head, my teeth tearing flesh, setting all the life loose to run free down his stinking garments.

Then was a time of nothing.

Then I was sitting in the snow, back against a tree. Cub was lying in the snow not far from me. His forepaws were dappled with blood. He was licking his legs clean, a careful, slow, thorough licking.

I lifted my sleeve to my mouth and chin. I wiped away blood. It was not mine. I knelt suddenly forward in the snow, to spit out beard hairs, and then to vomit, but not even the acid taste of my bile could cleanse the dead man’s flesh and blood from my mouth. I glanced at his body, looked away. His throat was torn out. For a terrible instant I could recall how I had chewed down, the tendons of his throat taut against my teeth. I shut my eyes tight. I sat very still.

Cold nose against my cheek. I opened my eyes. He sat beside me, regarding me.
Cub
.

Nighteyes
, he corrected me.
My mother named me Nighteyes. I was the last of my litter to get my eyes open
. He snuffed, then sneezed suddenly. He looked around at the fallen men. I followed his gaze unwillingly. My knife had taken the young one, but he had not died quickly. The other two …

I killed faster
, Nighteyes observed quietly.
But I have not the teeth of a cow. You did well, for your kind
. He stood up and shook himself. Blood, both cold and warm, spattered my face. I gasped and wiped it away, then realized the significance.

You’re bleeding
.

So are you. He pulled the blade out of you to put it in me
.

Let me look at it
.

Why?

The question hung between us in the cold air. Night was about to find us. Overhead the tree branches had gone black against the evening sky. I did not need the light to see him. I did not even need to see him. Do you need to see your ear to know it is part of you? As useless to deny that part of my flesh was mine as to deny Nighteyes.

We are brothers. We are pack
, I conceded.

Are we?

I felt a reaching, a groping, a tugging for my attention. I let myself recall that I had felt this before and denied it. Now I did not. I gave him my focus, my undivided attention. Nighteyes was there, hide and tooth, muscle and claw, and I did not avoid him. I knew the sword thrust in his shoulder and felt how it had gone between two big muscles there. He held his paw curled to his chest. I hesitated, and then felt his hurt that I would hesitate. So I paused no longer, but reached out to him as he had to me.
Trust is not trust until it is complete
. So close were we, I do not know which of us offered this thought. For an instant I had a double awareness of the world as Nighteyes’ perceptions overlay my own, his scenting of the bodies, his hearing telling me of scavenger foxes already creeping closer, his eyes making no difficulty of the fading light. Then the duality was gone, and his senses were mine, and mine his. We were bonded.

Cold was settling, on the land and into my bones. We found my cloak, clotted with frost, but I shook it out and put it on. I did not try to fasten it, but kept it wide away from where I had been bitten. I managed to drag my mittens on despite my injured forearm. “We’d better go,” I told him softly. “When we get home, I’ll see to cleaning and bandaging us. But first, we’d better get there and get warm.”

I felt his assent. He walked beside me as we went, not behind me. He lifted his nose once, to snuff deeply of the fresh air. A cold wind had come up. Snow began to fall. That was all. His nose brought me the knowledge that I need fear no more Forged ones. The air was clean save for the stench of those behind us, and even that was fading, turning into carrion smell, mingling with the scavenger foxes come to find them.

You were wrong
, he observed.
Neither of us hunts very well alone
. Sly amusement.
Unless you thought you were doing well before I came along?

“A wolf is not meant to hunt alone,” I told him. I tried for dignity.

He lolled his tongue at me.
Don’t fear, little brother. I’ll be here
.

We continued walking through the crisp white snow and
the stark black trees.
Not much farther to home
, he comforted me. I felt his strength mingling with mine as we limped on.

It was nearly noon when I presented myself at Verity’s map-room door. My forearm was snugly bandaged and invisible inside a voluminous sleeve. The wound itself was not that severe, but it was painful. The bite between my shoulder and neck was not so easily concealed. I had lost flesh there, and it had bled profusely. When I had seen it with a looking glass the night before, I was nearly sick. Cleaning it had made it bleed even more profusely; there was a chunk of me gone. Well, and if Nighteyes had not intervened, more of me would have followed that mouthful. I cannot explain how sickening I found that thought. I had managed to get a dressing on it, but not a very good one. I had pulled my shirt high and fastened it in place to conceal the bandaging. It chafed painfully against the wound, but it concealed it. Apprehensively, I tapped on the door, and was clearing my throat as it opened.

Charim told me Verity was not there. There was a worry deep in his eyes. I tried not to share it. “He can’t leave the boatbuilders to that work, can he?”

Charim shook his head to my banter. “No. Up in his tower,” the old servant said shortly. I turned aside as he slowly shut the door.

Well, Kettricken had told me as much. I had tried to forget that part of our conversation. Dread crept through me as I sought the tower stairs. Verity had no reason to be in this tower. This tower was where he Skilled from in summers, when the weather was fine and the Raiders harried our shores. There was no reason to be up there in winter, especially with the wind howling and the snow dropping as it was today. No reason save the terrible attraction of the Skill itself.

I had felt that lure, I reminded myself as I gritted my teeth and began the long climb to the top. I had known, for a time, the heady exuberance of the Skill. Like the clotted memory of long-ago pain, Galen the Skill Master’s words came back to me. “If you are weak,” he had threatened us, “if you lack focus and discipline, if you are indulgent and inclined to pleasure,
you will not master the Skill. Rather, the Skill will master you. Practice the denial of all pleasures to yourself; deny all weaknesses that tempt you. Then, when you are as steel, perhaps you will be ready to encounter the lure of the Skill and turn aside from it. If you give in to it, you will become as a great babe, mindless and drooling.” Then he had schooled us, with privations and punishments that went far past any sane level. Yet when I had encountered the Skill joy, I had not found it the tawdry pleasure Galen had implied. Rather, it had been the same rush of blood and thunder of heart that sometimes music brought to me, or a sudden flight of bright pheasant in an autumn wood, or even the pleasure of taking a horse perfectly over a difficult jump. That instant when all things come into balance, and for a moment turn together as perfectly as birds wheeling in flight. The Skill gave that to one, but not for just a moment. Rather it lasted for as long as a man could sustain it, and became stronger and purer as one’s ability with the Skill refined. Or so I believed. My own abilities with the Skill had been permanently damaged in a battle of wills with Galen. The defensive mental walls I had erected were such that not even someone as strongly Skilled as Verity could always reach me. My own ability to reach out of myself had become an intermittent thing, skittish and flighty as a spooky horse.

I paused outside Verity’s door. I took a very deep breath, then breathed it out slowly, refusing to let the blackness of spirit settle on me. Those things were done, that time was gone. No sense railing to myself about it. As was my old habit, I entered without knocking, lest the noise break Verity’s concentration.

He should not have been Skilling. He was. The shutters of the window were open and he leaned out on the sill. Wind and snow swirled throughout the room, speckling his dark hair and dark blue shirt and jerkin. He was breathing in deep, long steady breaths, a cadence somewhere between a very deep sleep and that of a runner at rest and catching his wind. He seemed oblivious of me. “Prince Verity?” I said softly.

He turned to me, and his gaze was like heat, like light, like wind in my face. He Skilled into me with such force that I felt driven out of myself, his mind possessing mine so completely
that there was no room left to be myself in it. For a moment I was drowning in Verity, and then he was gone, withdrawing so rapidly that I was left stumbling and gasping like a fish deserted by a high wave. In a step he was beside me, catching my elbow and steadying me on my feet.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I was not expecting you. You startled me.”

“I should have knocked, my prince,” I replied, and then gave a quick nod to him that I could stand. “What’s out there, that you watch so intently?”

He glanced aside from me. “Not much. Some boys on the cliffs, watching a pod of whales sporting. Two of our own boats, fishing halibut. Even in this weather, though not enjoying it much.”

“Then you are not Skilling for Outislanders….”

“There are not any out there, this time of year. But I keep a watch.” He glanced down at my forearm, the one he had just released, and changed the subject. “What happened to you?”

“That’s what I came to see you about. Forged ones attacked me. Out on the face of the ridge, the one where the spruce-hen hunting is good. Near the goatherd’s shed.”

He nodded quickly, his dark brows knitting. “I know the area. How many? Describe them.”

I quickly sketched my attackers for him and he nodded briefly, unsurprised. “I had a report of them, four days ago. They should not be this close to Buckkeep this soon; not unless they are consistently moving in this direction, every day. Are they finished?”

“Yes. You expected this?” I was aghast. “I thought we had wiped them out.”

“We wiped out the ones who were here then. There are others, moving in this direction. I have been keeping track of them by the reports, but I had not expected them to be so close so soon.”

I struggled briefly, got my voice under control. “My prince, why do we simply keep track of them? Why do not we … take care of this problem?”

Verity made a small noise in his throat and turned back to his window. “Sometimes one has to wait, and let the enemy
complete a move, in order to discover what the full strategy is. Do you understand me?”

“The Forged ones have a strategy? I think not, my prince. They were—”

“Report to me in full,” Verity directed me without looking at me. I hesitated briefly, then launched into a complete retelling. Toward the end of the struggle, my account became a bit incoherent. I let the words die on my lips. “But I did manage to break his grip on me. And all three of them died there.”

He did not take his eyes from the sea. “You should avoid physical struggles, FitzChivalry. You always seem to get hurt in them.”

“I know, my prince,” I admitted humbly. “Hod did her best with me—”

“But you were not really trained to be a fighter. You have other talents. And those are the ones you should be putting to use to preserve yourself. Oh, you’re a competent swordsman; but you’ve not the brawn and weight to be a brawler. At least, not yet. And that is what you always seem to revert to in a fight.”

“I was not offered the selection of weapons,” I said, a bit testily, and then added, “my prince.”

“No. You won’t be.” He seemed to speak from afar. A slight tension in the air told me that he Skilled out even as we spoke. “Yet I’m afraid I must send you out again. I think you are perhaps right. I have watched what is happening long enough. The Forged ones are converging on Buckkeep. I cannot fathom why, and yet perhaps knowing that is not as important as preventing them from attaining their goal. You will again undertake the removal of this problem, Fitz. Perhaps this time I can keep my own lady from becoming involved in it. I understand that if she wishes to go riding, she now has a guard of her own?”

“As you have been told, sir,” I told him, cursing myself for not coming to speak to him sooner of the Queen’s guard.