Assassin's Apprentice

She nodded again and pushed open a door in the barnlike structure that was the outer armory. Here, I knew, the practice weapons were kept. The good iron and steel were up in the keep itself. Within the armory was a gentle halflight, and a slight coolness, along with a smell of wood and sweat and fresh strewn reeds. She did not hesitate, and I followed her to a rack that supported a supply of peeled poles.

"Choose one," she told me, the first words she'd spoken since directing me to follow her.

"Hadn't I better wait for Hod?" I asked timidly.

"I am Hod," she replied impatiently. "Now pick yourself a stave, boy. I want a bit of time alone with you, before the others come. To see what you're made of and what you know."

It did not take her long to establish that I knew next to nothing and was easily daunted. After but a few knocks and parries with her own brown rod, she easily caught mine a clip that sent it spinning from my stung hands.

"Hm," she said, not harshly nor kindly. The same sort of noise a gardener might make over a seed potato that had a bit of blight on it. I quested out toward her and found the same sort of quietness I'd encountered in the mare. She had none of Burrich's guardedness toward me. I think it was the first time I realized that some people, like some animals, were totally unaware of my reaching out toward them. I might have quested farther into her mind, except that I was so relieved at not finding any hostility that I feared to stir any. So I stood small and still before her inspection.

"Boy, what are you called?" she demanded suddenly.

Again. "Fitz."

She frowned at my soft words. I drew myself up straighter and spoke louder. "Fitz is what Burrich calls me."

She flinched slightly. "He would. Calls a bitch a bitch, and a bastard a bastard, does Burrich. Well ... I suppose I see his reasons. Fitz you are, and Fitz you'll be called by me as well. Now. I shall show you why the pole you selected was too long for you, and too thick. And then you shall select another."

And she did, and I did, and she took me slowly through an exercise that seemed infinitely complex then, but by the end of the week was no more difficult than braiding my horse's mane. We finished just as the rest of her students came trooping in. There were four of them, all within a year or two of my age, but all more experienced than I. It made for an awkwardness, as there were now an odd number of students, and no one particularly wanted the new one as a sparring partner.

Somehow I survived the day, though the memory of how fades into a blessedly vague haze. I remember how sore I was when she finally dismissed us; how the others raced up the path and back to the keep while I trailed dismally behind them, berating myself for ever coming to the King's attention. It was a long climb to the keep, and the hall was crowded and noisy. I was too weary to eat much. Stew and bread, I think, were all I had, and I had left the table and was limping toward the door, thinking only of the warmth and quiet of the stables, when Brant again accosted me.

"Your chamber is ready," was all he said.

I shot a desperate look at Burrich, but he was engaged in conversation with the man next to him. He didn't notice my plea at all. So once more I found myself following Brant, this time up a wide flight of stone steps, into a part of the keep I had never explored.

We paused on a landing and he took up a candelabra from a table there and kindled its tapers. "Royal family lives down this wing," he casually informed me. "The King has a bedroom big as the stable at the end of this hallway." I nodded, blindly believing all he told me, though I later found that an errand boy such as Brant would never have penetrated the royal wing. That would be for more important lackeys. Up another flight he took me and again paused. "Visitors get rooms here," he said, gesturing with the light, so that the wind of his motion set the flames to streaming. "Important ones, that is."

And up another flight we went, the steps perceptibly narrowing from the first two. At the next landing we paused again, and I looked with dread up an even narrower and steeper flight of steps. But Brant did not take me that way. Instead we went down this new wing, three doors down, and then he slid a latch on a plank door and shouldered it open. It swung heavily and not smoothly. "Room hasn't been used in a while," he observed cheerily. "But now it's yours and you're welcome to it." And with that he set the candelabra down on a chest, plucked one candle from it, and left. He pulled the heavy door closed behind him as he went, leaving me in the semidarkness of a large and unfamiliar room.