Assassin's Quest

Slavery has never been commonly accepted in the Six Duchies. Many of the early border conflicts between Shoaks and the Chalced States had more to do with the slavery issue than actual boundary lines. Shoaks families refused to accept that soldiers wounded or captured in war would be kept the rest of their lives as slaves. Any battle that Shoaks lost was almost immediately followed by a second savage attack against the Chalced States to regain those lost in the first battle. In this way, Shoaks came to hold much land originally claimed by the Chalced States. The peace between the two regions is always uneasy. Chalced constantly brings complaint that the folk of Shoaks not only shelter run away slaves, but encourage others to escape. No Six Duchies monarch has ever denied the truth of this.

My whole drive now was to reach Verity, somewhere beyond the Mountain Kingdom. To do it, I would have to cross all of Farrow first. It would not be an easy task. While the region along the Vin River is pleasant enough, the farther one travels from the Vin the more arid the countryside becomes. The arable stretches are given over to great fields of flax and hemp, but beyond these are vast stretches of open, uninhabited land. The interior of Farrow Duchy, while not a desert, is flat, dry country, used only by the nomadic tribes who move their herds across it, following the forage. Even they forsake it after the "green times" of the year are past, to congregate in temporary villages along rivers or near watering places. In the days that followed my escape from Tradeford Hall, I came to wonder why King Wielder had ever bothered to subjugate Farrow, let alone make it one of the Six Duchies. I knew that I had to strike away from the Vin, to head southwest toward Blue Lake, to cross vast Blue Lake, and then follow the Cold River to the hems of the Mountains. Yet it was not a journey for a lone man. And without Nighteyes, that was what I was.

There are no sizable cities in the interior, though there are rudimentary towns that subsist year-round near some of the springs that randomly dot the interior. Most of these survive by virtue of the trade caravans that pass near them. Trade does flow, albeit slowly, between the folk of Blue Lake and the Vin River, and by this same path do the goods of the Mountain folk come into Six Duchies hands. The obvious course was to somehow attach myself to one of those caravans. Yet what is obvious is not always easy.

When I had entered Tradeford town, I had looked to be the poorest type of beggar imaginable. I left it finely dressed, on one of the best animals ever bred at Buckkeep. But the moment after I had parted with Arrow, the gravity of my situation began to dawn on me. I had the clothing I had stolen and my leather boots, my belt and pouch, a knife and a sword, plus a ring and a medallion on a chain. In my pouch there were no coins left at all, though it did contain implements for fire making, a sharpening stone for my knife, and a good selection of poisons.

Wolves are not meant to hunt alone. So Nighteyes had once told me, and before the day was out, I came to appreciate the wisdom of that statement. My meal that day consisted of rice-lily roots and some nuts a squirrel had hoarded in too obvious a hiding place. I would gladly have eaten the squirrel, who sat overhead scolding at me as I raided his cache, but I had not the means to make that wish a reality. Instead, as I pounded the nuts with a stone to open them, I reflected that one by one, my illusions about myself had been stripped away.

I had believed myself a self-sufficient and clever fellow. I had taken pride in my skills as an assassin, had even, deep down, believed that although I could not competently master my Skill ability, my strength at it was easily the equal of any in Galen's Coterie. But take away both King Shrewd's largesse and my wolf companion's hunting ability, subtract from me Chade's secret information and plotting skill and Verity's Skill-guidance, and what I saw left was a starving man in stolen clothes, halfway between Buckkeep and the Mountains, with small prospect of getting any closer to either one.

Satisfyingly bleak as such thoughts were, they did nothing to assuage the nagging of Verity's Skill-suggestion. Come to me. Had he intended for those words to burn into my mind with such command? I doubted it. I think he had sought only to keep me from killing both Regal and myself. And yet now the compulsion was there, festering like an arrowhead. It even infected my sleep with anxiety, so that I dreamed often of going to Verity. It was not that I had given up my ambition of killing Regal; a dozen times a day, I constructed plots in my mind, ways in which I might return to Tradeford and come at him from an unexpected angle. But all such plots began with the reservation "after I have gone to Verity." It had simply become unthinkable to me that there was anything else that had a higher priority.