Fool’s Assassin

But one day I will carry forward as if it were tattooed with sharp needles of both pleasure and pain into the very core of my being. There is a day I recall with colors so bright and scents so strong that I have only to close my eyes and be there again. It is a bright winter day, a day of blue sky and glistening white snow and the wrinkled gray sea beyond the roofs and roads of Buckkeep Town. Always that day will be the day before Winterfest eve. Always I will hear merry greetings and the luring calls of peddlers and tinkers and the gulls high overhead crying, crying in the wind. The crisp breeze carried the scents of hot cooked foods both sweet and savory mixed with the iodine and rot of the low tide. I walked the streets alone, buying small gifts for the daughter I had left behind at Withywoods and necessary things for my injured friend, herbs to make the salves Burrich had taught me and clean clothing and a warm cloak and shoes for his crippled, frostbitten feet.

The gulls wheel and cry, the merchants beseech me to buy, the wind whispers of the changing tide, and below in the slight bay, the ships creak and tug restively at their lines. It is a choice day, a lapis day in a silver setting.

It is the day my life changed forever. It is the day my child was stolen, and flames and smoke and the screams of horses rose to the skies over Withywoods, unheard, unseen by me. Neither my Wit nor my Skill told me of snow melted scarlet there, of women with bruised faces and men with pierced bodies. Nothing warned me on that bright day that the darkest time of my life had begun.

About the Author

Robin Hobb is the author of the Farseer Trilogy, the Liveship Traders Trilogy, the Tawny Man Trilogy, the Soldier Son Trilogy, and the Rain Wilds Chronicles. She has also written as Megan Lindholm. She is a native of Washington State.