"Robin Hobb - Assassin 2 - Assassin' s Quest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hobb Robin)

I recall the blow from him that split my swollen skin and left the scar down my
face that I still bear.
I have never forgiven myself the triumph I ceded to him when I took poison
and died.


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But more painful than the events I can recall are those that are lost to me.
When Regal killed me, I died. I was never again commonly known as FitzChivalry,
I never renewed bonds to the Buckkeep folk who had known me since I was a child
of six. I never lived in Buckkeep Castle again, never more waited on the Lady
Patience, never sat on the hearthstones at Chade's feet again. Lost to me were
the rhythms of lives that had intertwined with mine. Friends died, others were
wed, babes were born, children came of age, and I saw none of it. Though I no
longer possess the body of a healthy young man, many still live who once called
me friend. Sometimes, still, I long to rest eyes on them, to touch hands, to lay
to peace the loneliness of years.
I cannot.
Those years are lost to me, and all the years of their lives to come. Lost,
too, is that period, no longer than a month, but seeming much longer, when I was
confined to dungeon and then coffin. My king had died in my arms, yet I did not
see him buried. Nor was I present at the council after my death when I was found
guilty of having used the Wit magic, and hence deserving of the death that had
been dealt me.
Patience came to lay claim to my body. My father's wife, once so distressed
to discover he had sired a bastard before they were wed, was the one who took me
from that cell. Hers the hands that washed my body for burial, that straightened
my limbs and wrapped me in a grave cloth. Awkward, eccentric Lady Patience, for
whatever reason, cleansed my wounds and bound them as carefully as if I still
lived. She alone ordered the digging of my grave and saw to the burying of my
coffin. She and Lacey, her woman, mourned me, when all others, out of fear or
disgust at my crime, abandoned me.
Yet she knew nothing of how Burrich and Chade, my assassin mentor, came
nights later to that grave, and dug away the snow that had fallen and the frozen
clumps of earth that had been tossed down on my coffin. Only those two were
present as Burrich broke through the lid of the coffin and tugged out my body,
and then summoned, by his own Wit magic, the wolf that had been entrusted with
my soul. They wrested that soul from the wolf and sealed it back into the
battered body it had fled. They raised me, to walk once more in a man's shape,
to recall what it was to have a king and be bound by an oath. To this day, I do
not know if I thank them for that. Perhaps, as the Fool insists, they had no
choice. Perhaps there can be no thanks nor any blame, but only recognition of
the forces that brought us and bound us to our inevitable fates.




CHAPTER ONE