"Robin Hobb - Assassin 3 - Royal Assassin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hobb Robin)

Perhaps. But perhaps not. What we take for granted now, the knowing of these
things, may be a wonder and a mystery someday to our descendants.
There is very little in any of the libraries on magic. I work laboriously,
tracing a thread of knowledge through a patchwork quilt of information. I find



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scattered references, passing allusions, but that is all. I have gathered it,
over these last few years, and stored it in my head, always intending to commit
my knowledge to paper. I will put down what I know from my own experience, as
well as what I have ferreted out. Perhaps to provide answers for some other poor
fool, in times to come, who might find himself as battered by the warring of the
magics within him as I have been.
But when I sit down to the task, I hesitate. Who am I to set my will against
the wisdom of those who have gone before me? Shall I set down in plain lettering
the methods by which a Witgifted one can expand her range, or can bond a
creature to himself? Shall I detail the training one must undergo before being
recognized as a Skilled one? The Hedge wizardries and legendary magics have
never been mine. Have I any right to dig out their secrets and pin them to paper
like so many butterflies or leaves collected for study?
I try to consider what one might do with such knowledge, unjustly gained. It
leads me to consider what this knowledge has gained for me. Power, wealth, the
love of a woman? I mock myself. Neither the Skill nor the Wit has ever offered
any such to me. Or if they did, I had not the sense nor ambition to seize them
when offered.
Power. I do not think I ever wanted it for its own sake. I thirsted for it,
sometimes, when I was ground down, or when those close to me suffered beneath
ones who abused their powers. Wealth. I never really considered it. From the
moment that I, his bastard grandson, pledged myself to King Shrewd, he always
saw that all my needs were fulfilled. I had plenty to eat, more education than I
sometimes cared for, clothes both simple and those annoyingly fashionable, and
often enough a coin or two of my own to spend. Growing up in Buckkeep, that was
wealth enough and more than most boys in Buckkeep Town could claim. Love? Well.
My horse Sooty was fond enough of me, in her own placid way. I had the
truehearted loyalty of a hound named Nosy, and that took him to his grave. I was
given the fiercest of loves by a terrier pup, and it was likewise the death of
him. I wince to think of the price willingly paid for loving me.
Always I have possessed the loneliness of one raised amid intrigues and
clustering secrets, the isolation of a boy who cannot trust the completeness of
his heart to anyone. I could not go to Fedwren, the court scribe, who praised me
for my neat lettering and well-inked illustrations, and confide that I was
already apprenticed to the royal assassin, and thus could not follow his writing
trade. Nor could I divulge to Chade, my master in the Diplomacy of the Knife,
the frustrating brutality I endured trying to learn the ways of the Skill from
Galen the Skill Master. And to no one did I dare speak openly of my emerging
proclivity for the Wit, the ancient beast magic, said to be a perversion and a
taint to any who used it.