Royal Assassin Read Free Page A

Defeat was in his voice. “Yes. That is just as possible as the other. But don’t you see we have no choice? I could physick you to try to force the poison out of your body. But if it’s damage, not poison, all I would do was weaken you, so that your body’s own healing would take that much longer.” He stared into the flames, and lifted a hand to touch a streak of white at his temple. I was not the only one who’d fallen to Regal’s treachery. Burrich himself was but newly recovered from a skull blow that would have killed anyone less thickheaded than he. I knew he had endured long days of dizziness and blurred vision. I did not recall he had complained at all. I had the decency to feel a bit of shame.
    “So what do I do?”
    Burrich started as if roused from dozing. “What we’ve been doing. Wait. Eat. Rest. Be easy on yourself. And see what happens. Is that so terrible?”
    I ignored his question. “And if I don’t get better? If I just stay like this, where the tremors or fits can come over me at any time?”
    His answer was slow in coming. “Live with it. Many folk have to live with worse. Most of the time you’re fine. You’re not blind. You’re not paralyzed. You’ve your wits, still. Stop defining yourself by what you can’t do. Why don’t you consider what you didn’t lose?”
    “What I didn’t lose? What I didn’t lose?” My anger roselike a covey of birds taking flight and likewise driven by panic. “I’m helpless, Burrich. I can’t go back to Buckkeep like this! I’m useless. I’m worse than useless, I’m a waiting victim. If I could go back and batter Regal into a pulp, that might be worth it. Instead, I will have to sit at table with Prince Regal, to be civil and deferential to a man who plotted to overthrow Verity and kill me as an added spice. I can’t endure him seeing me tremble with weakness, or suddenly fall in a seizure. I don’t want to see him smile at what he has made me; I don’t want to watch him savor his triumph. He will try to kill me again. We both know that. Perhaps he has learned he is no match for Verity, perhaps he will respect his older brother’s reign and new wife. But I doubt he will extend that to me. I’ll be one more way he can strike at Verity. And when he comes, what shall I be doing? Sitting by the fire like a palsied old man, doing nothing. Nothing! All I’ve been trained for, all Hod’s weaponry instruction, all Fedwren’s careful teachings about lettering, even all you’ve taught me about taking care of beasts! All a waste! I can do none of it. I’m just a bastard again, Burrich. And someone once told me that a royal bastard is only kept alive so long as he is useful.” I was practically shouting at him as I said the last words. But even in my fury and despair, I did not speak aloud of Chade and my training as an assassin. At that, too, I was useless now. All my stealth and sleight of hand, all the precise ways to kill a man by touch, the painstaking mixing of poisons, all were denied me by my own rattling body.
    Burrich sat quietly, hearing me out. When my breath and my anger ran out and I sat gasping in my bed, clasping my traitorously trembling hands together, he spoke calmly.
    “So. Are you saying we don’t go back to Buckkeep?”
    That put me off balance. “We?”
    “My life is pledged to the man who wears that earring. There’s a long story behind that, one that perhaps I’ll tell you someday. Patience had no right to give it to you. I thought it had gone with Prince Chivalry to his grave. She probably thought it just a simple piece of jewelry her husband had worn, hers to keep or to give. In any wise, you wear it now. Where you go, I follow.”
    I lifted my hand to the bauble. It was a tiny blue stone caught up in a web of silver net. I started to unfasten it.
    “Don’t do that,” Burrich said. The words were quiet, deeper than a dog’s growl. But his voice held both threat and command. I dropped my hand away, unable to