The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince by Robin Hobb

Author:Robin Hobb [Hobb, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Epic, Robin Hobb, Fantasy, high fantasy, Farseer
ISBN: 9781596065444
Google: 8E3LMgEACAAJ
Amazon: 1596065443
Publisher: Subterranean
Published: 2013-02-27T06:00:00+00:00

To my natural son, I gave the name Redbird, for his hair was russet as a robin’s breast feathers. He was smaller than Prince Charger, and not a healthy child at first. His vision was weak, so he developed a peering expression, and this I think was the result of him being forced so soon into the outer world. I raised him beside the prince, just as I had been raised beside his mother, but to my boy I did not give the ill counsels my mother had bestowed on me.

I requested a room on a higher floor than I had previously occupied, and the house steward was quick enough to find one for us. No one tried to take the bastard prince from me and if anyone even knew I had borne a child as well, no one cared. So it was that I lived on the floor above the royal family’s quarters, but on a level below that occupied by the common servants. My neighbors were those well born, but not royal, and visiting nobility. I lived quietly among them. The court was happy to forget us.

I saw to the young prince’s needs as I once had to his mother’s, visiting the royal seamstresses when he needed new garments, and making sure that they were well made enough that they would serve my smaller son as well when he grew into Charger’s cast offs. As the months passed my son grew healthier, though he never matched his royal companion in size or appetite, and once he passed his sickly beginning, was an easy child, content to give way to the prince in all things. I mourned my lost princess and cherished her son for he was all I had left of her; but as the months passed, the razor of my pain dulled.

At Buckkeep life and politics must continue, no matter whose wife or daughter dies. In less than a year King Virile had been bereaved of both wife and daughter. Many said that he would follow them swiftly to the grave, for grief and shame as heavy as that might kill any man. They began to look to his younger brother, wondering if Virile would not name him as King-in-Waiting now. But in truth, King Virile bore up under his sorrows. I do not mean that I was privy to the king’s private thoughts or doings, but only that I saw what everyone did. He still came to sit in judgment on the appointed days. The flesh of his face sagged with grief and his eyes were never clear, but he was clean and walked as tall and sat as straight as ever he had.

He became a man both grave and thoughtful, seldom smiling and never laughing, but a better king all the same than he had been in the years before his grief. For the next two decades, he was to rule wisely and well. At first, his dukes and duchesses spoke amongst themselves, saying: “Perhaps

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