Assassins Apprentice by Robin Hobb

Author:Robin Hobb [Hobb, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-03-31T12:26:07+00:00

"Stand up straight!"

I stiffened.

"Not like that! You look like a turkey, drawn out and waiting for the ax. Relax more. No, but put your shoulders back, don't hunch them. Do you always stand with your feet thrown out so?"

"Lady, he is only a boy. They are always so, all angles and bones. Let him come in and be at ease."

"Oh, very well. Come in, then."

I nodded my gratitude to a round-faced serving woman who dimpled a smile at me in return. She gestured me toward a pew bench so bedecked with pillows and shawls that there was scarcely room left to sit. I perched on the edge of it and surveyed Lady Patience's chamber.

It was worse than Chade's. I would have thought it the clutter of years if I had not known that she had only recently arrived. Even a complete inventory of the room could not have described it, for it was the juxtaposition of objects that made it remarkable. A feather fan, a fencing glove, and a bundle of cattails were all vased in a well worn boot. A small black terrier with two fat puppies slept in a basket lined with a fur hood and some woolen stockings. A family of carved ivory walruses perched on a tablet about horse shoeing. But the dominant elements were the plants. There were fat puffs of greenery overflowing clay pots, teacups and goblets and buckets of cuttings and cut flowers and greenery, vines spilling out of handleless mugs and cracked cups. Failures were evident in bare sticks poking up out of pots of earth. The plants perched and huddled together in every location that would catch morning or afternoon sun from the windows. The effect was like a garden spilling in the windows and growing up around the clutter in the room.

"He's probably hungry, too, isn't he, Lacey? I've heard that about boys. I think there's some cheese and biscuits on the stand by my bed. Fetch them for him, would you, dear?"

Lady Patience stood slightly more than arm's distance away from me as she spoke past me to her lady.

"I'm not hungry, really, thank you," I blurted out before Lacey could lumber to her feet. "I'm here because I was told to make myself available to you, in the mornings, for as long as you wanted me."

That was a careful rephrasing. What King Shrewd had actually said to me was, "Go to her chambers each morning, and do whatever it is she thinks you ought to be doing so she leaves me alone. And keep doing it until she is as weary of you as I am of her." His bluntness had astounded me, for I had never seen him so beleaguered as that day. Verity came in the door of the chamber as I was scuttling out, and he, too, looked much the worse for wear. Both men spoke and moved as if suffering from too much wine the night before, and yet I had seen them both at table last night, and there had been a marked lack of either merriness or wine.

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