Hobb, Robin – Farseer 1 – Assassin’s Apprentice

“Is that what you want, Fitz? To take the blood of kings that’s in you, and drown it in the blood of the wild hunt?

To be as a beast among beasts, simply for the sake of the knowledge it brings you? Worse yet, think on what comes before. Will the scent of fresh blood touch off your temper, will the sight of prey shut down your thoughts?” His voice grew softer still, and I heard the sickness he felt as he asked me, “Will you wake fevered and asweat because somewhere a bitch is in season and your companion scents it? Will that be the knowledge you take to your lady’s bed?”

I sat small beside him. “I do not know,” I said in a little voice.

He turned to face me, outraged. “You don’t know?” he growled. “I tell you where it will lead, and you say you don’t know?”

My tongue was dry in my mouth and Nosy cowered at my feet. “But I don’t know,” I protested. “How can I know what I’ll do, until I’ve done it? How can I say?”

“Well, if you can’t say, I can!” he roared, and I sensed then in full how he had banked the fires of his temper, and also how much he’d drunk that night. “The pup goes and you stay. You stay here, in my care, where I can keep an eye on you. If Chivalry will not have me with him, it’s the least I can do for him. I’ll see that his son grows up a man, and not a wolf. I’ll do it if it kills the both of us!”

He lurched from the bench, to seize Nosy by the scruff of the neck. At least, such was his intention. But the pup and I sprang clear of him. Together we rushed for the door, but the latch was fastened, and before I could work it, Burrich was upon us. Nosy he shoved aside with his boot; me he seized by a shoulder and propelled me away from the door. “Come here, pup,” he commanded, but Nosy fled to my side. Burrich stood panting and glaring by the door, and I caught the growling undercurrent of his thoughts, the fury that taunted him to smash us both and be done with it. Control overlaid it, but that brief glimpse was enough to terrify me. And when he suddenly sprang at us, I repelled at him with all the force of my fear.

He dropped as suddenly as a bird stoned in flight and sat for a moment on the floor. I stooped and clutched Nosy to me. Burrich slowly shook his head as if shaking raindrops from his hair. He stood, towering over us. “It’s in his blood,” I heard him mutter to himself. “From his damned mother’s blood, and I shouldn’t be surprised. But the boy has to be taught.” And then, as he looked me full in the eye, he warned me, “Fitz. Never do that to me again. Never. Now give me that pup.”

He advanced on us again, and as I felt the lap of his hidden wrath, I could not contain myself. I repelled at him again. But this time my defense was met by a wall that hurled it back at me, so that I stumbled and sank down, almost fainting, my mind pressed down by blackness. Burrich stooped over me. “I warned you,” he said softly, and his voice was like the growling of a wolf. Then, for the last time, I felt his fingers grip Nosy’s scruff. He lifted the pup bodily and carried him, not roughly, to the door. The latch that had eluded me he worked swiftly, and in moments I heard the heavy tromp of his boots down the stair.

In a moment I had recovered and was up, flinging myself against the door. But Burrich had locked it somehow, for I scrabbled vainly at the catch. My sense of Nosy receded as he was carried farther and farther from me, leaving in its place a desperate loneliness. I whimpered, then howled, clawing at the door and seeking after my contact with him. There was a sudden flash of red pain, and Nosy was gone. As his canine senses deserted me completely I screamed and cried as any six-year-old might, and hammered vainly at the thick wood planks.