Robin Hobb – Royal Assassin. Farseer Trilogy Book 2

“Molly, please, he cannot love you as I do,” I begged.

She did not look at me. “Nor can your king love you as I … used to. But. It is not a matter of what he feels for me,” she said slowly. “It is what I feel for him. He must be first in my life. He needs that from me. Understand this. It is not that I no longer care for you. It is that I cannot put that feeling ahead of what is best for him.” She went down two more steps. “Good-bye, Newboy.” She no more than breathed those final words, but they sank into my heart as if branded there.

I stood on the steps, watching her go. And suddenly that feeling was too familiar, the pain too well-known. I flung myself down the steps after her, I seized her arm, I pulled her under the loft stairs into the darkness there. “Molly,” I said, “please.”

She said nothing. She did not even resist my grip on her arm.

“What can I give you, what can I tell you to make you understand what you are to me? I can’t just let you go!”

“No more can you make me stay,” she pointed out in a low voice. I felt something go out of her. Some anger, some spirit, some will. I have no word for it. “Please,” she said, and the word hurt me, because she begged. “Just let me go. Don’t make it hard. Don’t make me cry.”

I let go of her arm, but she did not leave.

“A long time ago,” she said carefully, “I told you that you were like Burrich.” ‘

I nodded in the darkness, not caring that she could not see me.

“In some ways you are. In others you are not. I decide for us, now, as he once decided for Patience and himself. There is no future for us. Someone already fills your heart. And the gap between our stations is too great for any love to bridge. I know that you love me. But your love is … different from mine. I wanted us to share all our lives. You wish to keep me in a box, separate from your life. I cannot be someone you come to when you have nothing more important to do. I don’t even know what it is that you do when you are not with me. You have never even shared that much with me.”