Assassin's Quest

PROLOGUE
The Unremembered

I AWAKE EVERY MORNING with ink on my hands. Sometimes I am sprawled,
facedown, on my worktable, amidst a welter of scrolls and papers. My boy, when
he comes in with my tray, may dare to chide me for not taking myself off to bed
the night before. But sometimes he looks at my face and ventures no word. I do
not try to explain to him why I do as I do. It is not a secret one can give to a
younger man; it is one he must earn and learn on his own.
A man has to have a purpose in life. I know this now, but it took me the
first score years of my life to learn it. In that I scarcely think myself
unique. Still, it is a lesson that, once learned, has remained with me. So, with
little besides pain with which to occupy myself these days, I have sought out a
purpose for myself. I have turned to a task that both Lady Patience and Scribe
Fedwren had long ago advocated. I began these pages as an effort to write down a
coherent history of the Six Duchies. But I found it difficult to keep my mind
long fixed on a single topic, and so I distract myself with lesser treatises, on
my theories of magic, on my observations of political structures, and my
reflections on other cultures. When the discomfort is at its worst and I cannot
sort my own thoughts well enough to write them down, I work on translations, or
attempt to make a legible recording of older documents. I busy my hands in the
hope of distracting my mind.
My writing serves me as Verity's mapmaking once served him. The detail of
the work and the concentration required is almost enough to make one forget both
the longings of the addiction, and the residual pains of having once indulged
it. One can become lost in such work, and forget oneself. Or one can go even
deeper, and find many recollections of that self. All too often, I find I have
wandered far from a history of the duchies into a history of FitzChivalry. Those
recollections leave me face-to-face with who I once was, and who I have become.
When one is deeply absorbed in such a recounting, it is surprising how much
detail one can recall. Not all the memories I summon up are painful. I have had
more than a just share of good friends, and found them more loyal than I had any
right to expect. I have known beauties and joys that tried my heart's strength
as surely as the tragedies and uglinesses have. Yet I possess, perhaps, a
greater share of dark memories than most men; few men have known death in a
dungeon, or can recall the inside of a coffin buried beneath the snow. The mind
shies away from the details of such things. It is one thing to recall that Regal
killed me. It is another to focus on the details of the days and nights endured
as he starved me and then had me beaten to death. When I do, there are moments
that still can turn my bowels to ice, even after all these years. I can recall
the eyes of the man and the sound of his fist breaking my nose. There still
exists for me a place I visit in my dreams, where I fight to remain standing,
trying not to let myself think of how I will make a final effort to kill Regal.
I recall the blow from him that split my swollen skin and left the scar down my
face that I still bear.
I have never forgiven myself the triumph I ceded to him when I took poison
and died.
But more painful than the events I can recall are those that are lost to me.
When Regal killed me, I died. I was never again commonly known as FitzChivalry,
I never renewed bonds to the Buckkeep folk who had known me since I was a child
of six. I never lived in Buckkeep Castle again, never more waited on the Lady
Patience, never sat on the hearthstones at Chade's feet again. Lost to me were
the rhythms of lives that had intertwined with mine. Friends died, others were
wed, babes were born, children came of age, and I saw none of it. Though I no
longer possess the body of a healthy young man, many still live who once called
me friend. Sometimes, still, I long to rest eyes on them, to touch hands, to lay
to peace the loneliness of years.
I cannot.
Those years are lost to me, and all the years of their lives to come. Lost,
too, is that period, no longer than a month, but seeming much longer, when I was
confined to dungeon and then coffin. My king had died in my arms, yet I did not
see him buried. Nor was I present at the council after my death when I was found
guilty of having used the Wit magic, and hence deserving of the death that had