"Robin Hobb - Assassin 1 - Assassin' s Apprentice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hobb Robin)

and Lady of Withywoods. I have been to Withywoods. Its name bears no
relationship to its appearance. It is a warm valley, centered on a gently
flowing river that carves a wide plain that nestles between gently rising and
rolling foothills. A place to grow grapes and grain and plump children. It is a
soft holding, far from the borders, far from the politics of court, far from
anything that had been Chivalry's life up to then. It was a pasturing out, a
gentle and genteel exile for a man who would have been King. A velvet smothering
for a warrior and a silencing of a rare and skilled diplomat.
And so I came to Buckkeep, sole child and bastard of a man I'd never know.
Prince Verity became King-in-Waiting and Prince Regal moved up a notch in the
line of succession. If all I had ever done was to be born and discovered, I
would have left a mark across all the land for all time. I grew up fatherless
and motherless in a court where all recognized me as a catalyst. And a catalyst
I became.



CHAPTER TWO
Newboy

HERE ARE MANY LEGENDS about Taker, the first Outislander to claim Buckkeep as
the First Duchy and the founder of the royal line. One is that the raiding
voyage he was on was his first and only foray out from whatever cold harsh
island bore him. It is said that upon seeing the timbered fortifications of
Buckkeep, he had announced, "If there's a fire and a meal there, I shan't be
leaving again." And there was, and he didn't.

But family rumor says that he was a poor sailor, made sick by the heaving
water and salt-fish rations that other Outislanders throve upon. That he and his
crew had been lost for days upon the water, and if he had not managed to seize
Buckkeep and make it his own, his own crew would have drowned him. Nevertheless,
the old tapestry in the Great Hall shows him as a well-thewed stalwart grinning
fiercely over the prow of his vessel as his oarsmen propel him toward an ancient


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Buckkeep of logs and poorly dressed stone.
Buckkeep had begun its existence as a defensible position on a navigable
river at the mouth of a bay with excellent anchorage. Some petty landchief,
whose name has been lost in the mists of history, saw the potential for
controlling trade on the river and built the first stronghold there. Ostensibly,
he had built it to defend both river and bay from the Outislander raiders who
came every summer to plunder up and down the river. What he had not figured on
were the raiders that infiltrated his fortifications by treachery. The towers
and walls became their toehold. They moved their occupations and domination up
the river, and rebuilding his timber fort into towers and walls of dressed
stone, finally made Buckkeep the heart of the First Duchy, and eventually the
capital of the kingdom of the Six Duchies.