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

Wordlessly he flung it, with great force and fury, and I cowered where I stood.
I do not recall a cry, nor the sound of struck flesh. What I do remember is how
the doors swung outward, so that the old man had to step hastily back, dragging
me with him.
And there is this. The man who opened the door was no house servant, as I
might imagine if I had only heard this story. No, memory shows me a man-at-arms,
a warrior, gone a bit to gray and with a belly more of hard suet than muscle,
but not some mannered house servant. He looked both the old man and me up and
down with a soldier's practiced suspicion, and then stood there silently,
waiting for us to state our business.
I think it rattled the old man a bit, and stimulated him, not to fear, but to
anger. For he suddenly dropped my hand and instead gripped me by the back of my
coat and swung me forward, like a whelp offered to a prospective new owner.
"I've brought the boy to you," he said in a rusty voice.
And when the house guard continued to stare at him, without judgment or even
curiosity, he elaborated. "I've fed him at my table for six years, and never a
word from his father, never a coin, never a visit, though my daughter gives me
to understand he knows he fathered a bastard on her. I'll not feed him any
longer, nor break my back at a plow to keep clothes on his back. Let him be fed
by him what got him. I've enough to tend to of my own, what with my woman
getting on in years, and this one's mother to keep and feed. For not a man


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will-have her now, not a man, not with this pup running at her heels. So you
take him, and give him to his father." And he let go of me so suddenly that I
sprawled to the stone doorstep at the guard's feet. I scrabbled to a sitting
position, not much hurt that I recall, and looked up to see what would happen
next between the two men.
The guard looked down at me, lips pursed slightly, not in judgment but merely
considering how to classify me. "Whose get?" he asked, and his tone was not one
of curiosity, but only that of a man who asks for more specific information on a
situation, in order to report well to a superior.
"Chivalry's," the old man said, and he was already turning his back on me,
taking his measured steps down the graveled pathway. "Prince Chivalry," he said,
not turning back as he added the qualifier. "Him what's King-in-Waiting. That's
who got him. So let him do for him, and be glad he managed to father one child,
somewhere."
For a moment the guard watched the old man walking away. Then he wordlessly
stooped to seize me by the collar and drag me out of the way so he could close
the door. He let go of me for the brief time it took him to secure the door.
That done, he stood looking down on me. No real surprise, only a soldier's stoic
acceptance of the odder bits of his duty. "Up, boy, and walk," he said.
So I followed him, down a dim corridor, past rooms spartanly furnished, with
windows still shuttered against winter's chill, and finally to another set of
closed doors, these of rich, mellow wood embellished with carvings. There he
paused and straightened his own garments briefly. I remember quite clearly how
he went down on one knee to tug my shirt straight and smooth my hair with a