Assassin's Apprentice

That evening in my room, I was horribly tired, but too enervated to sleep. The Fool had left food for Smithy, and I was teasing him with a large beef knuckle. He had set his teeth in my sleeve and was worrying it while I held the bone just out of his reach. It was the sort of game he loved, and he snarled with mock ferocity as he shook my arm. He was near as big as he would get, and I felt with pride the muscles in his thick little neck. With my free hand, I pinched his tail and he spun snarling to this new attack. From hand to hand I juggled his bone, and his eyes darted back and forth as he snapped after it. “No brain,” I teased him. “All you can think of is what you want. No brain, no brain.”

“Just like his owner.”

I startled, and in that second Smithy had his bone. He flopped down with it, giving the Fool no more than a perfunctory wag of his tail. I sat down, out of breath. “I never even heard the door open. Or shut.”

He ignored that and went straight to his topic. “Do you think Galen will allow you to succeed?”

I grinned smugly. “Do you think he can prevent it?”

The Fool sat down beside me with a sigh. “I know he can. So does he. What I cannot decide is if he is ruthless enough. But I suspect he is.”

“So let him try,” I said flippantly.

“I have no choice in that.” The Fool was adamantly serious. “What I had hoped to do was dissuade you from trying.”

“You’d ask me to give up? Now?” I was incredulous.

“I would.”

“Why?” I demanded.

“Because,” he began, and then stopped in frustration. “I don’t know. Too many things converge. Perhaps if I pluck one thread loose, the knot will not form.”

I was suddenly tired, and the earlier elation of my triumph collapsed before his dour warnings. My irritability won and I snapped, “If you cannot speak clearly, why do you speak at all?”

He was as silent as if I had struck him. “That’s another thing I don’t know,” he said at last. He rose to go.

“Fool,” I began.

“Yes. I am that,” he said, and left.

And so I persevered, growing stronger. I grew impatient with our slow pace of instruction. We went over the same practices each day, and gradually the others began to master what seemed so natural to me. How could they have been so closed off from the rest of the world? I wondered. How could it be so hard for them to open their minds to Galen’s Skill? My own task was not to open, but rather to keep closed to him what I did not wish to share. Often, as he gave me a perfunctory touch of the Skill, I sensed a tendril of seeking slinking into my mind. But I evaded it.

“You are ready,” he announced one chill day. It was afternoon, but the brightest stars were already showing in the blue darkness of the sky. I missed the clouds that had yesterday snowed upon us, but had at least kept this deeper cold at bay. I flexed my toes inside the leather shoes that Galen permitted us, trying to warm them to life again. “Before, I have touched you with the Skill, to accustom you to it. Now, today, we will attempt a full joining. You will each reach out to me as I reach out to you. But beware! Most of you have coped with resisting the distractions of the Skill touch. But the power of what you felt was the lightest brush. Today will be stronger. Resist it, but stay open to the Skill.”

And again he began his slow circuit among us. I waited, enervated but unafraid. I had looked forward to attempting this. I was ready.

Some clearly failed, and were rebuked for laziness or stupidity. August was praised. Serene was slapped for reaching forth too eagerly. And then he came to me.

I braced as if for a wrestling contest. I felt the brush of his mind against mine, and offered him a cautious reaching of thought. Like this?

Yes, bastard. Like this.

And for a moment we were in balance, hovering like children on a seesaw. I felt him steady our contact. Then, abruptly, he slammed into me. It felt exactly as if the air had been knocked out of me, but in a mental rather than physical way. Instead of being unable to get my breath, I was unable to master my thoughts. He rifled through my mind, ransacking my privacy, and I was powerless before him. He had won and he knew it. But in that moment of his careless triumph I found an opening. I grasped at him, trying to seize his mind as he had mine. I gripped him and held him, and knew for a dizzying instant that I was stronger than he, that I could force into his mind any thought I chose to put there. “No!” he shrieked, and dimly I knew that at some former time, he had struggled like this with someone he had despised. Someone else who had also won as I intended to. “Yes!” I insisted. “Die!” he commanded me, but I knew I would not. I knew I would win, and I focused my will and bore down on my grip.