The Farseer: Assassin's Apprentice recap

A six-year-old boy is delivered to the Six Duchies court as the bastard of Prince Chivalry, whose career the scandal ends. Raised in the stables at Buckkeep by the stableman Burrich, the boy takes a private bargain from King Shrewd: he will be the king's man, and in return he will be fed, housed and taught. The teaching turns out to include poisons. The old assassin Chade trains him in the crown's quiet work while Burrich beats at his forbidden beast-magic and the Skillmaster Galen, who hates Chivalry's bastard, ruins his chance at the royal Skill. Outislander Red Ships begin raiding the coast and returning hostages hollowed of feeling. Sent to the Mountain Kingdom for Prince Verity's proxy wedding to Kettricken, Fitz is ordered to kill her brother Rurisk and refuses. Regal's plot kills Rurisk anyway and very nearly kills Fitz. He survives poisoned and permanently damaged, the wedding stands, Galen is destroyed, and Regal walks away untouched.

A six-year-old boy is brought to the town of Moonseye by his mother's father and handed over to Prince Verity as the bastard son of Verity's elder brother Chivalry, the King-in-Waiting of the Six Duchies. Chivalry's stableman Burrich is made responsible for him. The scandal costs Chivalry the throne: he renounces the succession and retires to the inland estate of Withywoods without ever meeting his son, leaving Verity as heir. Burrich takes the boy to the coastal fortress of Buckkeep, where he grows up in the stables with no name and no acknowledged place, half servant and half embarrassment. In Buckkeep Town he falls in with the chandler's daughter Molly and a few other children. Then old King Shrewd sends for him privately and makes a bargain: the crown will feed, house and school him, and in exchange he will belong to the king before he belongs to anyone else. Shrewd gives him a pin as the token of it, and the boy accepts without understanding what he has agreed to.

Fitz grows up between the stables and the keep, learning horses and hounds from Burrich and lessons from the keep's teachers. Burrich discovers that the boy can reach the minds of animals, the old magic called the Wit, and sets himself to stamping it out, taking away the dog Fitz has bonded with and forbidding him ever to do it again. Fitz obeys unwillingly and in secret does not. He also draws the attention of King Shrewd's pale jester, the Fool, who says unsettling things to him and explains none of them. King Shrewd's youngest son Regal makes no secret of despising him. Word comes from Withywoods that Chivalry has died after a fall from a horse, and Fitz grieves a father he never spoke to. Verity, now King-in-Waiting, takes up the burden of a coast that has begun to suffer raids by Outislander ships with red-painted hulls.

A gaunt, pockmarked old man named Chade begins waking Fitz at night and leading him up a hidden stair. Chade is the king's private assassin, and Shrewd's half of the bargain includes training a successor: herbs, poisons, forgery, locks, and the habit of watching everything. Fitz learns what the crown does not put its name to and takes his first assignments. Travelling with Verity to Neatbay, where a coastal duke has left a watchtower unmanned and his shore open to raiders, Fitz uses his forbidden animal sense on a noblewoman's lapdog to nudge her towards persuading her husband; the tower is manned again. Chade shadows the journey disguised as a sour old woman called Lady Thyme. Fitz begins to understand exactly what he has agreed to be, and how little say he has in it.

The Red Ship raiders take the village of Forge and do something new: they hold the villagers hostage, take payment, and return them alive but hollowed out, stripped of all feeling for their own families. The Forged ones cannot be healed and cannot be lived with, and the Six Duchies have no answer to it. Verity spends himself using the Skill to watch the coast and turn the raiders aside. Into this comes Lady Patience, Chivalry's widow, who has come to Buckkeep and finally sends for the boy whose existence cost her husband a crown. The interview goes badly. She then abruptly decides to take charge of his education, gives him a place of his own above the stables and a scattering of impractical lessons, and presents him with a puppy, Smithy, whom Fitz quietly bonds with in defiance of everything Burrich has taught him.

Verity persuades King Shrewd to let the Skillmaster Galen train a new coterie of Skill users to support the crown against the raiders, and Fitz insists on being tested with the rest. Galen hates Chivalry's bastard and sets out to break him with starvation, humiliation and beatings. When Fitz begins to make progress anyway, Galen attacks him at the Witness Stones and leaves him for dead; he is found and nursed back over weeks, and returns to the training against advice. At the coterie's final trial he cannot reach anyone through the Skill and is judged to have no talent at all, while Galen's chosen students are made the king's coterie. Fitz accepts the verdict as his own failure. Chade and Burrich are less convinced, and Fitz goes back to the work Chade trained him for.

Fitz carries out the killings the crown requires of him, and learns how little of himself he gets to keep. Regal negotiates a marriage that will secure the Six Duchies' inland border: Kettricken, daughter of the ruler of the Mountain Kingdom, is to be wed to Verity by proxy at Jhaampe, with Regal standing in for his brother. Fitz rides with the wedding party carrying secret orders from Chade, and finds Jhaampe stranger and plainer than Buckkeep, its rulers holding themselves as the Sacrifice, spent for the good of their people. He meets Kettricken, who takes the marriage and the duty entirely seriously, and her brother Prince Rurisk, whom Fitz has been sent to kill as an obstacle to the alliance. Rurisk turns out to be no obstacle at all, and to have been misrepresented to Buckkeep on purpose.

Fitz refuses the order and warns Rurisk instead, but Regal's plan does not depend on him. Rurisk dies, and Fitz is poisoned and left barely alive. Kettricken is wed to Verity by proxy with Regal standing in his place, and the alliance holds. During the crisis Verity reaches through the Skill and Galen, striking at his king on Regal's behalf, is destroyed. Regal returns to Buckkeep untouched: Verity, Chade and Burrich know what he did, and none of it can be proved to King Shrewd. Nursed by Burrich and the Fool, Fitz survives with his health permanently broken, subject to shaking fits from the poison. He goes home to a coast still being raided, a King-in-Waiting burning himself out with the Skill, a king who is beginning to fail, and a boyhood covenant he cannot get out of. Molly is still waiting in Buckkeep Town, and knows nothing of what he actually is.

Fitz refuses to poison Rurisk and warns him instead, but Regal's plot runs on without him: Rurisk dies, and Fitz is poisoned nearly to death by those carrying out Regal's orders. Kettricken is wed to Verity by proxy, with Regal standing in his brother's place, and then leaves the Mountains for Buckkeep as queen-in-waiting. Verity reaches through the Skill during the crisis and Galen, striking at his king in Regal's service, is destroyed. Regal's treachery is understood by Verity, Chade and Burrich, but nothing can be proved to King Shrewd, and Regal returns to court unpunished and more dangerous than before. Fitz survives, nursed by Burrich and the Fool, but the poison leaves him with a wrecked constitution and shaking fits that come without warning. He has learned what he is worth to the men who own him: a tool that may be spent. He goes home to a Buckkeep where the Red Ship raids are worsening, where Verity is burning himself out with the Skill, and where Fitz is bound by a boyhood covenant to a king who is beginning to fail. Molly is still in Buckkeep Town, and Fitz has told her nothing about what he actually does.