Assassin's Apprentice Review

Assassin's Appretice is the first book of the Farseer Trilogy by American author Robin Hobb.

Fitz was a bastard of a Crown Prince. He had never seen his father who abdicated and then was murdered. He was brought up by his father's stablemaster in his grandfather's court.

While the boy was growing up to be a stable boy with a mixture of loneliness and happiness, the king, his grandfather, noticed his existence and decided that he should be a weapon to the king and secretly entrusted him to king's advisor and assassin Chade as his apprentice. Chade turned out to be a bastard as well and the half-brother of the king.

His step mother jumped out abruptly and transfered her love to his late father into him. She squabbled with the king to insist that he should receive the Skill training. The Skill was a kind of telepathy magic in the book which was an innate trait in the royal blood. Unfortunately, the skillmaster was a foe to his father. His teacher tried to kill him during the training. Of course, the boy survived.

Fitz had his own gift, the Wit, which could help him to communicate with animals in their minds. But his foster, the stablemaster, abhorred it the most. He told the boy that the Wit would change a human's mind and made him insane.

In the mean time, the kingdom was assaulted by a group of magic pirates named Red-Raider. They did not only loot, but also turned the common people into some savage monters.

The king had no clue to deal with these unnatural enemies but to think a marriage with a mountain kingdom for his second son, then king-in-waiting, would solve the problem.

Now the boy was assigned an assassination to kill the crown prince to the mountain kingdom. But his youngest uncle, the ambassador to the wedding, the third son to the king, leaked his mission to the bride for his evil purpose. And the bride was the younger sister to the target.

How could Fitz survive when he was facing the attacks from outside and inside simultaneously?

I think the Red-Raider is a metaphor for the Viking and the Wit for the Druidism.

This is an interesting book but some plots are unreasonable and illogical.