***Spoilers for the Tawny Man Trilogy through chapter 9 of Fool’s Fate.***
Sailing is such fun… just ask Thick!
As our characters embark on their Out Island journey, Thick is having a rough go of it- to say the least. It’s not just the physical challenges (which are formidable) he faces at sea, but also his sheer terror of being taken from home and thrust into an utterly unfamiliar environment.
Not to use Thick as a prop, but filtering the sea travel through his experience gives us two opportunities.
First: we get to tap into Fitz’s paternal side.
As a parent, I can really connect with Fitz’s experience (of course in very different circumstances). There are times when we desperately want to keep our children safe at home, tucked in and comfortable, but we know we can’t always do that. We have to navigate the world with kids who are at times scared, unwilling, uncooperative, or sick. Now, none of that is to say that forcing Thick on this sea voyage is humane – and we can debate the necessity of his presence – but it does highlight a very human experience unfolding on the page.
And through it, we see this beautiful side of Fitz: caring, protective, steadfast. He knows what they are putting Thick through is wrong. He feels regret, and he does his best within the circumstances.
Not to keep playing the parent card, but the weariness of caretaking for a sick Thick is painfully relatable.
“I had been on board for two days. Already it seemed like six months.”
I’ll have to check my textbook, but I’m pretty sure this is Newton’s Law of Time for International Travel While Parenting.
(I hope I’m not being insensitive with my comparisons between Fitz’s guardianship of Thick and the experience of raising children. That’s not my intention. I think it’s fair and possible to draw parallels without demeaning Thick. One of my favorite thematic throughlines of Tawny Man is the many father-like roles Fitz is forced to navigate, and his relationship with Thick is a big part of that.)
Second: Thick’s struggle creates space for Fitz to deepen his connection with Nettle- and for us to learn more about her.
We see just how powerful her dream manipulation abilities are- and I was impressed! If we believe that a person’s nature influences how their magic manifests (would explain Chade’s garbage Skilling), then Nettle’s nurturing presence is on full display. Each moment of her comforting kitten-Thick is beautiful. And it’s not just me who’s enamored.
“‘You’re alive and safe, and I will not let any evil befall you. And you know that you can trust me. Because I love you.’ At her words, my throat closed up and choked me. I wondered how she knew them to say. All my life, without knowing it, I had wanted someone to say those words to me, and have them be true and believable.”
☝️ And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the entire crux of Fitz wrapped up in a single self-reflection.
More gold:
“She was my daughter, blood of my blood, and yet the wonder and amazement she made me feel at that moment made her a creation entirely apart from me.”
Ok, enough mushy-gushy. It was also this section where I started to get pretty worried about where the Nettle storyline is heading. (Yes, yes, I know – I am an idiot for not staying worried at all times.) As the Fitz-Nettle relationship blossoms in the dreamspace, I’m increasingly concerned we may never get a satisfying in-person interaction.
That fear only deepens when we get our first indirect contact between Fitz and Burrich. Fitz gives Nettle a cryptic message for Burrich, letting him know he lives. Burrich heads to Buckkeep for answers, which presumably he gets from Kettricken and/or the Fool, and then returns with his own message for Nettle to pass on:
“If I dream of the wolf again, my father says, I’m to tell him, You should have come home a long time ago.”
The surge of hope I felt at that line tells me I am being set up for a classic “RobinLucy yanking the football” moment.
Fitz has always assumed that revealing himself to Burrich and Molly would ruin their lives. That to those he cares about, he’s better off dead. So to hear of Burrich’s joy in learning Fitz still lives, and his invitation home, is monumental. I need this reunion too badly for it to lead anywhere good.
It’s been a minute since my soul was violently ripped out of my asshole by this series. So we know what that means…
Being at sea leaves lots of time for musing!
I know it was just my last post that I was enjoying lonelyboy Fitz. But tides change quickly, and suddenly I find myself yearning for the return of some love and connection for our boy (shocking, I know).
“…I felt lonely and incapable of discovering peace anywhere. My heart yearned out to old memories, to my simple romance with Molly and the effortless friendship I had once shared with the Fool. Nighteyes came often to my mind, for Web and his bird were very much in evidence and Civil’s cat trailed him everywhere on the ship. I had lost the passionate attachments I had formed in my youth, and lost too the heart to seek others.”
I’m really loving Nettle’s emerging characterization. Even from these brief dream encounters, Molly is so viscerally present in her.
Exhibit A:
“Give him to me, she said with a woman’s weariness at a man’s incompetence.”
Exhibit B:
Nettle: “Are you always this dramatic?” Fitz: “I suspect I am.” Nettle: “It must be exhausting to be around you. You’re the second most emotional man I know.”
I touched on Thick’s presence at the top, but another key aspect is seeing how the broader world reacts to him. There is so much there- heartbreaking, touching, sometimes humorous (not at Thick’s expense, but in the situations Fitz is thrown into). And often, those opposing emotions tangle together in the same scene.
For example, the moment Fitz tries to get Thick on to the next ship for the second leg of the journey. A struggle ensues – one instantly familiar to anyone who has parented a toddler – with Thick understandably resisting. Fitz can’t just manhandle him because of the Skill intensity that comes with physical contact. The Outislander sailors watching jeer. Fitz could mostly give a fuck about people’s reactions to Thick, but there is only so much attention a man can endure in the middle of a tense standoff.
“The blood rushed to my face at the taunting of the men that accompanied my boarding of the ship. Most of them spoke Six Duchies in a rudimentary way. That they used it now was deliberate, to be sure I understood their scorn. I could not pretend to ignore them, for I could not control the blood that reddened my face with shame.”
It’s yet another of the endless examples where Fitz has to eat shit rather than betray who and what he is.
And you know which Outislanders weren’t taunting Fitz? The ones who faced him swinging an axe on Antler Island.
Not to question Kettricken’s political maneuvering, but are we certain Dutiful’s arranged marriage to Elliania is such a great strategic advantage? Yes, the Six Duchies and Out Islands have a long, bloody history. But we keep hearing how the Out Islands are more a collection of independent clans than a unified realm. And from what we see of the Hetgurd’s reaction to the Narcheska’s challenge, I’m not too confident she holds much sway in the court of public opinion.
Even our old pal Peottre admits:
“I stand in the Hetgurd assembly with no warriors at my back. They tolerate me more for the sake of my sister’s husband, Arkon Bloodblade, than for any respect toward me. Our clan has fallen on very hard times in every way except the richness of our motherlands and the honor of our bloodlines.”
I know we already had a book called Fool’s Errand, but this mission feels increasingly futile.
I continue to love the way magic evolves in the series. Fitz is the perfect proxy for us- we start with him as a boy completely ignorant of magic, and as he grows, we get to learn with him. Each new teacher or revelation unfolds naturally, making the development of the magic system feel organic.
In this section we get several developments. Nettle’s dream-manipulation abilities (covered earlier) are the big one. But we also get Web uncovering new layers to the Wit, as yet unseen by Fitz:
“I think that for a Witted one, to learn to repel is as instinctive as knowing how to flee danger. I had never stopped to think that there might be another complementary force, one that calmed and beckoned.”
And last but not least, in a true moment of innovation, Fitz ends the Hetgurd assembly, when the conversation is spinning out of control, by Skill-projecting Dutiful’s need to relieve himself onto everyone present.
To quote William Golding, “The greatest ideas are the simplest.”
Chade Death Watch 2025
“The old man was too careless with his health. He would burn his life away while trying to spend it in our cause.”
Fool Arrival Watch 2025
After arranging for there to be no room on the ship for Lord Golden, Fitz naively thinks that’s one problem solved…
“And when we sailed tomorrow without him, well, he’d remain safely in Buckkeep whilst the rest of us went off to whatever discomfort and boredom the journey could offer us. No worse than that.”
Famous last words if I have ever heard them.
Listen, I would never have the arrogance to compare my writing to Queen Hobb’s- BUT I did feel a kindred-spirit moment when she used “Chade-ish” as an adjective for acting like an asshole:
“For one brief Chade-ish moment, I thought of demanding that first she help me with Thick’s dreaming.”
I almost forgot to mention the small moment where Web overhears one of Fitz’s Skilled thoughts to Dutiful. Fitz gives us the classic:
“I had not even realized that I had spoken aloud the thought I’d previously Skilled to Dutiful.”
I know you’re exhausted, but c’mon man! Chade is going to blow a gasket if he learns that Web has been eavesdropping on their private Skill convos this whole time.
Wow – I ALSO almost forgot* to mention the out-of-nowhere recovered memory. As Nettle is exerting her dream-Skillz, Fitz flashes to a moment (which I presume is) from before his mother abandoned him to the Farseers:
“But most jarring for me was that it evoked a memory I both did and did not recognize: another time and an older woman, prying something fascinating and shiny from my chubby-fisted grasp, while saying, ‘No, Keppet. Not for little boys.'”
Whoa. Sometimes I forget the mystery of Fitz’s mother and pre-age six life lies dormant in the story. I’m a strong woman, but I don’t know that I can handle the Skill being used to reunite Fitz with his birth mom.
Also, Keppet:
*Writing this post has taken me a little longer than normal, causing the details to be a smidge fuzzy.Stupid family obligations getting in the way of my completely pointless blogging endeavor.
Alrighty, friends. Looking forward to checking in with our frisky-friend the Narcheska. When do we think the Fool is going to pop by? I’m still holding out hope he just “coincidentally” bumps into them while out on a Paragon pleasure cruise in the Out Islands.
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