No. I am your father.
***Spoilers for the Tawny Man Trilogy through chapter 13 of Fool’s Fate.***
It’s time to slay some dragons. For Fitz, both the literal and metaphorical varieties. We have arrived on Aslevjal, and our quest has begun in earnest. At the same time, the day of reckoning for Fitz’s past seems to be upon us.
Let’s begin with Nettle, shall we? All my dreams are coming true. After Skilling into a Nettle-Fitz dream interaction uninvited, Dutiful has had enough of the secrecy and demands answers. When he learns of his secret cousin (sister? 😬), he is pissed! I loved the dressing down he gives Fitz and Chade (more so the Chade part, but still). He’s wondering why he’s been left in the dark about an alternate Farseer heir, left to shoulder the entire responsibility of the line on his own. And when Fitz, in his classic myopia, tries to brush it off with a “yeah, I didn’t think it would really affect you,” Dutiful clocks him perfectly:
“You go around making these monumental decisions about what other people should know or not know about their own lives. But you don’t really have any more idea how it will turn out than I do!”
Such a great scene. I see the argument on both sides (both being Dutiful and Fitz, and very much excluding groveling, self-serving Chade), and they do too. Fitz wants to protect Nettle from being sucked into the Farseer machine the way he was. But witnessing Dutiful’s reaction shows how protecting one child has, in a way, cost the other. (Do we consider Dutiful Fitz’s child? Eh, tomato, tomahto.) So while Dutiful’s point about Fitz not knowing outcomes is true, it cuts both ways. Sure, Fitz shouldn’t shoulder these decisions alone, but what else can you expect from an abandoned boy who has never been able to truly trust anyone?
This leads to Dutiful demanding that Nettle be informed of her parentage and brought to Buckkeep for safekeeping from Tintaglia. Sadly, we are denied a scene where Fitz gets to tell her himself (“Surprise! Shadow wolf is your dad” would’ve been wild), because Nettle is mad at Fitz and shutting him out of her dreams. Still, we do get confirmation that she’s in Buckkeep and is aware of the truth. And Fitz’s response to this knowledge is just so endearing:
“There are moments that leave a man’s heart pumping so strong and free that no chill can touch him. I felt alive and completed, vindicated in all I had done.”
And then:
“My thoughts were elsewhere. Would Kettricken have put her in my old room? Did my daughter now wear the jewels and garb of a princess? I poured what was left of the tea into my cup and dumped out the dregs from the pot. But when I went to sweeten my brew, I could not find the pot of honey in the dark. So I drank it as it was, thick and bitter and delicious with the change that had visited my life that night.”
He is giddy just knowing his daughter finally knows he exists. This truth he has feared, protected, and painfully denied himself for so long is suddenly real, and he’s overwhelmed by just the possibility of an honest relationship with her. It’s beautiful.
Tintaglia… don’t fuck this up for us.
MUSINGS!
I don’t really care for the matriarchal, sexually liberated Out Island society…. PSYCH!
Actually, I fucking love it! (Almost as much as Dutiful’s guards probably do.) Yasss queens- find a man, have your fun, and kick him to the curb. They might be onto something.
Truthfully, I could have maybe done with a smidge less focus on the Narcheska’s perky breasts, but hey- this is a story told through a man’s POV, and Hobb’s characters are nothing if not authentic. Still: bad, Fitz!!
Fitz isn’t the only one getting sent to horny jail. Dutiful, who spent the entire last book not vibing with Elliania, is equally titmatized™. And you know what that means- my favorite: young love!! All it took was Dutiful catching sight of breasts and Elliania being challenged by her cousin over him- and boom! The kittens are smitten, and romance abounds.
Now that I’m officially charmed by them, what’s their future? I think we can pretty safely remove “Dutiful returns to Elliania’s mothershouse and plops Icefyre’s head on the hearth” as a likely ending. I’m also pretty certain the motivations for the betrothal on the Narcheska’s side are murky at best. (Lots of Pale Woman breadcrumbs in this section, more on that in a sec.) So while I’d love to imagine these two happily married and popping out the next generation of Farseers, the road ahead looks rocky, if not already doomed.
Staying with Dutiful and Elliania: I’ve been on the “does this arranged marriage even make sense?” beat for awhile now, and it seems Fitz is catching on. After her cousin reminds us that Elliania would forfeit her Narcheska title by leaving her homeland, Fitz asks Chade via Skill:
“Then why would she agree to this? Why would Peottre allow it? And if she is not the Narcheska when she comes to Buckkeep and remains there, do we gain any advantage by this wedding? Chade, this does not make sense to me.”
Chade’s answer?
“There is still too much that is not clear here, Fitz. I sense an unseen current in all this. Stay alert.”
At the mention of an unseen current, my mind went straight to the Pale Woman. Clearly there are mysterious forces at play on Team Narwhal’s side. But I am once again asking why is Team Farseer even engaging with this nonsense? Let alone risking their one and only prince on such an asinine challenge? Kettricken – girl, I love you – but I am not sure about the foreign diplomacy lessons you picked up in the Mountain Kingdom.
What a moment. As the gang approaches the isolated, mystical Aslevjal, a figure emerges from a colorful tent on a bluff.
Savvy readers like moi knew instantly who it was. I did not need to see a lock of golden hair or a glimpse of tawny skin. There’s only one character who would make such a dramatic return: the Fool is back!
We don’t know much yet. Their interactions are mostly limited to some rooster crown/honey pot flirting (no, those aren’t euphemisms). But I am on tenterhooks for the real confrontation awaiting us.
Thick’s struggle continues. And it continues to be both heartbreaking and laced with levity. There is some amusement in him venting his frustrations by Skill-jabbing Fitz so he frequently stumbles and bumps into things. But underneath, it’s bittersweet. To me, it shows how safe Thick feels with Fitz: he can lash out, cruelly or unfairly, because he doesn’t fear him. The flip side is it’s painful for Fitz to be the target, not so much because of his own discomfort (though sometimes literally that too) but because he doesn’t want to cause Thick pain in the first place, especially after how far they’ve come.
“I hated that things had become uncomfortable between us when I had worked so hard to gain his trust. When I said as much to Chade during one of our brief meetings, he dismissed it as necessary. ‘It would be far worse if he blamed it on Dutiful, you see. In this, you will have to be the whipping boy, Fitz.'”
(Oh look, it’s Chade being Chade-ish!)
I don’t have a ton to say here, but it feels remiss not to at least mention the fairly major revelations about the Pale Woman, the stone dragons, and forging back in the Farseer days.
I’m still not entirely sure how all the pieces fit, but the gist seems to be this: the Pale Woman was siphoning humanity from forged folk and attempting to infuse it into her own stone dragons.
“Had they thought they could create a dragon from the memories they had stolen from the Six Duchies folk?”
…
“They could steal the memories of Six Duchies folk and imprison them in stone forever. But they could not Forge from those memories the singleness of purpose that was required to breathe life into a dragon.”
Which leads to this fascinating little musing from Fitz:
“Yet I had never considered that at some time Dutiful, Thick, Chade, and I might wish to make a dragon of ourselves.”
I would love to see this hot mess of a coterie try to collaborate on creating a dragon.
Now that we are officially on the island, I am excited to see how the quest unfolds. We’ve already slimmed down the crew thanks to the Hetgurd’s rules, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some upcoming event/conflict trims the roster even more. (I mean, the Out Island chaperones are literally being referred to by their animal sigils- I think we can spare the Bear and the Owl.)
So let’s take stock: we’ve got a mythical frozen dragon; an angry single-parent dragon who wants to take a break and maybe a pilates class every once and a while; two horny teenagers; a spooky, looming “Black Man of Aslevjal”; a cracked-out Chade with casks of explosive materials; paternity drama playing out in the dreamscape; quarries of Skill stones; one Fool; zero Starlings; and a miserable, lonely Fitz ready to hop into hero mode with his trusty battle axe.
LFG!
wizardwordship 