Everything Everywhere All at Once
***Spoilers for the Tawny Man Trilogy through chapter 29 of Fool’s Fate.***
I fear it’s not the most compelling analysis for me to come to the keyboard each week just to say that was the most incredible thing I’ve ever read. But what the fuck else am I supposed to say? The way this story continues to weave and build is truly unreal.
These chapters had me… affected. In every way possible. From an emotional parting and death that somehow gets relegated to a footnote, because everything else that happens overshadows it, to what I would argue is the most erotic scene I have ever read.
It feels like we’ve reached the crescendo of Fool’s Fate, so I’m curious what’s left for us in the remaining eight chapters or so. The way this volume culminates so many storylines begun all the way back in Farseer also makes me wonder what’s in store for the Fitz and the Fool trilogy. I know we still have some story left to tell, so I’ll save my reflection for the end. But are we going to get Molly before we close out Tawny Man? Or is Robin going to dangle her on the other side of an entire quartet? (I’m assuming Rain Wild Chronicles, like Liveship Traders, will be a separate storyline from the Fitz trilogies, with a little world-building overlap.)
Ok, enough filibustering. I need to get into what actually happened so I can get back to reading posthaste! It’s going to be hard for me to not just copy in 50% of Robin’s words, insert bow-down GIFs, and hit publish. The writing is that incredible. But I shall do my best to share actual thoughts.
Good news: The Pale Woman did not cut off the Fool’s head.
Bad news: She did mercilessly torture him and deliver him to an undignified death.
Great news: Fitz, with the wisdom of Yoda, realizes that death is life, and, possessing the magic of life, he can work with this.
Let’s back up a bit. After the defeat of Dragon Rawbread and the great unforging, spirits are running high on the glacier, made even higher thanks to Thick’s ability to Skill-heal the injured- excluding Skill-sealed Burrich, damn it! (More on Burrich later). It’s a striking contrast between the jubilant majority and devastated Fitz and Swift.
When the gang returns to the beach and the rescue ships arrive ahead of schedule, it makes for a dramatic moment when Fitz announces his intention to stay behind. Like Westley dashing into the fire swamp with Buttercup, so Fitz will return to the hellhole ice palace to retrieve his Beloved. (I’m not saying he’d like to build a summer home there, but the ice is actually quite lovely).
(I am going to give Thick and the Black Man of Aslevjal the Burrich treatment and come back to them later. For now, I want to focus on the divinity that is Fitz and the Fool.)
Fitz makes his way back into the eerily deserted ice palace, wanders through, and, crucially, finds the broken shard of the rooster crown before locating the Fool’s body, sadistically left to die in a refuse chamber. The love and grief pouring off Fitz is palpable.
He tries, in vain, to rouse the coterie to Skill-heal the Fool, but they must tell him there’s no one left to reach. And thus begins one of the saddest stretches in the series (and we survived a whole book of Nighteyes slowly dying). Fitz cradles the Fool’s frozen corpse in his arms and carries him through the palace, refusing to set him down. He’s determined to find a fitting place to burn his Beloved’s body. Along the way, he encounters the stripped-of-her-powers Pale Woman, fully diminished, her hands taken into the Skill-dragon. She goads Fitz to kill her, but powerfully, he declines:
“I asked myself why I did not kill her. The answer seemed too simple to be true. I did not want to put his body down on her floor while I did it. Even more, I did not want to do anything that she expected me to do.”
I loved this choice. Fitz basically tells her he’s the Catalyst now; her timeline is over, and he won’t give her a thing she desires. At this point, killing her would be merciful, but with his tortured Beloved in his arms, he’s not inclined to choose mercy.
“I am the Catalyst. I change things. Besides. The time we are in now is the time the Fool chose. It is his future I live in. In his vision of the future, I walk away from you. You die slowly. Alone.”
She makes a final, desperate plea- an empty offering to make all of his dreams come true:
“My dream was dead in my arms. I continued to walk.”
Onward he trudges. The devotion and reverence is heartbreaking. He occasionally stops to rest but remains singularly focused on his goal:
“Then I rose and took him up and walked on, completely disoriented in the unchanging pale light. I was, perhaps, a trifle mad.”
It wasn’t until this trip through the ice palace that the similarities to the buried Elderling city in the Rain Wilds clicked for me. (Elderlings are mentioned explicitly many times, so it’s not the most astute connection, but still). I was delighted by the discovery of the map room, complete with runes matching the various Skill-pillar symbols previously found. It was like the moment in Zelda where you have the map and finally acquire the compass- suddenly everything comes clearly into view.
Fitz has been wandering in a fog of grief, and with this discovery, he finally knows where to take the Fool:
“I walked a slow circuit around them until I came to the one that I had known would be there. I nodded to myself. I held him close to me and said softly into his blood-matted hair, ‘Let’s go back, then.’”
He takes the Fool through the pillar, back to the market plaza visited way back in Assassin’s Quest. At peace with this final resting spot, he’s preparing the Fool’s funeral pyre when – ding, ding, ding – it’s finally rooster crown time.
There is simply no way for me to do justice to the incredible sequence that follows. I’ve been noting all along the growing angst between Fitz and the Fool, as well as predicting the rooster crown’s involvement in the Fool’s survival, and now, we have reached the climax:
“‘Oh, Beloved,’ I said. I bent and kissed his brow in farewell. And then, grasping the rightness of that foreign tradition, I named him as myself. For when I burned him, I knew I would be ending myself, as well. The man I had been would not survive this loss. ‘Good-bye, FitzChivalry Farseer.'”
He’s prepared to crown the Fool, burn his body, and move forward.
“He was dead. Nothing could change that.
But I was the Changer.”
And with that, he takes the crown and slams it onto his own head in a desperate attempt to channel whatever power lies within to bring back the Fool.
Now, did I find it funny that the rooster crown ended up being filled with the souls of some rude entertainers? Of course. Fitz is in the most vulnerable state of his life and gets hit with:
“I’ll wager he never turned a handspring in his life.”
I’m sure you’re bored as fuck in the crown, but take it easy.
Speaking of take it easy… Fitz learns how the minstrels managed to fuse their souls into the feathers and live on through the crown- a great honor from the dragons themselves. When he discovers the Fool’s cowering presence (due to his using his blood to repair the broken crown), the minstrels are furious, treating him as an intruder. Fitz tries to play the “well actually, he just saved the last living dragons and their species as a whole, so maybe they wouldn’t object to his presence” card, but the minstrels won’t budge and get to work expelling the Fool from their midst.
Fitz then has this incredible recollection of his own death and resurrection, realizing it was the Wit that allowed Burrich to prepare his quite-dead body to reabsorb his soul.
(Side note: how fucking incredible to have a question – possibly even a plot hole to some – answered this many books later. I’m sure plenty of readers wondered, at the end of Royal Assassin, how he was able to return to a body that surely would have begun decomposing. Well, now we know!)
So here it is, friends:
“The Wit is the awareness of life all around us. It is a web, a net that connects us to every living creature. Some were vital and complex, large healthy beasts that demanded my recognition. Trees and plants were subtler, but even more essential to the continuation of life than creatures that moved. They were the warp the world is woven upon, and without them we would all snarl and fall. Even so, I had successfully ignored them for most of my life, other than a passing interest in the green shadow life of the oldest trees. But beyond and beneath it all, there flowed an even more nebulous life.
It was death.
Death, the knots in the net that connected us all, was not death at all. In that twisting and tightening noose, life was re-formed, not destroyed. The Fool’s body rioted with life. It was a simmering cauldron of life, bubbling its way to rebirth. Every element that had united to make his body a living creature was still there. The question was, could I persuade it to assume its old alignment rather than the simpler forms it was now reducing itself to?”
I’ve been noting the interplay of Fitz’s magics as a key theme throughout the series, and this just knocked my socks off. AND WE HAVEN’T EVEN GOTTEN TO MY FAVORITE PART.
Fitz dives into the Fool’s body – “I gathered my courage, knowing well that I was going into death itself. But go I would.” – and begins the painstaking process of regenerating him.
Once he awakens life in the Fool’s body, he opens his eyes to find the Fool’s consciousness in his own. What follows might be the most erotic sequence I’ve ever read:
“I found my wrist with his hand. The fingertips knew where to fall. For a moment, our gazes held as we mingled in unity. One person. We had always been one person. Nighteyes had voiced it long ago. It was good to be whole again. I used our strength to pull myself up, to press his brow to mine. I did not close his eyes. Our gazes locked. I felt my frightened breath against his mouth. ‘Take your body back from me,’ I bade him quietly. And so we passed, one into the other, but for a space we had been one. The boundaries between us had melted in the mingling.”
From there we get tenderness – healing, catching up, and this wrenching parallel between the Fool’s post-torture struggle and Fitz’s own past experience.
Apologies for the quote-heavy post, but the text is so SO rich. I have to honor what Robin Hobb accomplished in this sequence. So I’ll leave this section where she leaves us:
“All that night, I cradled him in my arms, as closely as if he were my child or my lover. As closely as if he were my self, wounded and alone. I held him while he wept, and I held him after his weeping was done. I let him take whatever comfort he could in the warmth and strength of my body. I have never felt less of a man that I did so.”
These deep emotional moments are so earned; what could better encapsulate the journey we’ve been on with these two?
Ok, I think I have (more than sufficiently) covered the Fool’s fate, but a few quick musings:
Burrich’s death may not have made my opening remarks, but it’s certainly worthy of top musing.
Losing Burrich so soon after his return is painful, but I found his conclusion satisfying. He’s integral to all of the events that transpire – saving the dragons, resurrecting the Fool – and his influence on Fitz has never felt stronger than in these last few chapters.
They share a final exchange during Burrich’s waning lucidness, where he asks Fitz to take care of Molly and his sons, and, in a perfect Burrich moment, gives final breeding instructions for his horses. Oh, Burrich.
His final words to Fitz capture the complexity of where life has taken them:
“I was the better man for her.” A breath. In a whisper, “She still would have chosen you. If you’d come back.”
When the party leaves on the boats, Fitz entrusts Swift to oversee Burrich and then receives confirmation via Skill that Burrich indeed passed during the voyage.
I always envisioned Fitz reuniting with Molly while she was still married to Burrich. But he was never going to become any sort of presence that could come between them. This sequence of events makes much more sense to create space for… something. (I’m not saying they are going to instantly fall back together, of course, but now the possibility of a relationship developing feels in play). It’s like this Robin lady knows what she’s doing.
Could the “Black Man of Aslevjal” have been named in a way that makes referring to him less awkward? I suppose not, but I call these “Musings,” so muse I must.
Favorite Moment of Levity
The rooster crown minstrels were collectively a mess (see handspring Fitz roast above). But I died at this exchange:
“’What are you?’ I demanded.
‘We are sweet preserves of song, stored away so that in the winter of our deaths you can taste again the tang of our summers.’ It was the young man, so conscious of his imagery that he ruined it for me.
‘Someone else!’ I begged when the young man fell silent.”
Fitz is really out here swiping right on the trapped souls in the rooster crown. Be serious, please.
There’s an interesting moment in the Fool regeneration scene, as Fitz becomes acquainted with the Fool’s physical form. He notes:
“He was human only in the same way that I was a wolf.”
Fascinating.
I’ve previously commented on Fitz’s increasing loneliness and isolation as Tawny Man progressed. I found it masterful how Hobb led him to this point- feeling completely alone and thus willing to sacrifice himself for the Fool. We also get a number of allusions to Fitz contemplating taking his own life. It all feels necessary to feel the full impact of the moment where he is ready to sacrifice himself, full stop.
It’s just storytelling at its absolute finest.
Chade has now outlived all of Fitz’s other father figures.
Ok, I didn’t even get into Thick – surprise! – staying back, or the Black Man of Aslevjal as previously promised. Honestly, I’m tired, so here’s what I’ve got: I enjoyed them both and found what we learned from the Black Man interesting.
(If you’re ever sharing my work with someone, please don’t start here.)
Ok, this was a lot, even for me. The end is near- stick with me, folks!
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