Fitz finally takes action, but even being dead can't release him from Farseer expectations
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| Cover illustration by John Howe |
Evil Prince Regal and his court believe that Fitz is dead: after being beaten and tortured, Fitz is found dead in his cell (well, only mostly dead, with his mind safely tucked away in his wolf-companion Nighteyes), pronounced posthumously guilty on all charges, and his life in the Six Duchies is effectively over.
Even Burrich, who helps reintegrate Fitz’s mind with his body, ends up believing him dead, for slightly contrived reasons involving a scuffle resulting in a dead body wearing Fitz’s clothes. At this point, Fitz has no one. He has nothing. It’s a rough ride, to be sure, but it’s freeing, and what it frees him up to do is move the plot forward. And first on his to-do list is to kill Prince Regal. And that’s so satisfying! He’s a trained assassin. He has a target. He has a motive for succeeding. And his target doesn’t even suspect he’s still alive. These are the plot components that make a book just sing.
Since Prince Regal has moved house Tradesford, Fitz must leave the coast and travel inland as well to find him. And in this way we get to see more of the Six Duchies than we had in the previous books. We also get to see Fitz finally deploy some of his skills that he learned as an assassin. For a time he travels with a wandering minstrel, a blind harper named Josh accompanied by two his daughter and his niece, Honey and Piper. The family travel from town to town, singing for their supper, and doing, on the whole, reasonably well for themselves. Fitz assumes a fake identity, which he carries off convincingly enough, and with his memory trained by Chade’s assassin-teaching, he learns their songs quickly. Before long, Honey is propositioning Fitz in the night, and Josh asks him to join them permanently. And it’s a good offer: Fitz is good at fighting off Forged people, who make the roads unsafe; he’ll learn a trade that he could be good at; and Honey is super, super into him. He could find a place with these people; he could make a new life for himself. But he’s still mooning over Molly, his beloved (not to mention spying on her through Skill dreams in a way that feels awfully stalkerish, given the intimate moments he observes); and he’s still on his quest to kill Regal, and after that he’s going to need to find Verity and SAVE THE SIX DUCHIES FROM DESTRUCTION. So he declines the offer and moves on.
During his journey to Tradesford, Fitz also encounters a community of other people with the Wit. It’s a brief sequence, but it’s a valuable deepening of this second type of magic system, which we haven’t learned much about beyond Fitz’s intuitive fumblings, and Burrich’s foreboding warnings. In this community, we see the other side of it: the cultural knowledge, the traditions, the understandings about how to bond with animals properly. Burrich was right, we learn, to try to prevent Fitz from bonding with those puppies as a child. Not because the bonding is wrong in itself, but because it is akin to marriage: children are too young for it. It is obscene and wrong to bond as a child, with a baby animal. Even now, adult Fitz is seen as awfully young to have bonded with Nighteyes. The Witted community offer Fitz a home, so he can learn their ways, to learn how to live well as a Witted, bonded man. But, as with Josh’s offer, he cannot accept. He must kill Regal, and then find Verity and SAVE THE SIX DUCHIES FROM DESTRUCTION. So he declines the offer and moves on.
So here, again, we return to the theme of missed opportunities, of chances at happiness that Fitz might have had, if only he weren’t stuck into this miserable network of responsibilities and obligations that come with being a royal bastard. They've been present throughout the whole series. In the first book, Assassin’s Apprentice, Fitz impressed the court scribe, who offered him an apprenticeship, to become a scribe himself. But Fitz could not take it, because he was pledged to Shrewd, and because the royal family would never let a bastard, a possible claimant to the throne, out of their control. In the second book, Royal Assassin, Fitz wanted nothing more than to marry Molly and settle down with her; but that was even more of a non-starter than apprenticing to a scribe. If there’s one thing that a royal family wants to control more than a bastard, it’s the bastard’s reproductive options. Now, finally, Fitz has escaped all those official constraints on his autonomy by being officially dead, but he still can’t get away from the Farseers. He’s vowed vengeance against Regal, and he’s vowed loyalty to Verity; and those vows constrain him internally as much as any formal orders from the royal family. It’s dreadfully bleak, but also thematically coherent – and because these internal constraints force Fitz into action, rather than compelling inaction, it makes for a much more interesting story.
Naturally, Fitz’s attempt to assassinate Regal goes horribly wrong. In an attempt to reach Verity through a telepathic Skill link, he betrays himself to Will, Regal’s chief magician, and suddenly all the protection of being thought dead is gone. Will lays an obvious trap, and for all that Fitz is more active than in the previous book, he’s not any smarter, so he doesn’t identify the obvious trap as an obvious trap. He gets away, but at this point, even if he were going to pursue any offers of a new life, it’s now no longer possible, because Regal and Will know he’s alive. They promptly make use of their resources, and alert the countryside to a dangerous criminal armed with unnatural Wit, and make it clear that they will never stop hunting Fitz. And, because Hobb can never let any of her characters catch a break for long, evading capture is made even more complicated, because in the kerfuffle, Verity lays a Skill-reinforced command on Fitz: Come to me.
So after a brief stretch in which Fitz’s actions reflected only his internalization of the Farseer network of obligations, he is once again tied up with externally enforced pressures. He must kill Regal, or else Regal will kill him; but he can’t focus on that, because the Skill-based summons is impossible to resist. So he must go to Verity, while Regal’s men dogs his heels.
The bit after Fitz leaves Regal behind and goes into the mountains, seeking Verity – harassed the whole time by Regal’s pursuit, naturally–is tremendous fun. Not for Fitz, to be sure, but for me to read about. It’s got something for everyone. My own favorite sequence is when Fitz is captured by a group of Regal’s men, and – again drawing on his training – he puts poison in all their food, and watches them die slow, agonizing deaths over the course of the next day. They realize what’s happening too late to kill him in retribution, but not too late to beg him for their lives. But Fitz is an assassin, not a doctor, and has no antidote to offer them. I don’t know why I love this sequence, but I do. Something about the triumph of Fitz's competence over Hobb's authorial malice, perhaps. For once Hobb’s ability to give everyone a bad time is directed elsewhere than at Fitz.
But perhaps your sentiments are softer. Do you like whump? In another sequence, Fitz gets shot by an arrow while fleeing Regal’s men. Weakened, dying, he collapses at the feet of a shadowy figure, who lifts him in his arms and bears him to safety – only to be revealed as the Fool. When each recognizes the other, it’s tender and intense. ‘Gods, what have they done to you,’ the Fool says, ‘to mark you so? What has become of me, that I did not know you, even though I carried you in my arms?’ Then he caresses Fitz’s scarred and broken nose, and says, ‘When I recall how beautiful you were,’ and drops a tear on his face. Which, ok, yes, rude, but also it’s great stuff, and really drives home how the Fool and Fitz are grown now, not children. Indeed, that’s one of the first things Fitz notices about the Fool: that his body and face are no longer a child’s. Now, at last, their intimate, sort-of-but-not-really-but-definitely-kind-of homoerotic energy has room to flourish.
But also – for all that the Fool is the only real friend Fitz has (besides Nighteyes) – it’s hard to miss that the Fool also sees Fitz as a cog in a machine. His perspective, in a way, is really not all that different from how the Farseers saw him. The Fool was born as the White Prophet, a vague status (at this point in the saga), originating in the Fool’s vague homeland, somewhere far away south. And as the White Prophet, he has always known Fitz as the Catalyst, whose role is to help forestall the myriad catastrophic futures that await the Six Duchies (and THE ENTIRE WORLD BEYOND). They might be friends – closer than friends – but the Fool’s impassioned speech about how his life had lost meaning when he learned of the death of Fitz, the Catalyst, has a distinct whiff of, ‘You died, and I was out of a job.’
There is so much more I could talk about. There's grumpy old Kettle, who knows a lot more about the Skill than you would expect; there's Molly's fantastic moment where she fends off Regal's men who have come to take her baby (begat by Fitz, and hence one of the Farseer line) by telling them that her bee hives are populated by Witted bees, who are murderous and deadly and angry and will sting them to death. I could discuss the slightly awkward but – I believe – well-meaning for 1998 attempt to highlight the Fool’s gender fluid nature, by introducing a character who insists that the Fool is a woman and uses ‘she’ pronouns for him. He’s very gracious about it – although I get the sense that that’s largely because he knows that it annoys Fitz and he’s a bit of a chaos goblin – but it still feels clunky. I could discuss the extremely uncomfortable sequence in which right at the end, Verity borrows Fitz’s body to make a baby with Kettricken, using the Skill to make Fitz appear like him, Verity (since Verity himself is not at this point up to the act). Whatever kind of consent is happening between Kettricken and Verity, it’s not happening between Kettricken and Fitz’s body – because Kettricken doesn’t know it’s Fitz’s body, and Fitz isn’t in his body during the event. It’s not great – but then Hobb doesn’t like making things easy for anyone, not even the readers.
But I don't have room for all that. There's just so much in this book, that's all so good, and rich, and engrossing. The revelation of who the Elderlings were, and what must be done to waken the dragons and save the Six Duchies, is beautiful and magical and achingly sad. Regal gets what’s coming to him, in a tiny little payoff of a very brief conversation from hundreds of pages earlier, which is satisfying as hell. And Fitz – well, he doesn’t get a happy ending. Molly is lost to him forever, because before he gets back she has moved on and settled down and found happiness for herself. But Fitz at least gets a kind of peace, released (for now) from the strictures of being a Farseer, and the obligations of being a Catalyst. Not forever. He’ll be back. But this portion of his story is done, and next month we will move on to The Liveship Traders. It is my absolute favourite of Hobb’s series, and I can’t wait to share it with you as spring unfolds.
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References:
Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Quest. [Harper Collins, 1998].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative, and on Bluesky at https://bsky.app/profile/ergative-abs.bsky.social
