Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool, book 3: Assassin's Fate

Why couldn’t the dragons just fly the ring to Clerres?

Cover illustration by Alejandro Colucci

OK, I’m going to confess something. I’ve been calling this whole project a “reread,” but in fact, I’ve never actually read this last trilogy. So I didn’t know what was coming when I wrote the last two posts, and I feel VERY SILLY now that I’ve gotten to the end about my ignorant comments blithely asserting that Hobb was mellowing in her cruelty, softening her blows, pulling her punches.

She wasn’t. She was just taking a deep breath before this last book. Be aware: I'm going to abuse italics. I'm very worked up about this.

And although I’ve seen the kinds of blows she can land, still—this book seems the worst, because it was all unnecessary. In the Farseer trilogy, Fitz getting tortured to death in Regal’s dungeons was part of the path to extract himself from his identity as a Farseer bastard, freeing him up to do things like find Verity and help him build his Skill-dragon to defend the Six Duchies from the Red Ship raiders. In the Liveship trilogy, Vivacia had to become a slaver so that she’d get taken by Kennit, which would send her (and Paragon) on the path to recovering their draconic roots, thereby enabling them to guide the serpents to their spawning grounds and start a new nest of dragons. In Tawny Man, the Fool getting flayed alive in the Pale Lady’s ice cave was necessary to bring the other dragons back from extinction. These were horrible things that happened, yes, but they served a purpose. They made the world better.

What did we accomplish here in this book? Yes, we rescued Bee (although, honestly, she was doing a pretty awesome job of rescuing herself), but that’s personal. The Farseer line is doing just fine without her: Nettle’s got a baby, Elliania’s got a baby. On the large scale, rescuing Bee is a good thing for Fitz to do as a father, but it’s a very small story for a Robin Hobb trilogy.

But wait! you might say. What about the destruction of Clerres? you might say. That’s a huge thing! That’s incredible! That’s an amazing improvement in the world at large! you might say.

Yes. But Fitz and the Fool didn’t do it. First of all, it was Bee who burned the archives, and second of all, it was the dragons who finished the job. Fitz and the Fool didn’t even need to go to Clerres! For that matter, the Fool didn’t even need to go to Fitz! He could have sicced the dragons on Clerres, left poor Fitz out of it, and everything could have ended happily. Properly happily. Not whatever this together-forever White Prophet and Catalyst nonsense is. Clerres would be rubble, Fitz would be Tom Badgerlock, raising his little daughter Bee and meeting his grandbaby, and the Fool would be…

Well, probably dead. But as I consult my feelings about this book, I find that I don’t really care about the Fool as a character on his own. We have a good few chapters at the end when he’s trying to be a father to Bee, because they both think Fitz is dead and he’s all she has left, and everything about that attempted relationship just falls flat. The Fool on his own is not an interesting person. He only works with Fitz.

I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that’s actually a masterful bit of character work. By seeing how grim and lonely and empty the Fool’s life will be without Fitz—denied even by his own child (for a given value of “his own”), bereft of purpose—it is satisfying to see him come to his end, united forever with Fitz (and Nighteyes) in the Skill-wolf.

But I still don’t like him. I cannot forgive him for the misery he brought. The unnecessary misery. In the previous sub-serieses of this saga, it was possible to argue that there was no other way to bring about the events that had to happen.  But here, after all we’ve endured, the dragons rock up and just… tweet it out destroy Clerres to the bedrock, and it’s hard to ignore that big smoking sign trumpeting THIS WAS THE OTHER WAY.

Yes, fine, we’ve had 15 books so far establishing that Fitz will do whatever the Fool asks him, and the Fool loves Fitz and their relationship is complicated and deep and there are layers, and I get it. And also, yes, fine, the Fool was desperate and dying and going to the only person who could help him, the person who knew more of him than he had ever revealed to anyone else who breathed. He wasn’t thinking straight, so it’s understandable he wouldn’t think to ask why the eagles dragons couldn’t just fly the ring their vengeance to Mordor Clerres.

And, yes, we’ve had 15 books in which these sorts of character motivations have been key supporting elements of the plot, resulting in a united, coherent through-line of motivation to justify the troubles. But notice my phrasing there: the character arcs supported the plot. They united with the plot to produce motivation. They were not the sole load-bearing components. Until now.

It’s a cruel author who gives us dragons, shows how the dragons can easily right the most hideous wrongs—and then chucks Fitz into the meatgrinder anyway.

All throughout the book, I was taking notes for a very different write-up. I had all sorts of thoughts about the differences between identities that are assigned to you versus identities you take on yourself. Gender, of course: Fitz trusts the Fool, but not Amber. But also not just gender. Is Bee the Destroyer or the Unexpected Son? Is Beloved or the Pale Lady the true White Prophet? Are liveships liveships, or dragons?

But I don’t have the heart. I am disheartened. Hobb has stolen my heart, enchanted my heart, and then crushed it in her claws. I knew she had it in her. I just didn’t think she would do it to me.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Fate [Del Rey, 2017].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool, book 2: Fool's Quest

Loose threads are tied off. Also, throuple.

Cover illustration by Alejandro Colucci

This installation – the penultimate in the entire saga! – is the beginning of the wrapping-up. To be sure, there’s still a LOT of plot to get through when we reach the last page: little Bee is still lost, Fitz thinks she’s dead and is feeling pretty suicidal about it, and the Fool’s homeland of Clerres is about to get an almighty ass-kicking of a regime change, to be brought about by a (small) coalition of foreign powers.¹ And yet there’s a lot going on here that feels like it’s gathering in the loose ends of a dozen books to tie them all off.

First, we have Fitz’s reintroduction at court in Buckkeep as himself. Remember, he’s spent most of his adult life pretending that Fitzchivalry Farseer, the Witted Bastard, actually did die in Evil Prince Regal’s dungeons way back in Royal Assassin. Fitz? What Fitz? No Fitz here, no no, just Tom Badgerlock, one-time man-at-arms to Lord Golden, mentor to King Dutiful, and now the sort of master-caretaker of the estate at Withywoods. Not the Lord of Withywoods, let’s be clear, because that was given to Burrich, and upon Burrich’s death inherited by Molly. Fitz then married Molly, but upon her death the estate went to Nettle. Fitz was never entitled to any part of it, and remains there solely on Molly’s sufferance. 

Let me step aside here and mention how much I appreciated this detail about inheritance. It would be so easy to adopt a kind of knee-jerk assumption of male dominance in an otherwise entirely medieval-flavoured fantasy book, which would let Fitz remain the lord of Withywoods after Molly’s death. Or perhaps one of his stepsons might inherit the property. But no: Nettle is the oldest daughter, so Nettle inherits, which means that, as legal owner of Withywoods, she can kick Fitz out for any reason she pleases. And she’s not a jerk about it, but likewise she is willing to pull this string on him if it seems necessary. And when it comes to Bee, Nettle worries that it might be: Fitz is so paralysed by Molly’s death that she worries he is incapable of giving Nettle the care she needs. He does not want to give up custody of Bee to Nettle, and Nettle does not want to kick Fitz out of Withywoods, but if that’s the only way to force him to give her custody of Bee – even Fitz has the sense to recognize that he cannot look after a little girl if he has nowhere to live and no source of income – she will do it without hesitation. 

It’s more of that same trend I mentioned noticing in the previous book: the travails that assail our characters are exactly the same troubles that we see in modern life. A custody battle over a child is brutally common in our own world, and the shape of that looming conflict in this book invokes the identical stress points: neglect, income, and where the child will live. And Nettle has the power to hold her own. Indeed, it was pretty clear that she was going to win that battle before the Clerres people came, rampaged through Withywoods, and stole Bee away. It sucks for Fitz, and we know from Bee’s perspective that she does not want to go away, but it’s really hard not to see Nettle’s point. When we’re invited to view this custody battle between them from modern eyes – which it’s hard not to do, given how familiar the shape of the custody battle is – it’s hard not to notice that Fitz is neglecting Bee. Also don’t forget that he’s the kind of guy that will stab to death a dying beggar in the street for giving his daughter a hug. This kind of murderous impetuosity is not the behaviour of a well-regulated father.

So: Nettle’s exercise of female power introduces a bit of modern social sensibility into the Six Duchies. It would be a bit of a break from how that society worked in previous books, except that we've been seeing social change happening from the top, first through Kettricken's years of ruling as Dutiful's regent, which started back in the Farseer trilogy, and then from the introduction Elliania as Queen, which we got in Tawny Man. Elliania, recall, comes from the strictly matriarchal society of the Outislands. So far, she’s only had sons – fine for the Six Duchies, who inherit by the male line, but catastrophic for her family line back home. She needs a female child, and there isn’t any prospect of her creating one out of her own body. But Nettle is a Farseer, a relative of Elliania’s husband² and by extension now a member of her own family. And when Nettle becomes pregnant by her own lover, Elliania is thrilled! A possible female child borne into her line, to take up the responsibilities back in the Outislands! Except in order to take up those responsibilities, the child must be acknowledged as a Farseer, and for that to happen, Nettle must be acknowledged as a Farseer, and for that to happen, her relationship to Fitz must be acknowledged, which means Fitz can no longer be Tom Badgerlock, but must instead step into the light once more, and take up the role he has been denied for half a century. 

So Elliania makes it happen, entirely on her own authority. It’s a lovely scene. Court is assembled, Starling is summoned, and she tells Fitz’s story, his true story. Starling, who chafed so bitterly at being forced to keep silent all those decades ago, when her dearest wish as a professional minstrel was to bear witness to one of the most historic events ever to occur in the Six Duchies, is finally invited before the entire court to reveal what she knows. 

And thus the first loose thread is tied up. Fitz will not die in obscurity. Whatever happens in the next, last book, his story and identity are now known and acknowledged, his line will continue, and his life will be remembered for what he truly did, not the calumny that was the official story for half a century.

Of course, Hobb can’t give us any unalloyed joy, because on the heels of this celebration, news finally reaches Buckkeep about the raid on Withywoods and Bee’s abduction. But because Fitz is also finally learning to hold his goldang horses when it comes to tearing off in a rage to unleash some whoopass on people who have wronged him, he responds carefully. Methodically. He investigates. He asks questions. He gathers information. When the time comes to act fast, he springs into action – and indeed, the fact that he is only a couple of hours too late to intercept the kidnappers before they take Bee through a Skill portal is only bad luck. He almost made it. He is fast when he needs to be, and the rest of the time he makes the preparations that are needed. He has – dare I say it? – matured!

Not that this maturity does him much good, because he sees no sign of Bee on the other side of the portal, and so – in a bit of characteristic dumbassery (he does not grow out of that) – decides to forget all those hours and days and (in one case) weeks that he himself has lost in a Skill portal, and instead concludes immediately that Bee is lost forever. Dead. Gone. Alas! Nothing to do but join up with the Fool and bring vengeance marching down south to Clerres. It’s a great hook for Book 3. 

But first, on the way there, he must tie up another loose thread. Remember the Rain Wild Chronicles? Remember the very new baby Elderling city of Kelsingra that was just coming to life with the return of the dragons? Remember Malta and Reyn’s baby boy who was so sickly and ill-formed and needed Tintaglia’s touch to fix his heart and let his body grow? The path to Clerres leads through Kelsingra, and so Fitz and the Fool take us on a brief tour of that city to show us how it’s getting on. It’s always fun to meet familiar characters through someone else’s eyes. We see a city with a nominal King and Queen of the Elderlings (Malta and Reyn) being run like a Bingtown Trader’s council, because that’s who Malta and Reyn are: traders. We see that sweet, dopey Rapskal has entirely lost that portion of himself, and is now an absolute asshole of a General who is – nevertheless – extremely good at his job. 

And we see that baby Ephron, Malta and Reyn’s son, is a young man now, but still struggling with his health. All the Elderling children are. The whole city is struggling, because the physical changes wrought by dragons are not being properly overseen, and children are deformed and dying. Once upon a time, Elderlings could use the Skill. Once upon a time, the Skill was more widespread than just the Farseer line. Once upon a time, perhaps, the changes that dragons wrought in their Elderlings could be maintained, guided, adjusted, to mitigate the damage that would result from unsupervised changes. But now those lineages have split. Bingtown and Rain Wilders traders came from Jamaillia, not the Six Duchies, and had no tradition of the Skill. But they are the core of the reborn Elderlings, and they are suffering.

And then Fitz arrives. And he can heal their children. He can set right those meandering, damaging, wild changes that kill slowly and painfully. He – or the knowledge of Skill-healing that he can teach -- could be the salvation of Kelsingra. Another loose thread tied up!

I’d love to have a third loose end here, but I don’t just yet. Fitz teases us with the potential to bond to another animal with the Wit – a very nice horse and a raven are teased as potential partners – but can’t quite take the plunge. So for my third point here, I want to remark on parenthood. Fitz is constantly put in positions where he is almost but not quite a parent. Nettle is unmistakeably his child, but he never meets her until she has been claimed and raised by Burrich. Hod, the fosterling he takes in, could be an adoptive child to him, but actually Hod and Fitz’s relationship never does all that much in these books besides serve as a source of anxiety and responsibility. Dutiful, like Nettle, is the child of Fitz’s body, but there is never any hope of him being acknowledged as anything other than Verity’s son. And then we have Bee – lovely Bee, born the entirely legitimate, acknowledged daughter of Fitz and Molly.

Until, we learn here, that the Fool was somehow in on things too. Back at the end of Tawny Man, when Fitz and the Fool did their body swap, part of the Fool remained in Fitz, and so helped engender Bee.³

Poor Fitz. He just wants a kid to call his own. But when you are the Fool’s Catalyst, every relationship will always be some kind of a throuple.

¹Yes, I know, all right? I know. But this is fantasy. <sup>↩

2</sup>The precise nature of the relationship is complicated. If we consider Dutiful to be the proper son of King Verity, who was occupying Fitz’s body during Dutiful’s conception, then Nettle would be Elliania’s first cousin once removed by marriage. However, if we consider Dutiful to be the proper son of Fitz, since it was Fitz’s body that conceived him, then Nettle is Elliania’s half-sister-in-law. <sup>↩

3</sup>For those keeping track at home, that’s a full two third of Fitz’s biological children who are conceived during a magical body swap.^↩

--

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Fool's Quest [Del Ray, 2015]. 

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: Fitz and the Fool Book 1: Fool's Assassin

In which Robin Hobb, believe it or not, is merciful

Cover illustration (c) Alejandro Colucci

And so, my friends, we come to the beginning of the end: the first book of the last trilogy of this magnificent saga. Do you feel a bit of melancholy? A twinge of guilt at joining with Hobb to inflict her narrative malice upon poor Fitz? Remember the end of Tawny Man? He was done! He was reunited with his beloved Molly, installed in Withywoods, settled with an estate, a family, released from Farseer demands upon him. It was all over!

Hah, not so fast, I thought, cackling in anticipation as I settled down to read this. Except there is a hint of mellowing in Hobb's approach here. More than a bit. We actually saw the start of this process in the Rain Wild Chronicles, where familiar torments of misery and despair are not quite so tormented as they have been in the past. For all that there was cannibalistic torture and the disintegration of self and identity in the memory-drowning addictions of dead civilizations, nevertheless the Rain Wild Chronicles lacked something of the keen edge of the previous trilogies. And that — not blunting, but let's say softening — of edge continues here.

We open with Fitz happily ensconced in Withywoods. Nettle is established as skillmaster at Buckkeep, the other stepchildren are grown and on the verge of departure. Fitz and Molly are the beloved and established Lord and Lady of Withywoods. They host Winterfest celebrations, they welcome guests; Fitz administers the estate, Molly runs the house. It is delightful. It is peaceful. It is . . . doomed?

Well, so I thought, foolishly imagining I knew what Robin Hobb had in mind. But there are many, many hundreds of pages of peace and plenty and prosperity that elapse before doom befalls. And although there are worries included in those pages, they are decidedly mundane and expected. Some mysterious visitors. A bit of light murder. A baffling, uninterpretable message. Molly is slightly unwell and needs to go to bed. And that’s it.

And between each of these events, YEARS pass! YEARS! Years more of Fitz's domestic tranquility pass domestically tranquilly elapse between plot points. He ponders the passage of time, the process of ageing. He has late night text message Skill conversations with Chade. Molly starts showing signs of dementia, claiming that she is pregnant. Fitz doesn't believe her: she is well past menopause, and the claimed pregnancy continues past nine months, twelve months, twenty-four months. Fitz and Nettle have hard conversations about how to handle Molly's mental state. And, yes, it's distressing that Molly's losing her marbles a bit, but this particular type of hardship is not the unique misery that Hobb tends to inflict. These unhappinesses are real things that happens to real people all the time. Ageing and eldercare and dementia is hardly comparable to getting tortured to death in a dungeon by your uncle-usurper-of-the-throne!

Eventually, a bit of magic separates these real-world cares from our world, but in so doing they render Fitz's life better, not worse. Molly was pregnant, it turns out, with a real child. An odd child, to be sure — slow in developing in utero, and freakishly small after birth, to the point that other people don't believe that the little girl, named Bee, will live. But Bee does live, and although she continues slow to grow and slow to talk, and hesitant around Fitz because his wild Skilling distresses her, she is the joy of his life. And so more years pass of domestic tranquility. A far cry from being forcibly separated from your loved ones, watching from afar as your father-figure marries your beloved and raises your daughter as his own. WHAT IS GOING ON?

And then! And then! Molly dies! Oh no, disaster! She dies — peacefully, painlessly, in her garden, with her little girl next to her, of some entirely natural heart-attack type of thing. Not great for little Bee to see her mother die, but as far as deaths in a Hobb book go, this is nowhere near being flayed alive. Even Fitz's misery is lessened, because he has around him his daughter Nettle, his devoted staff of household retainers, and little Bee. Again, the worst thing Hobb can inflect on Fitz and Bee — widowhood, single parenting an orphan — is nothing worse than people in our world must endure all the time. It's not even in the same ballpark as getting your leg chomped by a sea serpent, leaving a rotting gangrenous stump behind.

And Bee! She is small, and has a speech impediment for the first part of her life, and her peers bully her, and the tutor that Fitz arranges for her is snotty to her when he discovers she is not as stupid as people say she is. And what does he do to punish her? He makes her write lines! Which Fitz immediately puts a stop to the instant he hears about her treatment. Bee never even has to work on her penmanship, let alone get beaten to unconsciousness, almost thrown off a tower, and suffer permanent damage to her ability to Skill.

Even the basic PASSAGE OF TIME is softened. We've already seen Molly having a much-wanted and beloved baby well past menopause. But Fitz gets even more. He doesn't even show his age! Due to an over-enthusiastic Skill healing he enjoyed back in Golden Fool, which keeps him looking young and virile, his appearance tops out at 35 at most. Just look at the cover art! Alejandro Colucci's brief almost certainly included the instructions, 'More DILF than GILF.'

Ok, so, sure, at the end the Fool reappears and in a tragic misunderstand Fitz stabs him, and must leave Bee so he can rush the Fool to Buckkeep for Skill-healing. And then the Fool's people, who it turns out have been torturing him for years, murdering his friends, and chasing him to recapture him for more torture, invade Withywoods, kill people, fog their minds, and abduct Bee in Fitz's absence. Like, yes, that's all bad. That's the kind of thing I expect in a Robin Hobb book. 

But here’s the thing: I expect it to happen well before page 600 in a sub-700 page novel. Hobb is entirely capable of squeezing a lot of unhappiness into 80 pages. She makes a good showing of it here! But even she can’t make them rough enough to bring the average for this book back up to expected Hobbian mean. The mathematics of misery simply don’t allow it.

Is it a relief? A disappointment? I’m not sure. It’s not what I expected when I first read this book. I think a lot of the misery might have been self-inflected, as I perpetually braced for the never-dropping other shoe throughout the first half thousand pages. Come back next month to see whether book 2, Fool’s Quest, regresses to the mean.

——

References: 

Hobb, Robin. Fool's Assassin [Del Ray, 2014]. 

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 4: Blood of Dragons

 Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced

I don’t want to call Blood of Dragons a shallow book, but something about it reveals the structural skeleton of Hobb’s method more clearly than her other books. It is . . . gaunt, perhaps. Not quite as rich and lush as it might be. Some people like that kind of thing; but when you’ve been with Hobb for this many thousand pages, when you’ve grown to like the shapely, well-developed muscles of plot and callipygous curves of character overlaid on top of her structural skeleton, then it can be a bit disconcerting to see the bones underneath, no matter how beautifully articulated they might be. Oh dear, you think, I wish this poor half-starved creature had been fed a bit more before publication.

This impression comes through most strongly in the character arc of Selden, the youngest Vestrit child who became Tintaglia’s Elderling back in the Liveship Traders. He’s been popping up occasionally in between then and now, travelling around in an attempt to better the plight of these dragons. We saw him very briefly through Fitz’s eyes back in the Tawny Man trilogy, when he came with a delegation of Bingtowners to beg aid of the rumoured Six Duchies dragons. Fitz was impressed then at how Elderlingish he looked. Now, Selden's made his way to Chalced, and discovered to his misfortune that appearances which read ‘Elderling’ in other parts of the world read in Chalced as ‘all scaley and draconic’.

The thing, is, it is not safe to be scaley and draconic in this part of the world. Slave-keeping Chalced has a pretty permissive approach about putting people in cages, especially people who are weird looking. After all, if your caged prisoner looks weird you can charge a high admission price to gawp at them. But on top of that, recall that the Duke of Chalced is dying and will pay anything for dragon body parts to preserve his life. And since it’s proving difficult to harvest those body parts from real dragons, a scaley prisoner offers another revenue stream: cut off bits of him and sell them to the Duke. Sure, this guy is not a real dragon, but he’s dragonish! Just look at the scales! So Selden, already caged up as a carnival sideshow, gets sold to the Duke of Chalced. 

Throughout the rest of the book, set firmly in the Rain Wilds, we return intermittently for brief scenes surrounding Selden’s plight, which, in a return to Hobb’s form, goes from bad to worse. First, he’s in a cage, starved and deprived of clothes and blankets, the better to show off his scales to viewers. Then people start cutting bits off of him to feed to the Duke of Chalced. Before the end the Duke is drinking Selden’s blood direct from his veins, vampire-like. And to top it all off, he’s got some bronchitis-pneumonia-type illness, so he spends a lot of time feverish and coughing. 

It’s this last detail, the pneumonia, which, of all that Hobb inflicts upon her characters, feels gratuitous. Sure, Fitz was literally tortured to death in a Evil Prince Regal’s dungeon, but that revealed a lot of important detail about how the Wit operates. Sure, Kennit’s leg rotted off from gangrene following a sea-serpent bite, but it was also really important for his character arc, as well as the development of Wintrow and Etta. Sure, the Fool got flayed alive, but that was necessary to drive home the importance of his role as the White Prophet, Fitz as his catalyst, and the lore of the Rooster Crown. 

But Selden’s pneumonia? What the point of that, beyond just making him suffer? 

This pneumonia is the bony rib of Hobb’s gaunt story structure showing through. Hobb just plain likes whump. Usually she manages to connect these components to enough of the rest of the story/character/worldbuilding that it is well-clothed in narrative flesh. In contrast to his pneumonia, Selden’s cannibalistic dismemberment is one of those well-fleshed bits of whump. It’s all part of the Duke of Chalced’s attempt to ward off his death, which is the same motivation that caused him to send agents into the Rain Wilds in previous books, suborning Sedric into accompanying Alise, forcing Hest to follow her, thereby forcing a resolution of the whole domestic drama surrounding those three. The outrage of being hunted for their meat further serves as the motivation for the dragons to rise up and attack Chalced at the end of this book, rescuing Selden from the human version of that same fate. So the cannibalism component of Selden’s treatment is rock-solidly embedded in the rest of this series.

The pneumonia, though? That’s a bit of a harder sell. There’s a gesture at using it to connect Selden to the Duke’s daughter, Chassim, who’s been trying to carry off her own Chalced feminist revolution. Her attempts at writing seditious poetry and distributing it among the women of Chalced are uncovered, and she’s imprisoned by her father, and tasked with looking after Selden. So his pneumonia works as an excuse to put them in a room together. If he weren’t sick, he wouldn’t need looking after. When the dragons come to burn everything down at the end, Chassim has earned his trust and as a result gets put in charge of the new transitional government. It’s tidy, I guess. But it’s thin. The connections are limited to the very proximate plot surrounding the events, rather than developing those far-reaching tendrils of interconnectedness that we see in the best parts of Hobb's work. 

Part of the limited interconnectedness problem springs from the simple fact that  Chalced itself is underdeveloped. I don’t have a sense of who Chassim is, what her life is, or what life in Chalced is under the dying Duke. Without this, I have no investment in removing (or preserving) the Duke, and no stake in who gets put in charge after the Duke is gone. And because I’ve spent so many thousands of pages in this world already, I know that it’s reasonable to expect to know these things. Throughout these series, we’ve seen the internal workings of the Six Duchies, the Mountain Kingdom, Jamaillia, Bingtown, the Pirate Isles, the Outislands, and the Rain Wilds, and we’ve been given a feel for them as real places. Even very brief sequences, such as the bit in the Mountain Kingdom at the end of Assassin’s Apprentice, can be effective illustrations of the life and culture and people of these places. Done well, these sequences can reveal how the different nations work, both internally as nations, and internationally as networks, bound by ties of trade and allegiance and marriage and shared heritage and fiercely defended independence. 

But throughout all of this worldbuilding, Chalced has only ever been those assholes over there. The slave-trading assholes. They are the Nation of Hats. Sooner or later there is always war with Chalced, people intone, and that’s been enough to explain whatever Chalced does. So now, with a chunk of the plot taking place in Chalced proper, with narrative POVs encompassing key political actors, you’d think this would be the chance for this nation to get the same treatment that the rest of the nations have gotten.

And I think that’s Hobb’s intention here, in setting so much of the plot so far from the Rain Wilds. But in this particular case, it doesn’t work. It feels too stretched, like skin over bone. Yes, the Duke is brutal and court life is unsafe and precarious, full of backstabbings and betrayals. But that’s not new. We’ve already seen competent, intelligent agents of Chalced in action in the Rain Wilds, and we’ve learned that they behave as ruthlessly and cruelly as they do to protect his loved ones back home. That right there shows just as clearly – and more economically -- what the Duke is capable of than any number of on-page executions. Moving the narrative to Chalced down not show us more; it show us merely more of the same. Structurally, yes, it’s absolutely time for us to see Chalced from the inside. The skeleton of that narrative purpose is absolutely clear. But the skeleton is all that's clear, because the rest of it is not fleshed out.

Selden’s pneumonia is a rib. Chalced’s cruelty is a collarbone. Hobb has constructed a good story. But without the rest of the flesh of narrative and character and plot and theme and worldbuilding, the bones are showing through.

-- 

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Blood of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2013].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, book 3: City of Dragons

Memory defines dragons and Elderlings, but humans need less of it

When last we left our intrepid band of misfits, they had finally arrived at the lost city of Kelsingra. The dragons have needed to put aside their ideas of what makes a traditional dragon in order to recover the core of what draconic characteristics remain to them. No more can they rely on dignity and inherited memory if they want to fly. They must work, human-like, to develop abilities that once came effortlessly to them as their birthright. Like humans, what they become is a function of what they, as individuals, put into it, not what their ancestors, as dragons, have bequeathed them in inherited memories.

But if the first two books follow the dragons’ journeys to learn human skills and develop a more cooperative, human-like society, City of Dragons allows humans the opposite opportunity. Kelsingra is an intact Elderling city, and one key component of such cities is the heavy use of memory stone to save or record the thoughts and experiences of the inhabitants. Some of this is useful: it’s nice to know how to work the hot baths and lighting. But a lot more than functional infrastructure is recorded in these memory pillars, and not all those recordings are safe for humans to experience. Those former lives are glamourous and addictive, and too much indulgence can overwhelm a person’s identity, leaving them more like a ghost of the original bearer of the memory than their own person. Such is the case of Rapskal, whose own identity of a cheerful, dopey, optimistic, childlike teenager becomes entirely erased and replaced by an arrogant, martial Elderling whose memories ensnare him beyond his ability—or conscious desire—to resist.

For dragons, these ancestral memories form a core part of their identities, Without them, they are less draconic than they should be. But for humans, these ancestral memories are a threat to their own individual identities. It is not an accident that it is only Elderlings—those humans who have been changed by close association with dragons—are the ones who indulge in memory stone. This component of Elderling magic is not arbitrary. It is a reflection of dragons’ tendency to make their Elderlings like them. We see this tendency on the small scale with Sintara and Thymara. Sintara transforms Thymara into an Elderling with wings, but the wings are purely decorative, an expression of art rather than function. Sintara claims that this was the intention the entire time, but surely it’s no accident that Thymara’s wings remain purely decorative as long as Sintara herself is earthbound. One of Rapskal’s last acts as his own identity is encouraging Thymara to try to fly anyway. She has wings. Wings are for flying. He got Heeby to fly, and he is confident that he can do the same for Thymara.

So, as with decorative or functional wings, so it is with memory: dragons remake Elderlings in their image, and a core part of what they are is stored and shared ancestral memories. And this fundamental artificiality of what Elderlings are—where “artificial” means both not natural, and also a work of artifice, of intentional art—does dampen, somewhat, the glory of Elderlings that we’ve been taught to revere as something lost and wonderful throughout this entire series. Even the images of Kelsingra at its former height cannot be properly mourned as a vanished heritage, because there are hints that, even when the Elderlings and dragons were at their grandest, Kelsingra was still a city of memories. It was never full of bustling magic, alive and magnificent. It was always half-populated by ghosts; its wonders were always just a veneer of lives laid over memories of other lives. The apparent richness came from the layering, not reality.

It’s tempting to make a simple dichotomy here: with dragons, losing ancestral memories and being forced to develop individual identities human-like is a catastrophic loss. With humans, gaining ancestral memories at the expense of individual identity is equally bad. And certainly, watching Rapskal’s gentle dopiness become overwritten by an alien, long-dead personality feels like a similar loss. It is a loss. But Hobb would never let something as simple as good-for-dragons-but-bad-for-humans structure her plot. The loss for the dragons tempers their arrogance, and forces their partnership with humans into something slightly more equitable than it had been previously. In parallel, gaining those memories allows Rapskal and Thymara to access the skills that came with those memories. To jump ahead into the last book for just a moment, Rapskal’s acquired ability to lead military attack is useful in an encounter with Chalced (sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced), and Thymara’s acquired memory of Kelsingra’s infrastructure maintenance allows her to restore the well of Skill that is so vital for the dragons’ well-being. In moderation, then, the cross-pollination of humans and dragons can build greatness.

I will still always mourn, however, the realization that the Elderlings themselves relied on a palimpsest of ghosts.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. City of Dragons [Harper Voyager, 2012].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, Book 2: Dragon Haven

To build a new society, you must understand what worked (and didn’t) about the old

Dragon Haven is, at its heart, a meditation on self-determination, both on the level of the individual, and society more broadly. (In fact, both Dragon Keeper and Dragon Haven are organized around that idea, but I wanted to talk about other things last month, so we’re going to pretend that this theme is specific to this book.) When last we left our little band of adventurers, Alise had accomplished her heart’s dream, to accompany dragons in a quest for the lost dragon city of Kelsingra. She embodies the ideal of this book's thematic messaging: someone who rejects a role thrust upon her, creates her own role in the world, and thrives therein. At pivotal moments throughout this series, she will encounter people who compare the new self she has constructed to the old self she left behind. Although the comparison is complicated, in a Hobbian way, overall it turns out as well as is possible in the Rain Wilds. Alise is no longer the cultured society lady that she was at the start of the book: her hair and skin are roughened, and the man she comes to love is coarse and dirty. Nor does she grow into an elegant Elderling, the way the other dragon keepers start to do; and there are moments of tension that emerge as a result, a growing us-vs.-them sprouting between the dragon keepers and the still-humans. In every external metric, her transformation is a downward one. She loses money, power, even whatever physical charms she ever had. Her scholarship of those lost wonders is no longer valuable in a world with dragons and Elderlings returned, and Elderling cities rediscovered, with memory devices sharing their secrets with anyone and everyone who passes by. And yet, internally, she is happy and she is loved. And she has the strength of character to recognize those things as paramount. This is as close to a happy ending as you’ll get in a Hobb book.

The dragon keepers themselves have a less straightforward trajectory. They have no difficulties casting off their old life. Indeed, their old life cast them off first, by assigning them this one-way mission to take the dragons away. But people are people, and although they revel in the opportunity to build a new kind of life among themselves, nevertheless they reproduce, in microcosm, the same societal tensions that plague every society. Thymara, young and naive, basks at first in the feeling of having friends and peers, released from the strictures of a society that thinks she should have died as an infant. The other, older dragon keepers, clock immediately that this freedom from social constraint means that they can start getting down with each other. Back in the cities, people as heavily marked as them were allowed to reproduce, but here there’s no such constraint. Jerd, a young woman, sleeps around with most of the young men, before eventually settling down with Greft, the oldest and most cynical of the keepers. It’s made reasonably clear that this decision is not about personal preference or connection, but instead is because she becomes pregnant with (probably) his child. It’s not quite a life of hedonistic abandon, since the dragons keep them working pretty hard to feed and care for them, but it’s a lot more freedom than they’ve known.

But sex comes with consequences, and those consequences lay bare the problems inherent in building a new society. We’ve already talked about why they kill babies back in Trehaug. Jerd’s pregnancy and subsequent miscarriage is one of the most compelling demonstrations of how a society can get to that point. At every stage, I found myself nodding along: yes, I agree with Thymara that Jerd’s behaviour has directly resulted in her inability to pull her share of the work. Yes, I agree with Bellin that the work of caring for a sick pregnant woman falls on other people, and if you don’t have a committed partner willing to take on that task, then you are imposing it on other people who didn’t agree to be liable for it. Yes, if you die in childbirth and leave behind an infant who must be cared for, you have deprived the group of your labour, and left them with only a burden. There are reasons why casual unprotected sex outside of committed relationships is discouraged, and it’s not (only) thoughtless puritanical conservatism.

But what is the solution? So far, societies have tried constraining women’s sexual agency (Bingtown) or murdering babies (Rain Wilds). Neither seems like a good solution. These dragon keepers are not going to arrive at a better one on their own, but they have a much better understanding now of why the rules that they want to break so freely were put there in the first place.

Or rather, some of them do. Greft, Jerd’s cynical paramour, seems to think he has a much better understanding of human nature than the rest of them. In fact, his ideas about how society should be—based on power and enforced hierarchies—are fed to him by a Chalced spy who’s snuck into the expedition, and even that little detail is a beautiful example of the macrocosm rendered small into this group of explorers. Sooner or later, there is always war with Chalced, even if that war means a single Chalced spy stirring up discord in the Rain Wilders.

Hobb uses Greft’s adoption of these odious Chalced ideas as a means to have her say in a conversation that will be depressingly familiar to fantasy fans over the age of, say 25: namely, the need for “realism” in one’s worldbuilding. But in this conversation, “realism” somehow has less to do with complications of exchange rates and currency devaluation and tariffs (unless you’re Daniel Abraham or Seth Dickinson), and more to do with the insistence that it’s more “realistic” to write a world in which women should be childbearing machines and settle down with men to protect them from sexual violence perpetrated by other men. I’ve had to wade through this Disc Horse myself in my own family, multiple times. Hobb, in her turn, allows it to play out between Thymara, who’d rather not choose a man, thanks very much, and Greft, who insists that she must. She represents the argument faithfully enough, but at the very end of that conversation, she does something very satisfying. Thymara says that she will not choose any man, and walks away. And in her mind, her dragon Sintara says, Now you are thinking like a queen. There may be hope for you yet.

In other words, Hobb ends the conversation by reminding her readers, We’re in a world with DRAGONS. Who cares about your stinking “realism”? It’s an elegant way of integrating the meta-discourse into the dialogue of her book, and I enjoyed the smackdown immensely.

Oh, yes, dragons! We’ve got dragons too! And like the humans, the dragons are working on building their own society. Because unlike their forbears, who were ruthlessly individualistic, these dragons require some degree of social cohesion to survive. Not all of them have the memories that a dragon needs to be properly draconic; some seem properly half-witted. Heeby, Rapskal’s dragon, seems more like a beloved pet in Rapskal’s care than the magnificent, overpowering marvel that a true dragon should be. And yet it is Heeby who manages to recover the power of flight first. The dragon who recovers what all the rest of them aspire to is the one who is willing to let go her thoughts of what she should be, and instead make use of what she has: Rapskal’s clumsy, good-hearted, unfailing encouragement. Yes, it’s undignified to run around flapping her wings, trying and failing over and over again. Yes, OG dragons did not do anything as pathetic as failure. But—in a choice reminiscent of what we saw with the Liveship Traders—these dragons cannot have it all. They need to choose which element of dragonhood they will preserve. Sintara chooses dignity, and stays earthbound in the mud. Heeby releases dignity, and flies.

And then there is Relpda, who is more animal even than Heeby at the start of the book. She’s the one that Sedric targets when he eventually builds up the courage to steal scales and blood in his wildly foolish and politically unwise agreement to provide dragon parts for the Duke of Chalced. To Sedric, all the dragons are mere beasts. He cannot even hear their voices as anything other than animal noises. But he drinks some of Relpda’s blood, more out of curiosity than any other reason, and so forces a connection with her. She did not consent to this act of blood-sharing, but the connection is forged nonetheless, and what follows is one of the most beautiful elements of the story. In contact with Sedric’s mind, Relpda awakens. And their relationship—which is the beginning of Sedric’s redemption arc—deepens during a deadly flood of the river, in which she saves his life (multiple times). Why? he wonders. Why would she save someone who had so wronged her? And she responds, Less lonely. You make sense of the world. To me.

That thought is so enlightening. What must it be like to be a stunted, half-conscious dragon? Sintara is frustrated and furious because she knows what she should be. Relpda didn’t know even that. But she knew she was lonely. And then along comes Sedric, and wrongs her in a way that is the worst possible way a human can wrong a dragon. And yet, in his presence, she is no longer lonely.

It’s the same setup that allowed Hest to ensnare Sedric in his net: Sedric was lonely. Hest made him not lonely, even though he is unkind and cruel. But where Hest takes advantage of that power dynamic and uses it to control Sedric, Sedric does not do anything like that to Relpda. Perhaps it’s because even a half-awakening dragon is immune to mere human manipulation. Perhaps it’s because Sedric’s deeply buried but still present decency manages to struggle to the front. Whatever the reason, the two of them develop together, and forge a new kind of relationship, one built not on domination but understanding and gratitude and genuine affection. This new society will not be like the old, either the purely human, or the human-dragon partnerships of the past. OG Dragons could never. But these ones can, and must. And do.

Reference: Hobb, Robin. Dragon Haven [Harper Voyager, 2010].

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Rain Wild Chronicles, Book 1: Dragon Keeper

The character arcs are familiar, but it's all in service of building something new 

We are on to the fourth subseries of this fantastic saga! The Rain Wild Chronicles is, in a way, atypical of a Robin Hobb series, largely because it is strikingly lacking in misery and structural complexity. The character motivations are straightforward and driven by no more than the usual amount of discontent with the status quo; the main character arcs mostly avoid catastrophe, except inasmuch as a lively flood or brief skirmish enlivens typical fantasy plots; and the plot is a very simple quest structure. We don’t even get the Fool, in any of his many identities. At the end, the evil are punished (hooo boy, are they ever!), the good are rewarded, dragons kick ass, and. . .  fin. 

By now, I’ve reread enough Robin Hobb to recognize that the character arcs are mostly recycled from previous books. This is not a criticism; more an observation. Hobb evidently had a lot to say about certain types of personal journeys, and she didn’t say it all the first time round. Take Alise Finbok, the dragon scholar who yearns to study dragons, yearns so hard that she insists that a study trip up the Rain Wild River be included as a condition in her marriage contract. This is her only point of joy in a loveless marriage to a husband who is powerful and overbearing, who oppresses her and belittles her and makes her feel small. When she finally gets the opportunity to travel to the Rain Wilds and observe the dragons, she is disappointed to find the creatures so different from how she’d expected them to be. Yet nevertheless she takes advantage of circumstances and manages to remake herself  into a new person in their company. She is thus freed from her asshole husband, and learns what it is to be loved and valued for her own skills and self and personhood. This is a lovely character arc. It is also in many ways a repeat of Serilla’s arc from the Liveship Traders. Serilla, recall, begins her arc as the companion of the asshole Satrap of Jamaillian, who belittles her, ignores her experience and political acumen, and tries instead to treat her as a sexual object. She finds her purpose in her scholarship of the history and politics of Bingtown. When she finally gets the opportunity to travel to Bingtown, she is disappointed to discover that the life she’d imagined for herself there is not feasible. Yet nevertheless she takes advantage of circumstances and – with some false starts – manages to remake a new existence for herself, freed from the asshole Satrap, and – if not loved and valued – at least respected for her knowledge and experience. The worst parts of Alise’s story are really not all that terrible compared to Serilla’s. As I’ve said, these books lack the typical Hobbian misery that we see elsewhere, and Alise’s arc is shifted substantially upward on the despair-to-joy spectrum. But still: the shape of the arc is the same.

Likewise, Sedric, Alise’s childhood friend and the amenuensis-cum-secret-lover of her dastardly husband, gets his own dragon-fueled redemption arc that feels a lot like Malta Vestrit’s. But again, like Alise’s, it’s a bit gentler. Malta, recall, starts as the most glorious 13-year-old brat who has ever bratted, and ends as a full-ass Elderling, negotiating the fate of nations. Both Malta and Sedric begin their respective stories sheltered and selfish, accustomed to a life of pampering and wealth, and ready to make all kinds of foolish decisions to pursue that comfort without thinking through or properly understanding the consequences of their decisions. 

The particularly interesting contrast between these two arises from how respective horriblenesses are tempered. Malta is a literal child at the start, and whomst amongst ust has not indulged in 13-year-old brattiness? Sedric, by contrast, is a full-grown adult. He regularly travels internationally, and has a firm grasp on politics and trade. He knows the consequences of his actions, or should know, and that expectation of competence makes his behaviour much harder to forgive. 

 Consider, for example, his decision to accompany Alise to the Rain Wilds, where he will acquire dragon parts to sell to the Duke of Chalced. These dragon parts represent the sole chance of saving the dying duke’s life, so Sedric expects to get a huge payoff upon delivery. What Sedric doesn’t seem to realize is that this is, on many levels, a terrible idea. Leave aside the ethics of butchering and selling sentient creatures for medicine, and think about the politics for a moment. The Duke of Chalced is dying. Dragon parts can save him. Dragons can only be found in the Rain Wilds. Last time Chalced tried to make trouble in that part of the world, Tintaglia fought them off, but Tintaglia is not here anymore.  So why in the world would Sedric want to (a) demonstrate to the desperate Duke of Chalced that life-saving resources are to be found in the Rain Wilds, and (b) do it at a time when Tintaglia is no longer defending them against Chalced? Sooner or later, the saying goes, there is always war with Chalced. Sedric’s actions are going to make it much sooner than later.

Malta’s brattiness is tempered by the fact that she’s a child. What excuse does Sedric have? In a word: Hest. Hest is Alise’s asshole husband, but he is also Sedric’s lover, and he is a classic narcissistic asshole. He glamours Sedric with  his handsomeness, his masterful exercise of wealth and power and taste; and he combines that glamour with a fair amount of manipulative emotional abuse. It is to please Hest that Sedric suggests Alise as a potential wife, and coaches Hest on how best to win Alise’s agreement for a marriage of convenience. It is to please Hest that he indulges in really foul semantic wordplay when Alise tries to invoke the clause in the marriage contract that dissolves the union in the event of infidelity. Oh no, says Hest, I’ve never slept with any other woman, right Sedric? And he is right: He’s not sleeping with women — because he’s sleeping with men. Sedric knows perfectly well that it makes no difference to Alise which people Hest is sleeping with. What matters is that she’s found evidence of infidelity and wants to invoke that contractual provision to dissolve her marriage. But because of her mistaken assumption that Hest is exclusively attracted to women, Hest wriggles out of the accusation. And because Alise has been friends with Sedric so long, she trusts him when he backs up Hest’s word; and so because of Sedric, she loses her opportunity to end her miserable marriage. Sedric is friendly, but he is not a friend.

As with Malta, Hobb does not insist that we feel sympathy for Sedric, at the start. The facts and actions and motivations are simply presented to us, and we are left to draw our own conclusions. Is Sedric a victim of domestic abuse, too enthralled to his abuser to do the right thing, for fear of the consequences for his own well-being? Or is he just a weak, sad man, who will prey on dragons and betray his friends to please an asshole he’s sleeping with? For my part, I am intellectually aware of the former interpretation, but emotionally I really lean toward the latter. Malta as a 13-year-old brat was gloriously, hilariously smackable. Sedric, as a full-grown failure of a man, is just sad. 

Let us turn now to the themes. Thematically, this book is fantastic. We’ll start with Tintaglia. Recall that we left the Liveship Traders trilogy with magnificent Tintaglia shepherding a massive tangle of 100 serpents to cocoon and transform into dragons, ready to take to the skies. We left the Tawny Man trilogy with the discovery and rescue of Icefyre, another adult dragon, mating with Tintaglia and ensuring another generation of eggs on the way. But the consequence of these triumphs is that Tintaglia abandons the Rain Wild dragons. When they were her only hope for the continuance of her species, she had time to help feed the pathetic specimens that emerged on the riverbed outside the Rain Wild city of Cassarick. But now, with a proper dragon at her side, she has no use for them. 

Yes, it is selfish. It puts the individual above the community. But this is how dragons are. They are not human. They do not have human-like loyalties to each other. And this ruthless, selfish independence works very well if you have the capacities of a dragon, if you can hunt and fly and feed yourself and defend yourself. Dragons are strong. Humans are squishy and weak. 

So humans must form societies to compensate for their squishy weakness, societies where they combine their capacities and work for the good of the whole, rather than the individual. This is especially important in an environment as harsh as the Rain Wilds, where people struggle to bear children, become disfigured with growths and scales as they age, and sicken and die young. However, this harshness of the environment, and the need to focus on the collective good, engenders harshness in its treatment of individuals. Any child born too ‘changed’ from the start is exposed at birth, to die. The reasoning of this regularly practiced infanticide is that these infants will only ever turn out to be a burden to society, sickening early, and unable to bear healthy children of their own. Why, conventional wisdom asks, must society welcome and support people who cannot contribute to the next generation? 

So life in the Rain Wilds is governed by these questions: How much of a burden of dead weight can a society bear? How much must an individual contribute before they are allowed to be a member of that society? Under what circumstances is it permissible to kill babies? It’s all very ‘Cold Equations’.

It’s an uncomfortable kind of conversation, and it’s not made any easier when we consider the case of Thymara, one of the primary viewpoint characters. Thymara is a young woman who ‘should’ have been exposed at birth. She was only given a chance at life because her father decided at the last minute to defy custom and expectation, and bring her back home, to raise her and train her in hunting and foraging and all the other life skills that Rain Wilders need to master for survival. It turns out that Thymara is an excellent hunter and forager. She brings in far more food than she eats. In her particular case, then, it would have been a mistake to leave her to die. Even if she never has a baby, and does not contribute to the next generation, her contributions are still a net positive to society.

But by even having this conversation, and pointing out that Thymara is a contributer rather than a burden, we are conceding an important point – namely, that it is reasonable to evaluate people’s right to live in a society as a function of their numerical contribution.¹ This reasoning needs only a statistical evaluation of expected value in the long term aggregate to justify and indeed require infanticide. Sure, in Thymara’s case, to be sure, there is no danger of her being a burden, because she grew up to be a good hunter. But statistically it was unlikely, so in the long run, just to be sure of optimizing the collective good . . . 

It’s the Tragedy of the Commons pitted against the belief that killing babies is bad. And every member of the Rain Wilds knows this. There’s a wonderful moment quite early on, where Thymara’s father points out how good a hunter she is, and his companions get all shifty and uneasy. Because every Rain Wild parent who’s ever left a child to die, after nine months of hope and fear and love and waiting, after hours of agonizing labour and the crushing grief at seeing one’s baby born with claws instead of fingernails – those parents are not comforting themselves with calculating expected values. These parents are not thinking well, in the aggregate, statistically these changed children consume more than they produce, so society as a whole is stronger if. . . No. Rather, these parents are looking at Thymara and thinking, if I had possessed the strength of character; if I had defied the rules, then my little one might be here today, like she is.

So: what does society do with these extraneous people, the ones who should be dead, the ones who cannot produce a new generation? Well, if you have a bunch of dragons wallowing on your doorstep, hemmed in by trees and flightless; sickly and stunted and unable to hunt, consuming far more than they produce, the answer is clear. You pull up your algebra notes, combine like terms, and offer the deadweights a job: Lead the dragons upstream, hunt for them, tend to them, and find them a new place to live, far away from here. 

This gives us the heart of the plot: two sets of outcasts, human and dragon, must work together to find a new place to live. And they both engage in this endeavour whole-heartedly. They do not feel like they have been cast out of their homes, rejected by their society – though they absolutely have been. The humans are the rejects of the Rain Wilds, and the dragons have been entirely abandoned by Tintaglia. Nevertheless, they see it as an opportunity to build a new future. 

But they approach this opportunity with a different end goal in mind. The humans are released from the constraints of the Rain Wild society, freed to negotiate a new set of customs, and figure out how far their new freedoms can take them. They envision an entirely different society, built from scratch, attuned to their own specific needs. By contrast the dragons don’t hope to build something new. Their entire abnormal life, stunted and sickly, flightless and wallowing in mud, has been an education in how the old ways were better. Yet they cannot recover anything resembling those old ways without the help of their human keepers, and so the very task of returning to their former greatness is going to require a certain amount of concessions to circumstances. 

Next month, we’ll see how those concessions work out, and what kinds of negotiations the humans and dragons must make with each other in their quest for a new home, and the new type of society they must build together.

---

1 This type of reasoning is not restricted to fantasy settings. UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced this week that  immigrants must now perform unpaid labour as a precondition for the right to live in the UK. ^↩  

References: 

Hobb, Robin. Dragon Keeper [Harper Voyager, 2009]. 

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Tawny Man, Book 3: Fool's Fate

 Full of genderness, with a richness and depth that allows it to age into modern Discourse

It’s time, my friends. I've spoken about setting, plot, characterization, love, risk, desire, and how Fitz just can't catch a break, each time particularized to a specific book. And I could do the same here. I even took notes on the Fool's Fate-specific theme I wanted to discuss. But I think that I'd rather set that aside; because here, at the end of things, we finally have all the pieces in place to address a different topic. And so although the structure of this whole Realm of the Elderlings Project might lead you to believe that today's entry is about Fool's Fate, in fact it's more a retrospective over the nine books as a whole, all of which contribute to today's discussion: The Fool, and Gender.

What makes the Fool’s ambiguous, shifting gender work so well, I think, is the way all of the conversations in these books have aged — a very hard task in a domain as volatile as gender. Typically, ‘ageing well’ is used to describe works that express a value we now agree is the correct one, before other people were mainstreamly expressing that value. But the whole Fool + Gender tapestry does something different. Here, the same events and interactions were relevant to gender discourse Back Then are also relevant to gender discourse Today, but in a different way. They are sufficiently rich and textured and ambiguous that they can be interpreted fruitfully across decades of shifting landscapes.

To demonstrate, I'm going to explore three moments from three different books that hit some (but not all — oh, by no means all!) of the main discussion points.

 1. Misgendering: The Fool is a woman and she is in love with you [Assassin’s Quest, pg 551]

Cover art by John Howe

This claim comes from Starling, and sets off a long sequence in which she insists that the Fool is a woman, and resolutely uses she/her for the Fool until Kettricken finally tells her to knock it off. Everything about this can be read in a way that engages fruitfully with sexuality discourse of the 1990s, and with gender identity discourse of the 2020s.

Today, this kind of claim in a modern book would immediately set off alarm bells about misgendering, so it can come across as a bit jarring how the Fool remains fully unbothered by something that is intricately intertwined with some very ugly attacks in modern discourse. 'What does it matter what she thinks?' he says. 'Let her think whatever is easiest for her to believe' (pg 634). Today, it matters an awful lot what someone thinks about your gender. Misgendering occupies a very specific cultural role, and when it appears in books it is there to elicit a very specific reaction. In non-awful books, misgendering is almost always either a symbol of intentionally malicious transphobia, or else represents the more insidious consequence of society’s insistence on gender-conforming expression and performance. It is not innocuous. It is not something to laugh off. In a modern book, the Fool’s willingness to disregard Starling’s behavior as a quirky bit of silliness would come across as some sort of attempt to minimize the very real problem of misgendering.

But this is not a modern book. It was written in the late 1990s, and the sorts of conversations we’re having now about misgendering simply weren’t as mainstream then. Starling isn’t malicious in what she’s doing by insisting that the Fool is ‘actually’ a woman. She’s not a representative of 2020s-era society’s refusal to respect gender identity. Instead, she’s representing a different kind of societal constraint: an unwillingness to respect queer love. She is absolutely all in favor of Fitz and the Fool getting together. And she's not wrong in her observation that the Fool is in love with Fitz. The Fool repeatedly tells Fitz that he is absolutely DTF should Fitz be interested; it’s just that he’s not only DTF. 

The problem with Starling’s behavior here is not her observations of the romantic potential between Fitz and the Fool. It rather arises from the fact that she represents lot of 1990s opinions about male friendships. If there is love and affection between two guys, the opining opines, it had better not have any sexual overtones. No homo, dude. And if the romantic indicators become too clear to disregard, then you’d better find a way to make it straight. The 1990s were a banner decade for girls dressing up as boys to have adventures, so it’s not a surprise (in the Doylist reading) that Starling draws on that same trope to straighten out what she sees between Fitz and the Fool. The Fool is a woman, and thereby can be in love with Fitz. It’s a silly, hopeless attempt to change something unchangeable; and the Fool treats it accordingly. 

Of course, any attempt to minimize society’s implacable cishet norms is not quite as harmless as the Fool makes it — hence the nagging concern that his reaction to Starling’s imposition of those norms on him trivializes the very real problem that she could be representing. Except, of course, that throughout the rest of this book, and the full Tawny Man trilogy, the Fool does retains a certain distaste for Starling. Is it simply jealousy, of how she can enjoy a sexual relationship with Fitz that is denied him? It could be. The Fool can be quite petty at times. But his dislike for Starling could also be read as a more unconscious reaction to her attempts to reinforce societal expectations of gender and sexuality.

It’s not clear. It doesn’t have to be clear. Hobb doesn't tell us what to think. She simply gives us the facts on the page. Starling misgenders the Fool. The Fool doesn't care for Starling. What you read out of that is a function of what you bring to the discussion; and that will change between 1998 and 2025. Regardless, however, Robin Hobb's readers are the smartest and most discerning and thoughtful of all readers, so the conversation that ensues cannot help but be smart and discerning and thoughtful. 

2. Trans vs. drag personae: Why must I truncate myself to please you? [The Golden Fool, pg 404]

Jacket illustration by John Howe

 

What makes the whole thing between the Fool and Starling even more interesting is that, in more than one way, she’s right. She's fully correct that the Fool is in love with Fitz, and although she's misgendering him, she's only doing it in the Six Duchies context. Elsewhere, in Bingtown, the Fool DOES have an identity that is female. As we learn in The Liveship Traders, the Fool is also Amber, and he is Amber in a way which seems to go beyond any kind of disguise. Amber is as real a person as the Fool is, and she is just as in love with Fitz as the Fool is. She uses Fitz's face as a model when she repairs Paragon, carving his features into the figurehead from her memory of his visage alone. Amber's got it bad for Fitz. And this discovery is the core of that awful rift between Fitz and the Fool in Golden Fool: Fitz learns about Amber, and starts to worry that the Fool he knows is another identity, no more real than Amber the woodworker in Bingtown, or Lord Golden the Jamaillian fuckboi in Buckkeep.

Fitz's discovery of the Fool's female-coded identity, and concerns over which one is 'real', can be related easily to modern discourses on transgender identity, just like the misgendering in Assassin's Quest. To the extent that anyone imagines one gender is less 'real' than another, that's just our resident dumbass Fitz. Certainly on the page Amber is never presented as anything other than a woman. And Fitz's reaction to learning about Amber has a lot in common with the furious, explosive rage that discovering a trans background can elicit in an ugly subset of our population (see the unpleasant history of the trans panic defense). We saw in Royal Assassin that Fitz does have a tendency to indulge in murderous rampages when he gets mad. It's uncomfortable to realize how much he has in common with those people who feel tricked or betrayed at discovering some intimate truth about a person, and persuade themselves that being denied access to those secrets justifies a violent response.

But to me, there’s another interpretation possible here. The Fool is not simply shifting his gender. He is not non-binary or gender fluid. He fully embraces whichever binary-coded gender he occupies at a given moment, and he is not gender fluid because when he shifts, he is shifting more than gender. He is shifting into fully distinct identities, with distinct skills and personalities, operating in separate spheres of his life. All of these facts are equally as important to the distinction of these personae as the fact that these personae have distinct gender expressions. 

And to me, that feels more like drag.

I'm going to phrase this next bit carefully, because neither trans identity nor drag culture are monoliths, and any statement I make will be inaccurate for a subset of individuals. Feel free to @ me; my social media usernames are at the bottom. But for now, here is my impression: gender transition is a change in the external expression of an identity. What was assigned at birth is left behind, and what replaces it is a new and entire person. This may not be the case for all transgender people, but it is the case for enough of them to have given rise to the term  'deadnaming': the old name, the old identity, is gone. It is dead. Long live the new.

By contrast, many people who do drag embrace a drag identity without rejecting their non-drag lives. So that brings us to the question that worries Fitz: which of the Fool's personae are ‘real’ and which are assumed? From what I’ve read about drag culture, I get the impression that this is not a simple question. An individual’s drag persona is not necessarily any less ‘real’ than the day-to-day mainstream counterpart. We’re always performing our gender — or our identity more generally — one way or another. Drag is what happens when that performativity is explicitly acknowledged, explored, and played with (Levitt et al 2018). This is why, when Fitz asks whether the Fool he has known and loved as his dearest friend is real, the Fool says, ‘You know more of the whole of me than any other person who breaths, yet you persist in insisting that all of that cannot be me. What would you have me cut off and leave behind? And why must I truncate myself to please you?’

The Fool is not one gender or another. He does not assume a gender solely as a stratagem in his travels. He is all the genders, because he is all the identities. He expresses one part of himself, or another, as the situation calls for it. And even if Fitz does know more of the truth of him than anyone else, still, even Fitz does not know all of him.

Then Fitz does his dumbassery and starts getting all het up about sex — which is a laugh, given how firmly the Fool told him not to confuse love with plumbing back in Assassin's Quest — and that lands us squarely into the realm of toxic masculinity.

3. Toxic masculinity: 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. [Fool's Fate, pg 644]

Jacket illustration by John Howe

In the same way that the Fool's identity works as a commentary on sexuality, gender, and (in my opinion) drag, the arc of Fitz and the Fool’s relationship works really well as a commentary on toxic masculinity. The OED has citations for the phrase dating back 35 years, and judging from the quotes, not much has actually changed about this particular corner of gender discourse. Consider this example from 1990:

I speak of toxic masculinity as that which damages men, women, children and the earth through neglect, abuse and violence. We seek to overcome toxic masculinity, whose tools include homophobia, by recovering the deep masculine, which is playful, spontaneous, vital . . .

Fitz’s discomfort with the Fool’s love, and his repeated insistence on worrying about the sexual potential of such a relationship, is deeply homophobic. The Fool never asked him for any kind of sexual relationship. The Fool has always known that Fitz doesn’t swing that way, and respected that in their interactions. His flirting is mere playfulness, and doesn’t bother Fitz when it happens in private. Fitz only gets uneasy when other people start commenting on it, as they do when the Fool starts playing the libertine who indulges in all sorts of depravities with his manservant. But here’s the thing: the rumors that the Fool encourages in Buckkeep are not about the Fool and Fitz. They are about Lord Golden and Tom Badgerlock. They are rumors that serve a political fiction. Fitz is happy to accept that his role of Tom Badgerlock is assumed and distinct from his true self in every respect – except, crucially, when it comes to the possibility of who he sleeps with. Who cares if everyone in Buckkeep thinks Tom Badgerlock is being bedded by Lord Golden? Well, Fitz cares. Or more precisely, Fitz’s homophobia cares.

Consider a parallel with Nighteyes, Fitz’s Wit-bonded wolf. Fitz has always been willing to publicly deny Nighteyes’s identity. He calls him a dog. He treats him as a pet in public when he cannot pretend Nighteyes doesn’t exist. He will deny a sentient creature’s intelligence, relegating him to the status of a subservient animal, and accept that as a necessary fiction for the sake of not being lynched for being Witted.¹ Ok, fine: needs must, avoid the noose. I get it. 

But you know what also will get him lynched? Being Fitzchivalry Farseer! His assumed identity of Tom Badgerlock is just as necessary for his survival as Nighteyes’s assumed identity as a dog. But where Fitz is willing to accept the dumb animal portion of that assumed identity on Nighteyes’s behalf – indeed, to insist upon it! To reinforce it with his own words and actions — nevertheless he cannot accept the ‘maybe sleeping with Lord Golden’ portion of Tom Badgerlock’s identity for himself, even when that acceptance means nothing more than letting other people gossip about it.

That’s toxic masculinity for you: it is easier to explicitly deny your best friend’s sentience than to let other people imagine you might not be fully straight.

Remember that horrible conversation in Golden Fool? The one where Fitz says, ‘I could never desire you as a bed partner. Never,’ and the Fool says, ‘We could have gone all our lives and never had this conversation. Now you have doomed us both to recall it forever' ? 

That’s also toxic masculinity for you, perpetually obsessed with sex, seeing it as the sole role of women, and absolutely forbidden between men. Toxic masculinity is why Starling is uncomfortable interacting with the Fool when it becomes clear he has no interest in bedding her. Toxic masculinity is why Starling, upon realizing that the Fool is actually pretty good at listening to her confidences, must decide he's actually a woman, because toxic masculinity disallows nonsexual intimacy with men. And thus, toxic masculinity will look at a friend whose love is unwavering and true, who has shared with you more of himself than any other person who breathes, who knows you will never have any kind of sexual interest in him, and who has never asked it of you — toxic masculinity will look at that friend, and force a conversation to say, for the avoidance of doubt: No homo, dude. 

And that brings us to the end of this character arc, in which Fitz learns the Fool has died at the hands of the Pale Lady. Fitz stays in the Outislands to retrieve the Fool’s body from the icy caverns where he was flayed and tortured to death; he uncovers the secrets from the Rooster Crown to retrieve the Fool’s self from where it had fled when he died; he swaps bodies with the Fool² so that the Fool does not need to be present in his ruined husk as Fitz takes on the agony of its damage and repairs it. All of these Fitz will do unthinkingly, because these actions — loyalty to comrades, rescue, and self sacrifice — are traditionally masculine acts.  At any point in his life Fitz would probably have done these things, if not for the Fool, then for Molly, for Nighteyes, or for Verity. Has already done something similar, actually: he accepts his own dose of tortured-to-death for Verity’s sake in Royal Assassin. Fitz has always been pretty strong on the traditionally masculine virtues. The reason I keep calling him a dumbass is because emotional intelligence is not included in that category.

So the moment that stuck with me in the years since I last read this, the culmination of Fitz’s character arc that I was looking forward to rereading, is not any of that. Instead, I waited for that moment after the rescue, the body swapping, the mechanical repair of injuries. Because in addition to the physical recovery comes the emotional toll. This scene is the middle of the night, when the Fool wakes, tortured by the remembered agonies he endured, and Fitz takes him in his arms and holds him, giving love and comfort. This is what toxic masculinity disallows; and that is what Fitz must overcome to be the kind of friend the Fool needs him to be. For all that the Fool openly admits he would not decline a sexual relationship with Fitz ('I set no boundaries on my love. None. Do you understand me?' [The Golden Fool, pg 404]), he nevertheless understands that intimacy can exist without it. Only by decoupling this knee-jerk association between intimacy and sex that runs through the heart of toxic masculinity can Fitz properly realize the closeness that has always been present between him and the Fool, and never feel less of a man for doing so.

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1 Let us take a moment to appreciate the construction of these taboos in this book. The Wit is something shameful, to be hidden and indulged in only in private, or in the safety of hidden subcultures, which develop their own norms and customs, where Old Blood is recognized as something not only harmless, but beautiful and natural. Outside that culture, however, it’s all Oh, Nighteyes? We’re just . . . very good friends. You know, as a man and a dog are in the usual way. Dogs: man’s best friend. Really we’re just friends. And roommates. Best friends and roommates. So, in Hobb’s incomparable richness of characterization, Fitz serves as a commentary on homophobia in two orthogonal ways: both in the text, with his own explicitly homophobic actions, and in the subtext, where he must exist as a queer Witted man in a society that abhors queerness the Wit.^↩

2 Fitz’s body really does seem to be kind of the town bicycle in this series. Verity has a ride in Assassin’s Quest, and now, in the very same quarry of black memory stone, the Fool is taking it for a spin of his own^↩

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References: 

Hobb, Robin. Assassin's Quest [Voyager, 1997]. 

Hobb, Robin. The Golden Fool [Voyager, 2002].

Hobb, Robin. Fool's Fate [Voyager, 2003]. 

 Levitt, H.M., Surace, F.I., Wheeler, E.E. et al. Drag Gender: Experiences of Gender for Gay and Queer Men who Perform Drag. Sex Roles 78, 367–384 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-017-0802-7 

Oxford University Press. (2023). Toxic masculinity, n. In Oxford English dictionary. Retrieved September 1, 2025, from https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/7276139079 

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

Realm of the Elderlings Project: The Tawny Man, Book 2: The Golden Fool

In which desire carries risks 

Cover illustration by John Howe

In last month’s discussion of Fool’s Errand, I discussed the complications involved in love – specifically, with relation to Fitz. This month, I’d like to have a similar discussion, but a bit more broad-reaching. I want to talk about the role of desire, and the complications it brings for everyone. 

Golden Fool is at its heart, all about desire. Yes, there is sexual desire, and we’ll get there, but so many other types of desire can drive characters’ decisions and actions, both small and large; and part of navigating the urges of desire is understanding the consequences and potential harms of satisfying them. So: let us examine some desires. We’ll start small. We’ll begin with Thick.

Thick is very intentionally written to have Down Syndrome¹. For our purposes, in this discussion of desire in Golden Fool, I will say only that he is incredibly powerful in the Skill, and that he is treated unkindly, regularly called halfwit, and indeed his own name, in this world of virtue names (King Shrewd, Prince Dutiful, etc.) reflects how he is seen². Up until Fitz takes him under his wing, Thick’s primary goal in life has been to remain unseen and unnoticed. But Thick's strength in the Skill will be useful to Prince Dutiful, and so Fitz, a Farseer to his bones, decides he can't let that go unexploited, and sets about to woo Thick to his cause. There’s a certain amount of persuasion that Fitz presents as cleverly manipulative psychology, but really, as I see it, Thick is unique in being unmanipulable. The approach that works best is when Fitz just asks him, straight out, what he wants. Thick answers, equally straightforwardly: He wants pink sugar cakes, not burned, from the kitchens. He wants a red whistle on a green ribbon, like the one his mother gave him. He wants a peacock feather, because it’s pretty. When Fitz persuades him to take a bath, Thick realizes that he likes being groomed, and having his hair cut. Thick’s desires are for simple things, but their significance is anything but simple. Small details throughout the book show that these desires reflect Thick’s past, his love for his dead mother, his own self-image; and in gratifying them and thereby winning Thick’s compliance, Fitz gains a vastly powerful ally in future plot elements. 

Yet no desire is harmless, in this book. Thick himself, in holding such humble desires, proves a weakness in Chade and Fitz’s need for secrecy. Yes, Fitz wins him over by giving him sweets and toys; but the Piebalds – those terrorists who wreak havoc on the Witted denizens of the Six Duchies both directly and indirectly, by commiting violence in their name – get to Thick first. They offer him pennies to buy sweets if he will tell them what happens in Chade's rooms, and what Chade and Fitz talk about, and what Chade calls Fitz when no one is listening. This is important because at this point no one except Chade and Kettricken know that Fitz is not Tom Badgerlock, servent to Lord Golden, but in fact that Witted Bastard, Fitzchivalry Farseer. The Piebalds stand to make serious mischief based on what they've learned from Thick, from the simple expedience of offering to gratify his simple desires (and, to be sure, threats to gut him if he tells anyone).

The more ambitious the desire, the greater the danger that comes with gratifying it. Chade’s desire for the Skill is one of the more dangerous ones. Using the Skill carries with it its own inherent desire-based element, because Skilling can be addictive. Unwary users can lose themselves entirely: their minds disintegrate and become part of the background stream of Skill that runs underneath the mundane world. Sensible fear of exactly this end was a large part of why Fitz resists Chade’s job offer to come tutor Prince Dutiful in Fool’s Errand for so many pages. However, Chade’s desire for the Skill compounds this inherent risk of personal destruction, because for him it represents more than just the immediate pleasure of the act of Skilling. Chade sees it as part of his inherited right as a bearer of Farseer blood, something that goes along with his power and political influence as Kettricken’s trusted advisor. So for Chade, the risks of misusing the Skill will not only destroy his own mind; they have implications for the future of the Six Duchies. 

More deadly still, there is humanity’s desire for dragons. The whole thrust of the Realm of the Elderlings thus far (and continuing into the future) is about the return of dragons to human lands. But dragons – whether biological, like Tintaglia from the Liveship Traders, or simulacrum, like Verity’s flock in Assassin’s Quest – are desperately dangerous. Verity’s flock, sculpted of memory stone, may rescue the Six Duchies from the Red Ship Raiders, but they will suck the humanity out of people who are shadowed by the dragons flying overhead. And Tintaglia, we have already seen, believes that humanity has no right  to freedom or self-determination in a world where dragons reign. And yet, despite these risks, humanity still desires dragons: 

The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons. When they are not there, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at a blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know. Something that was supposed to be there faded and vanished. (pg 627-628). 

It is tropey to build a story in which the plucky humans, refusing to bow to any masters, must fight for their freedom. Only Hobb can build a world in which humans are forced to bend their knee, slavishly, obsequiously, to a greater power, and make the reader think, ‘Well, I mean, after all, if it’s dragons…’

Desires are dangerous, yes. But that does not mean they should be denied. Because only by gratifying the most primal desire of them all do we make more humans. That's right! It's finally time to talk about sex.

I want to start with the Narcheska Eliania, the Outislander who has been chosen as Prince Dutiful’s arranged bride. She’s got all sorts of things going on back home that she’s got to balance in her role as affianced peace treaty token, one of which is a mysterious woman who encourages her to use her sexual wiles to bind Prince Dutiful to her will. This is deeply gross, since Eliania is only 13 or so, but it also clearly lays out how sexual desire is a tool, a weapon that Eliania can wield. And it is a dangerous weapon -- not just for the Six Duchies, but also for Eliania herself. Especially since she is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, a literal child³. Fortunately, Dutiful is not particularly interested in 13-year-olds, so everyone manages to sidestep the risks that come with gratifying sexual desire.

Sidestepping the issue of sex is also something that Fitz and the Fool have been dancing around for a few books now, but no longer. Remember, the Fool is totally, hopelessly, helplessly in love with Fitz. He has been flirting with Fitz for ages, as we saw with the whole ‘Beloved’ exchange in Fool’s Errand; he dresses him up in clothes that make Fitz look incredibly sexy; and he embodies a persona as rakish Lord Golden who chases after women and men (and boys) alike, to the extent that most of Buckkeep starts whispering about how Lord Golden is undoubtedly bedding his servant, Tom Badgerlock (i.e., Fitz). Fitz looks the other way when he can, about the teasing, but eventually he decides that Words Must Be Had about it all. Which, to be fair, is reasonable. No point letting the UST between you and your very best friend fester when it’s causing real problems in your professional life.

So Fitz forces a confrontation with the Fool, and the Fool, for all that he teases and snarks and plays games with words, does not lie. He admits that yes, actually, he desires Fitz. And in return, Fitz, here, becomes cruel. It’s one thing to clear the air, or to gently say no to a friend who confesses that they’ve caught feelings for you. It’s entirely different to force the friend to admit to the feelings, only to follow up that forced confession with something as bald as, ‘I could never desire you as a bed partner. Never.’  

The Fool responds, ‘That, too, is a thing that we both have known for years. A thing that never needed speaking, those words that I must now carry with me for the rest of my life… We could have gone all our lives and never had this conversation. Now you have doomed us both to recall it forever’ (pg 404).

This forced confession results in a rift between Fitz and the Fool, between the White Prophet and his Catalyst, that lasts for hundreds and hundreds of pages. It is the last, sharpest danger of desire. If satisfying it is dangerous, denying it can be worse. If the White Prophet and his Catalyst cannot work together to save the world, then that will lead to skies without dragons.

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1 I have already cut out hundreds and hundreds of words about how that works in this book, and indeed in the context of disability representation in general. Please feel free to have that conversation in your head, where no one will get upset at what I say or you think.^↩
2 Although I do rather wonder why he gets a virtue name. Thus far the tradition has been reserved only for nobility, and Thick has never been noble^↩
3 By even the in-world definition of child, I should add. She doesn’t reach puberty until the next book.^↩

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Reference: Hobb, Robin. The Golden Fool [Voyager, 2002].

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