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Comments from Bee’s journal about her journal and her reaction to the Fool reading it preface “Vivacia‘s Voyage.” The chapter follows Bee and her companions as the Vivacia bears them away from the ruin of Clerres, the liveship communing with her briefly. More survivors of the dragons’ attack, including Althea, are recovered, and Bee marks the shift in how others relate to the Fool-as-Amber. She also muses on her own multiplicity of names and identities.

As the voyage continues, Perseverance tends to Bee, and she spends much time sleeping. This occasions concern among her companions, but Bee is reticent in discussing what befell her. Perseverance relates as much of his own story and Fitz’s to her as he can, and Bee is comforted by the knowledge of her father’s love.

Later, the liveship summons Bee to her foredeck, where Brashen and Althea watch their son suffer. After some discussion, Bee works another Skill-healing on their son, mending many of his injuries. Amber arrives at the foredeck with warnings, and Bee reluctantly accedes to them. As she begins to recover from the experience, Amber and the liveship argue briefly, and Amber later confers with Bee about her abilities. Bee turns the conversation to the love between Fitz and the Fool, and the Fool attempts to turn it to her training as a White Prophet. Bee vents her resentment at the Fool, lying to him about Fitz’s words.

I do note with some pride having gotten to half a thousand entries in my rereading series. I do not expect at this point that nearly so many remain–but I have as much expectation about the days I have lived and will live, so I suppose that’s not something out of line. In both cases, there is still a fair bit for me to do, and I do look forward to getting at least some of it done. (Not that I expect something to happen that would prevent it, mind, but the possibility always exists.) There are many somedays.

Part of me wants to find the way time moves in the present chapter to be overly rushed. Some of that, much of it, is simply that I want to spend more time with the characters, my affective-reading self being as it is; I’ve spent a long time with Hobb’s work, invested much in it (though not so much as some, certainly), and it’s a familiar comfort that I don’t think I’m entirely out of line for wanting to keep hold of for a little longer. In terms of narrative structure, however, it makes sense; the voyage away from Clerres is not, itself, a focal point, but simply transit between focal points, a hastening towards a denouement over which there is no need to linger. It needs done, and there are a few items of interest along the way, but this is an instance where the destination matters far more than the journey. (That I have gotten sucked into rereading at length as I have written this is also a factor; I know what carries me away.)

To continue on with the affective reading: I’ve commented more than once about the ways in which my experiences correspond with Fitz’s, particularly as regards his interactions with Bee, and I find that the present chapter shows Bee growing in some ways I see my own daughter moving. She’s not got much trouble with people trying to stand in loco parentis with her, which is good, but she does have a way with words, and when she decides she will be sharp with them, I find swiftly where I am quite tender, indeed.

Then again, if I cannot be tender with my daughter…

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A brief adage from Chalced precedes “Warm Water.” As the chapter itself begins, Nighteyes complains of boredom as he is obliged to wait with Fitz for death to come. Fitz notes being surprised to still live, rehearsing his situation in some detail. He and Nighteyes confer internally, the wolf urging him to make a decision and act upon it rather than simply waiting, and Fitz searches what he can reach for some tool to help him. He encounters the titular warm water and is surprised again, attempting to determine its source. Belatedly, he realizes it is a bit of Elderling magic, and he settles into reverie and self-pity for which the wolf rebukes him.

Fitz soon finds out, the hard way, that Chade’s exploding powder can detonate underwater, spurred by the Elderling magic, and the Silver that he had carried splashes all over him. Nighteyes reminds him afterward that the Silver has afforded Verity and the Fool abilities to reshape and rework objects, and Fitz applies himself to reshaping his surroundings to permit his escape. So freed, Fitz slowly pushes forward in an attempt to reunite with the Fool and Bee, and he recognizes the impact his exercise of magic has had upon his body.

At length, Fitz emerges into open air and sees the ruin of Clerres. He also sees the Vivacia pulling away, and he attempts without success to Skill to Bee. Fitz further spies Motley, and Nighteyes remarks that the crow has seen him. He and the crow confer brokenly, and the crow delivers food to him. Drinking from a spring afterward, Fitz encounters Prilkop, who shares food with him amid an awkward conversation. Fitz learns much of recent events from it, and Prilkop mourns what good there had been in Clerres that has been lost with its destruction.

The two part with respect but not friendship, and Fitz finds Capra in the night. An assassin yet, he takes fatal vengeance for the Fool and for Bee, then departs.

The brief prefatory comments put me in mind of JC 2.2.34-35, the comment that “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / the valiant never taste of death but once.” I’ve written before about Shakespearean correspondences in Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings corpus, if with a different focus and a narrow scope due both to the structures of conference papers and the fact that fewer of works existed in the corpus at the time; it is, again, perhaps another scholarly someday that I would return to and expand upon said conference paper with the fuller works in place. That there should be such evocations is unsurprising; there is a reason that so much ink is spilled across so much time about how Shakespeare pops up after himself, and given the privileged position Shakespeare’s works continue to occupy in such conceptions of English-language literary canons that persist, that Hobb would make use of such resonances, consciously or not, is almost inevitable.

The latter parts of the chapter command some attention. The ending, with its comment about the half-chicken Fitz purloins from the slain Capra, strikes me as particularly funny. There’s something about the juxtaposition of the simple pleasure in tasty food and the grim, magically-enhanced work for which Fitz has long been trained and in which he has been reportedly adept that prompted laughter from me–although I admit to being primed for such things, having been steeped in Jenkinsian lore and having written a paper I wish had been published but that led to some useful tutorial materials, at least. And perhaps it is the case that such bits of humor point towards expectations about primary audiences, as well, another in a long series of scholarly somedays.

I am taken, too, by Prilkop’s near-fawning over Capra in the wake of the destruction of Clerres. That Prilkop prizes parts of his ancient home has been clear for several chapters, and he is not in error to point out that there were many in Clerres who could not rightly be held accountable for the many heinous misdeeds done by the Servants, their chosen Prophets, and the cult surrounding both. But for him not only to take delight in people surviving the dragons, but also to lionize Capra’s assumption of unitary leadership and to believe her promise of return to older ways (716), strikes me as…naïve, at best. Given the color dynamics at work (and acknowledging the ways in which earlier portions of the Realm of the Elderlings corpus), I find myself in mind of Uncles Tom and Ruckus, and it’s a markedly uncomfortable line of thought for me. That it is presented as a negative helps to some degree, but that there is still the invocation of such a stereotype…as I note, it’s not comfortable reading for me.

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