Read the previous entry in the series here.
Read the next entry in the series here.

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Following an extended report from Reyall to Detozi about the changing situation surrounding the bird-keepers and tightening security measures, “Passing Ships” begins with Hest considering his changed and deteriorated situation, put to hard use by his assailant. The assailant’s methods convince Hest that he has been only a dilettante, and he finds himself placed unhelpfully amid an ongoing Chalcedean conspiracy that takes him and a number of others upriver aboard one of the new “impervious” ships, but not the one pursuing the Tarman towards Kelsingra. Hest’s complicity is discovered, and other prisoners begin to rise against him, and he finds himself conscripted into servitude by the Chalcedeans aboard ship, realizing he is alone and abandoned.

As the voyage upstream continues, Hest continues to ruminate on his situation, his thoughts souring on Sedric. His reverie is broken by the approach of the ship that had pursued the Tarman, asking for aid in the wake of having been beset by the dragons outside Kelsingra. Hest is sent belowdecks to ponder what has befallen.

Elsewhere, Tintaglia flies again, her path away from Trehaug traced. She muses angrily on Chalced as she flies, though she is buoyed up by the realization that the dragons have reached Kelsingra. Amid her pain, she feeds, and she lapses unto an uneasy sleep.

Reading the chapter this time, I find myself of mixed feeling toward Hest. He remains largely unsympathetic, musing on what he had wrongly thought himself to be and raging at Sedric and Alise for what are, ultimately, his own actions. At the same time, as he is confronted with substantial physical violence, Hest’s compliance with the demands of his Chalcedean assailant is eminently understandable. Even so, though, he works toward the peril of his fellow Traders, something for which he is rightly rebuked…it’s hard to say that he didn’t have much of most of what happens to him coming, but it’s also hard to say that anyone, fictional or otherwise, deserves the kind of treatment he receives–and which all too many people in all too many parts of the world have endured and still endure, as must be recognized.

The problem I continue to have is with the ways in which Hest reinforces long-standing stereotypes about homosexual men. I can see an argument made that his mistreatment and the ongoing disfavorable presentation (for example, here) serve to comment upon the problems of the stereotype, that the way Hest is treated serves as a rebuke of the tropes he embodies, although I would note that Sedric is similarly presented early on (reference here, for example), and he finds at-least partial redemption. Such might mean that Hest serves as a counter-example to Sedric, and it is the case that Sedric is not alone among the homosexual men in the series in finding narrative valuation. So perhaps the message is that adherence to the tropes of dandyism is the problem, although that message presents its own difficulties, and I am not sufficiently skilled anymore to untangle them, if ever I was.

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