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

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After a missive concerning Lant, “A Childhood” opens with Fitz lamenting Bee. He notes the slow progress of Bee’s growth, Molly’s deepening fixation on her younger daughter, and his own unease and difficulties. Fitz and Molly confer about their daughter, and Fitz remains puzzled by Bee’s seeming lack of development despite a good appetite. He also remains vexed by her clear rejection of him, and he and Moly discuss what is to be done with Bee when they grow old.

Time passes, and Bee continues to grow as Molly and Fitz keep her to themselves. Hap visits at intervals, as his life as a minstrel permits, bringing gifts for his foster-sister, and Nettle calls in often, although she also despairs at her sister’s status. Molly takes Bee with her about her daily routines, however, and teaches her as she did her other children, and Bee begins to attempt speech.

More time passes, Bee growing, and Fitz’s and Molly’s lives centering more and more fully on her, although Fitz recognizes himself as being at some remove from his daughter. At length, Bee approaches Fitz while he works on a manuscript, and, through Molly, she asks for paper, pen, and ink. Provided them, she illustrates a lifelike bee and writes her name, to the surprise of both her parents. Fitz considers some of the implications thereof, and he Skills to Chade a request for more writing supplies.

The present chapter, brief though it is (some twelve pages in the edition of the text I’m reading), glosses several years, bringing Bee from swaddled infancy to the age of seven and the evidence of some agency. Among the events presented in the chapter, the visits from Hap are of particular interest to me. Since the introduction of Starling Birdsong in Assassin’s Quest, the Six Duchies novels have made note both of the itinerant lifestyle of the minstrels and of the relaxation of mores with regard to them. In effect, they have license to be different than the general populace; it follows, then, that they are more apt to be tolerant of and respectful of difference than are members of the general populace. That Hap would be one of Bee’s favorites early on, then, does not seem so strange a thing.

I am struck, too, by the invocation of Thick in the present chapter. Although the current text speaks of the character with some respect, it was not always the case, as noted here. The invocation comes in the context of Bee’s depiction in ways that read to my eye as glosses of descriptions of behaviors associated with the autism spectrum. (The phrasing is as it is in part because I am the wrong kind of doctor to offer any diagnoses–and even if I were the right kind, diagnosis from narration is chimerical at best.) And it joins discussion of the Rain Wilds Chronicles’ dragons, here, in suggesting the usefulness of a disability-studies reading of the Realm of the Elderlings corpus. I’ve noted before, of course, that my own expertise does not lend itself toward undertaking such a project, although I’d be thrilled to see how it might be or has been addressed.

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