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

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After an excerpt from Patience’s early writings about Fitz, “Time and Again” opens to Bee waking from a night of uneasy and unrestful sleep to the imprecations of her attendant, Careful. Changes to her appearance and presentation are noted, and the approach of Winterfest is marked. Bee reflects on her parents’ joy in the holiday, and she comes down to breakfast as Fitz and Riddle discuss the latter’s departure and travel plans. Shun and Lant join the trio at meal and insinuate themselves into the trip, which Bee dislikes, and Shun tarries long.

The trip to a nearby market town is described, and Bee enjoys her part of it. In the town, Bee finds herself flattered at Fitz’s attentions to her, and she delights in the holiday atmosphere. At length, however, prophecy begins to overtake her, and Fitz begins to grow wary of those around. Amid his growing concerns, he notices Bee attending to dogs bred for sport, and rage begins to overtake him that Riddle cannot stop. Fitz emphatically rebukes the dog-seller and the crowd that had gathered to watch his gory antics, and the surrounding tension only slowly subsides.

As Fitz, Riddle, and Bee head off, Bee again notices a particular beggar. While they eat, Bee pointedly commends Fitz’s actions with the dog-seller, leaving the men somewhat taken aback.

There is, in the prefatory materials, something that provokes what I have found to be dangerous thoughts in me: the might-have-been. While I readily acknowledge the affect and imprecision inherent in such readings, I find myself verging on such considerations, myself, as I read the reported in-milieu words of Patience (implied to have been found by Bee on one of her excursions through Withywoods); while I do not necessarily look on what might have been had I taken a child into my life that I could have but did not–my daughter is my daughter, and I am fortunate to have had her in my life as long as she has had hers–I do find myself, and entirely too often, considering what might have been had I but done some thing differently, had I applied to one more graduate program, had I written one more paper instead of grading one more class’s worth of them, that kind of thing.

Less often, but not more helpfully, I have thought on what might have been had I been a better man than I am, had I gone with my family to do a given thing rather than staying home, sitting hunched over at my desk and working. There has too rarely been a “later” for me to get to it, but the work has always continued. Even now, there is work I could be doing and perhaps should be doing instead of typing out these words, and if I am alone in my home to type them now, how often have I held myself apart from what my wife and daughter were doing, from what those who might have been my friends were doing, in favor of getting some task or another done that somehow never shortened the litany of things I needed to be doing?

But I digress, again as often.

With the book approaching its end–there are only five chapters and an epilogue left in the present volume–it is clear that some massive action is coming. The return of Fitz’s immense capacity for violence is one sign of it. That the present chapter focuses on preparations for Winterfest, with which the main action of the novel begins, is another such sign; by echoing the beginning of the text, the present chapter suggests the end of it, a close of exposition that invites the onset of action. And the attention paid to the one beggar in town indicates that said beggar is (and I do not apologize for the pun in context) a catalyst for that action.

Even without the benefit of rereading, I think a sense of foreboding could be justified. Hobb is writing Fitz, after all, and while he is no Miles O’Brien, Fitz does seem to come in for a lot of suffering along the way.

If you like the kind of writing I do, maybe you could hire me to write for you!

Or you can send your support along directly!