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

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Fitz dreams of Nighteyes as a preface to “An Exchange of Substance,” waking as the chapter begins and assessing himself and his surroundings. He notes that Ash has come and gone again, and he purposes to check on the Fool before sleeping further. He finds the Fool convalescing, and the two confer briefly before Fitz sets out breakfast for his friend. Over the meal, they talk further, the Fool relating more of his journeys; it is an unhappy tale that takes the Fool and Prilkop to Clerres, where they are taken in and taken in, and the Fool weeps over his folly.

One of the Fool’s comments speaks to the Pale Woman, naming her as a thing made by the Servants to enact their goals, and Fitz’s mind races back over what he has known to sort in the new information he has gained. The Fool comments that Fitz’s existence and actions thwarted the long designs of the Servants to some extent, and they discuss that point before Fitz tends to the Fool’s injuries again. The experience is unpleasant but soon concluded, and talk turns more fully to healing and the mixtures of magics that have pervaded their lives.

Fitz makes to prepare for an audience with Kettricken in his role as Feldspar, but the Fool halts him by resuming his narration of his travels. He teases him as he had once done, offering what reassurance he can before lapsing into sleep.

The present chapter, particularly Fitz’s assessment of the Servants’ breeding program, calls to mind other major prognosticatory threads in fantasy and science fiction: Asimov’s psychohistory and Herbert’s spice-fueled insights. Hobb has some connections to both; I have long commented on the ways in which the Fitz-centric novels emulate the Asimovian encyclopedia-entries in their chapter-beginnings, and Hobb has geographical associations with Herbert. The selective breeding programs, the cold calculations, the access to multiple possible futures and the refinement of predictions from years of gathered observations all speak to a similar narrative construction among the three (and, doubtlessly, others, but I am limited in my observations to what I have read often and know well).

In Asimov and Herbert, the protagonists work to gain control of the prognostication; such is not apt to be the case in Hobb, although some of that is because they already have some degree of control over it. The Fool has been, and it seems that Bee is, a White Prophet, whose dreams foretell events to come; they already have learned what awaits, at least to some extent. The rest is foreshadowed in Fitz’s reaction to the Fool’s description; he is horrified at the implications, and Fitz’s horror often results in things dying, not always peacefully or swiftly.

As in the earlier works, Hobb’s corpus invites consideration of the tension between fate and free will. I’m not as up on the philosophical work done in that line as I probably ought to be (although I will plead that there is only so much time, and I do have other things that demand my attention and study), so I don’t know that I am well positioned to explicate the parallels and borrowings in that regard. I’m not sure that there’s been much work done that way, either (although I do have some more items to review for the Fedwren Project that might speak to that end). It seems a project worth undertaking, though, even if it’s not one of my many scholarly somedays…

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