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

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After a description of Clerres reported to Chade, “The Strategy” begins with Fitz waking up to the crow, Motley, haranguing him for food and flight. After tending to the bird, Fitz reaches out through the Skill to Chade and finds him dreaming and disoriented. Nettle rebukes him through the Skill, and Dutiful summons him by that same agency. As Fitz considers his response, his anger at his situation grows, and he quashes it as he attires himself in a manner befitting his station.

Suitably attired, Fitz makes to answer Dutiful’s summons, but he is waylaid along the way by Foxglove, a former commander of the guard unit that had formed around Kettricken in her early days at Buckkeep and in which he himself had served for a time. The pair reminisce briefly before Fitz accompanies her to a guards’ mess. There, Fitz finds himself suddenly presented with a guard unit wearing the emblem of a charging buck long ago assigned him by Verity. Foxglove introduces some of her own kin, wearing the livery of Fitz’s new guard unit, and, after some Skilling with Nettle and Dutiful, Fitz accepts their oaths and asks for Foxglove’s own, naming her the captain of his guard.

After Fitz is able to gracefully exit the impromptu ceremony, he attends on Dutiful, Nettle, Kettricken, and Chade, the last of whom shows his age and injuries. Reports are exchanged and counsel taken, and Fitz’s own condition is noted with some concern. Plans for how to search for Bee and Shun are made, and the King, Skillmistress, and Kettricken leave to begin to enact them. Alone, then, Fitz and Chade confer about private events, Fitz voicing concerns about predestination. Their talk turns to dragons’ blood, and Chade notes Shun’s strength in the Skill. Chade reluctantly accepts the attentions of a healer, and Fitz moves to address the terms under which he does so.

Returning to the hidden suite where the Fool is kept, Fitz is startled by the appearance of a young woman–one Spark, who is the truth of Ash, who explains herself to him. The Fool is hurt by the deception, although Fitz seems to accept the explanation offered. As Spark then moves to summon Chade’s preferred healer, Fitz searches out his own medicines for his old mentor, and he and the Fool confer about Spark. The pair determine to talk together again, and Fitz takes his leave.

On his way back to Chade, Fitz encounters Dutiful’s sons, King-in-Waiting Integrity and Prince Prosper. An awkward conversation ensues and is soon concluded, and Fitz returns to Chade. The old assassin is in decline, his mind wandering as Fitz attends to him, and Nettle bustles him out of the room, informing him of the treatment that must follow for Chade and the need for his exclusion therefrom. Reluctantly, Fitz accedes.

As I reread the present chapter, which overtly calls back to earlier events, I find myself annoyed at myself for some of the way in which I gloss the events of earlier chapters. Had I been more thorough with listing names than I was, I would have an easier time of things now. That said, a summary should gloss details; it exists to make a brief account, after all, and offering all of the details means it cannot be shorter. Too, while a summary can be presented as an issue of fair use, especially when it is accompanied by explanation and commentary that run longer than it does, the more that is reproduced directly in the summary, the less fair the use is. I do not want to exceed what is fair, in this or in my other endeavors, so there is some tension…but I could have done better with character names than I did. And than I am likely to do, moving forward.

I find myself also once again uneasy with the Fool’s reaction to gender fluidity. Given the Fool’s own easy movements among presentations of masculinity and femininity, the long-standing failure to consider that the Unexpected Son might be a daughter sat oddly with me; the vehement reaction to the revelation that the boy, Ash, is a performed persona of the girl, Spark, seems even more so. (I do note, though, the parallel to Fitz’s own reaction to the revelation of Amber. Perhaps that underscores what’s going on, that the Fool has taken on some of Fitz’s less admirable ideas. It seems erratic if so, however.) Fitz’s acceptance of Spark’s explanation makes more sense to me, in fact; for one, he does seem to have a soft spot for children (Hap is but one example), and for another, Fitz has long known that Chade is not unaccustomed to doing such things in his own clandestine work. I remain…uncomfortable with it–not the fluidity, but the reactions to it of characters who seem to me as would have other reactions. But that may just be me.

I am more comfortable with the guard company coalescing around Fitz and the ceremonies related thereto. I’m a sucker for such things, honestly, for the presentation of lauds and honors in heavily symbolic contexts; indeed, for a while, I’d thought about how I could get work in the US Office of Protocol. (It’s one of many things that did not happen, like my being a band director or a college professor.) I am overly sentimental, to boot; heartfelt grand gestures get to me. (It’s been a problem before; I’ve been manipulated in such ways on occasion, taking at face value things that were, in the event, merely pro forma. Such cynicism as I evidence has some justification, after all.) I’ll admit that my reading of the ceremony does tend towards the medievalist–go figure that one out–and I’ve picked a post-image to suit that, but I have to wonder–go figure that one out–whether there’s some Native American practice being emulated in the specifics of the ceremony. I’m not versed enough in such things to be able to say so or affirm not, of course, and it is the case that Hobb remains within the Tolkienian fantasy tradition even as she ranges outside it…I’ll hope to see someone more up on such things than I am or can be take up the discussion.

They’re not all scholarly somedays for me.

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