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

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Following commentary from Chade about medicinal uses of dragon-parts, “Blood” begins with Fitz relating a remarkably vivid image to describe the sensation of his plunging through the standing stones and of reconstructing himself and Chade as they travel poorly therein. He emerges into the world, pulled thence by Dutiful and his coterie, and as he returns to normal consciousness, he makes such report of his experiences and recent events as his condition allows him to do. He subsequently stumbles through initial tending to his injuries, and he sleeps under pharmaceutical influence.

Fitz wakes to greater certainty and reaches out through the Skill, conferring with Dutiful and Nettle, although both urge him to restrain his Skill because he is not yet in control of himself. Nettle joins him in person, helping him to steady his magic, and the two confer briefly before food arrives and Fitz’s attention focuses entirely on it. After, Dutiful lays out to Fitz what actions he has taken and is taking, and Fitz gains greater control over himself, although with effort. Dutiful and Nettle also inform Fitz of what has befallen the Fool.

Fitz makes his way to the Fool, assessing his old friend as Kettricken looks on, and he quizzes Ash on what he has given the Fool. Ash reports in detail, and Fitz learns that the Fool has been dosed with dragon’s blood purloined from a supply meant for Andronicus Kent.

The prefatory materials to the present chapter, as often, attract my attention. In the present case, two major reasons obtain for their doing so. The first is the comment that “this scroll has been translated many times, to the extent that seventeen of the [twenty-seven substantiated] remedies make no sense,” which is given an accompanying example. While I know that the commentary is fabricated–and I have more to say about such constructions elsewhere–I also know that the kind of nonsense presented is the result of word-to-word translation, rather than sentence-to-sentence or idiomatic renderings. In the long-ago days when I had students and had occasion to discuss such things with them, I would ask Spanish speakers in my class if “¿Quién cortó el queso?” had the same valence as “Who cut the cheese?”; the answer was always a laughing “no.”

Chade’s comments about the “fifty-two unsubstantiated remedies” are also on-point. The regard for attestation that he uses as a rubric for contrasting the unsubstantiated remedies with the substantiated ones is, perhaps, something of an analytical bias (because, after all, user testimonies can be faked), but it is at least something. Too, the comments about manuscript positions–the unsubstantiated remedies are described as add-ons in the text from which Chade works–check out with what I have seen in discussions of even such august works as Beowulf; there’s a whole big thing about how the section of the poem dealing with the dragon is someone else’s work than who wrote of Grendel and his mother. So there is more than a bit of verisimilitude at work in the prefatory materials, which I appreciate seeing.

I note in the main line of the present chapter a return of one of Hobb’s narrative techniques, one previously deployed on the Skill-road to the stone-quarry and which has occasioned some readerly comment. In the present chapter, as in the earlier, Fitz’s experience with the Skill leaves him confused and befuddled, finding it difficult to conceive of thoughts and to convey them to others in any way they can easily parse. The present chapter, which notes Chade doing much the same thing, suggests that it is the Skill itself that has such an effect, rather than it simply being Fitz’s limits. I note, too, the similarities between Fitz’s narrated experience and the Fool’s report of the Skill-silvering; the intense, intimate focus on even the smallest details is another thing that seems to be of the Skill rather than of its users. I am put in mind of other media; Hobb here seems to be using a particular trope, although she uses it well in the present chapter–and I am taken with the notion that Fitz finds himself lessened by his return to himself after his Skill experience. There is something worth exploring there…

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