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

Another content warning for the chapter: discussion of child abuse / neglect, torture.

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After a Servant’s commentary about the Fool, one noting his youthful intransigence and certain measures attempted and suggested to address the same, “The Glove” returns to Bee and Shun as they flee the fracas between the Servants and their Chalcedean hirelings. Shun directs Bee as they flee, and they come at last to take a tentative rest. A cold night passes for them.

In the morning, Bee and Shun press on after some disagreement about what path to take and why. They proceed with difficulty and in cold hunger, and Shun divulges some of her personal history. Bee ruminates on it as she takes a turn breaking trail for Shun, and they come at last to a place to rest for the evening.

Bee wakes in the night, prompted by the echo of Nighteyes within her. One of the Chalcedean hirelings, Kerf, approaches in seeming kindness, offering escort and food. Kerf relates some of his own history and makes to attend to Bee and Shun, and they sleep.

The next day dawns with Kerf providing more food for Bee and Shun, and the trio set out again. Reluctantly, Bee and Shun follow Kerf as he leads them along, and they realize that he has led them back to Dwalia under Vindeliar’s power. Dwalia takes them in hand, noting the end of Bee’s deception, and she bids them be taken through a Skill-pillar. Bee acts, allowing Shun to slip free before she is dragged into the stone of the portal.

The present chapter does quite a bit. For one thing, in its prefatory materials, it brings back to mind the ways in which the Fool had been marked by those in Clerres, tattooed in his youth. In the earlier discussion of those marks, the Fool reports them as inflicted in an attempt to render him not-White. (As I write the words, I recall some earlier comments that motion towards Hobb’s use of tattooing as a trope, and I have to wonder about Manichean allegory and race politics–more scholarly somedays, I think.) While he might well have recalled them as thus inspired, the broader issues of control that are reported in the prefatory materials remain…chilling.

It’s not the only thing in the present chapter that is so. Aside from the weather depicted, there is a more to indicate the ruthlessness of the Servants and their ilk in dealing with those who resist them. As Dwalia and her company prepare to take Bee through the Skill-pillar, she produced “a single strange glove. [Bee] could not tell what it was made from. The hand of it was pale and thing, almost translucent, but to three of its fingertips a shriveled silvery button had been attached” (521). Another of the injuries inflicted on the Fool is accounted for in the description; in Fool’s Assassin, Chapter 30, Fitz notes when he surveys the Fool’s injuries after stabbing him that the fingers with which he had touched the Skill had been damaged, the magic-tinged tips taken away. It would seem they found another home–a macabre little touch that I do not think I caught in my earlier readings.

It’s a good sign when a book gives you something new upon rereading.

Another note, and on another topic entirely: I’ve remarked many times before about Hobb’s use of emblematic names in the Elderlings novels, something overtly discussed as at work among the higher social strata of the Six Duchies and seemingly present among other social groups in the milieu, as well. With that, I have to reflect on Kerf, whose name Merriam-Webster reports as meaning either “a slit or notch made by a saw or cutting torch” or “a slit or notch made by a saw or cutting torch.” In either event, the name indicates that something is missing because it has been removed, and I have to think, given the character’s self-report of his personal history and what has been done to him both by his native society and by Vindeliar at Dwalia’s command, it is an apt name.

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