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

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Following Dwalia’s comments about Prilkop, “Aftermath” begins with Fitz considering the fallout from the fight with Ellik and his few surviving subordinates. Fitz issues orders to Foxglove and his own guards, and a search for Bee and Shine ensues. As Fitz goes about his part of it, Riddle assists him and confronts him about Lant and about his own inclusion in the drugged group Fitz had left behind, and, after some discussion, the two are accorded.

The results of Fitz’s and Riddle’s search are noted, and they are unhelpful. The pair call at nearby Ringhill Keep, which is described as they receive accommodations. Fitz, drug-addled, muddles through the meal, after which he and Riddle are taken aside by the resident Skill-user and informed that they are to return to Buckkeep with all due haste. Fitz apologizes to Riddle for having led to his rebuke, which apology Riddle sets aside, and the pair prepare to return to face Nettle and Dufitul.

The next morning, Fitz, Riddle, Lant, and Perseverance set out for Buckkeep, Fitz’s guard in tow. Reports of the previous night are offered, and Lant voices his complaints to Fitz for ill-treatment. As they proceed, Fitz and Riddle confer, and discord breaks out among the guard. They also find Shine along the way, and Fitz learns to his sorrow that Bee has been taken through a Skill-pillar.

The introductory material to the chapter once again attracts my attention. I find it interesting that Dwalia describes Prilkop as “the Black Prophet,” a description echoing that under which he was introduced to the Realm of the Elderlings corpus (see here and here). I find it also interesting that the description comes amid commentary that casts some aspersion onto Prilkop: “Since he was discovered as a natural-born rather than bred at Clerres, his time at our school was too short to be certain of his loyalty” (523). Both lead me once again to think about Manichean allegory at work, as well as the ways in which portions of the Realm of the Elderlings seem to me to refigure early US experience (about which some comments are here). I imagine that some additional updates to my earlier work will be in order, and I imagine also that I may have to review some of my older notes to reground myself in some of the prevailing theoretical discourses in which I’d need to work to follow up on this particular set of scholarly somedays.

There’s some there there.

In any event, the text of the main chapter is relatively brief, some thirteen pages in the printing I have (I really need to sit down for a while with a cohesive print-run of the Elderlings novels; there’s something in the chapter-lengths). It reads to me as being a pivot, separated out from other materials for sense and to allow greater focus on other events but still needing more development than a simple gloss would permit. Fitz’s recognition of his errors, his faults, and the ways in which those faults impact both others and the regard others have for him deserves attention, certainly, and I am put in mind of “filler episodes” in a number of television series. I note that many such episodes become some of the most favorite, though, as they tend to permit the kind of character development that receives much approval and that, frankly, many “literary” novels focus on.

I’m not upset to see it.

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