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

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After a commentary from Chade about the decline of the Elderlings and the legendary alliance between them and the early Farseers, “Chalced” begins with Wolf-Father speaking to Bee of his being carried by the scruff of his neck as she emerges from the Skill-pillar into a hollow in the ground. Dwalia and the others–including Reppin–are crammed into the hollow with her, and Reppin finds herself pushed back into the stone as Wolf-Father helps Bee ground herself. She assesses her situation as Dwalia and the others fret and begin to panic.

At Wolf-Father’s urging, Bee attempts to pass back through the Skill-pillar, to no avail; at Wolf-Father’s further urging, Bee sleeps. When she wakes, Bee assesses her situation again, and she is somewhat taken aback by Kerf’s blunt discussion of their prospects and offer to kill her rather than let her suffer through what will come. Bee demurs, and the sounds of life outside the hollow begin to reach the group. Light begins to filter into the hollow, revealing it as the result of a collapse rather than a deliberate construction, and Kerf manages to move the fallen stones enough for Bee to slip out. She hides and watches as the others emerge, and Kerf notes his recognition of their location. Bee takes advantage of the others’ distraction to hide herself better, free from them but in a strange place.

The present chapter is not the first to bear the title “Chalced”; a chapter late in Blood of Dragons does so, as well. It is tempting to read the present chapter against the earlier, the coincidence of titles alone suggesting it as a short project that might well be done; the content of the present chapter, emerging from the content of the earlier, affirms it. I’m not going to do so at this point; it is very much the thing that makes for a decent scholarly someday, perhaps a good thing to take up in a post to this webspace that is not part of the rereading series, proper. I do always need to find outlets for my desire to write, after all, and turning to something resembling literary critical practice provides them in plenty. How the rest of my life will allow for such, though, I am not sure–hence the “someday” bit.

Anyway, the present chapter is relatively brief, only some eleven pages in my copy. (Again, I really need to get a cohesive run of the Realm of the Elderlings novels to see how the page numbers all line up. I really do think there’s something to the chapter-length, although I acknowledge that that might well be me digging deeper to find something than is needful or even useful. Such is life.) It does a good job, I think, of reinforcing something that a number of prior chapters in the Realm of the Elderlings novels point up: the danger of Skill-pillars. Repeatedly throughout the works, mention is made of the perils of traveling to unknown pillars, the thought of what would happen if the destination pillar was submerged (as here), broken, or buried. Bee and her captors–save Reppin–were lucky in the event (although so much could be expected, Bee being a deuteragonist and so needing to be around for the duration), but they need not have been. And the fact of Reppin being pushed back into the pillar…there are some implications there that stand some interrogating, I think.

Perhaps another scholarly someday is in order for that.

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