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

This is another chapter that discusses sexual assault and torture.

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After an excerpt from Bee’s dream journals, “Full Sails” begins with a return to Bee as she remains Dwalia’s captive. She assesses her situation aboard ship and her confinement, noting overheard conversations and plotting to escape Dwalia and her company. Part of the plot involves accommodating Vindeliar, who reveals more of Clerres’s organization and beliefs. Bee almost exposes herself to his magics in a moment of inattentive compassion, but she masters herself and learns more of the limitations of his abilities.

As Bee considers further what she has learned and overhears yet more, some news of the Pirate Isles and what faces merchants traveling through them, Vindeliar makes to join her. Bee presses the man for more information, and he reluctantly admits that the Unexpected Son is a potential threat to Clerres. Vindeliar comes to believe Bee is using the information to change things unacceptably, however, and soon has Kerf restrain her, taking her below. In confinement, she challenges Dwalia again, only for Dwalia to relate what she did do the Fool and what awaits Bee in Clerres.

The ship on which Bee travels as Dwalia’s captive, beset by weather, pitches, knocking Vindeliar unconscious. Bee attempts to suborn Kerf and attacks Dwalia. Vindeliar regains consciousness, however, and resumes control of Kerf, who removes Bee from Dwalia. In the ensuing fracas, Bee escapes into the bowels of the ship.

The present chapter is helpful in laying out more of the structure of Clerres. The detail that the Servant in the north tower passes down a name is of interest–although it must be noted that the character providing the information, Vindeliar, is not wholly reliable as a narrator. The novels in which he appears make clear that his perceptions and understandings are sharply limited and curated, so it is not necessarily the case that what he says can be taken entirely at face value, even aside from Vindeliar being Bee’s direct captor, whose words should not be trusted for that reason alone.

I am reminded as I reread the chapter of the idea of the butterfly effect. It’s a common enough concept that I don’t think I need to elucidate it here, but, as I have looked back over the bits of this rereading, I find that I have not noted it earlier, and I really ought to have done so. The Fool, as memory serves, remarks at many points throughout the Realm of the Elderlings novels that small changes end up making big differences; a metaphor used at one point (where, exactly, escapes me at the moment; there are many conversations between Fitz and the Fool) is a small rock put in the path of a wheel that forces the wheel’s path to shift (with admitted unpleasantness for the rock). That is, the Fool makes much of small changes exerting ongoing effects–the butterfly effect, in brief.

There’s enough related imagery in the novels to further the reading, of course. There is, for one example, Bee’s whispered verse to Fitz in “My Own Voice” in Fool’s Assassin, and there’s Nettle’s handling of Tintaglia at the end of Golden Fool; both associate Fitz’s daughters with butterflies, their wings making storms happen far away and later on. The life-cycles of the dragons are strangely mimetic of butterflies (and, admittedly, other insects), and I recall that the Fool seems to employ such imagery from time to time. I’ll admit that I wasn’t reading for such details and that I probably ought to have been…but I doubt this is the last time I’ll work through the Realm of the Elderlings novels, so I may well return to it again.

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