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

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Another account of a particular prophecy precedes “Hand and Foot,” which opens with harsh conversation among the Four as Bee listens, considering her situation before she is taken away. The advice to “Never do that which you can’t undo, until you’ve perceived what you can’t do once you’ve done it” (476) is voiced again, and Capra takes charge of matters, explaining why she does so.

Bee is locked in a cell again, her progress to that point described. As the Four lock her away, Prilkop, who is also locked away there, speaks to them challengingly but receives no response. After they depart, Bee sees to herself as she can and weeps. Prilkop speaks to her, then, and she passes a sorrowful night.

The next morning, Prilkop again attempts conversation with Bee, and she relates a version of her story to him. Prilkop answers her story with his understanding of surrounding events, as well as the utterly unforeseen continuation of Fitz and the Fool in the world after the former’s death and resurrection. Prilkop acknowledges that Bee’s arrival portends a massive upheaval, and he lapses into silence.

That Hobb once again makes fairly explicit reference in the present chapter to events in previous chapters is once again something I appreciate about her writing. That there is such call-back in a series of novels that makes much of prognostication helps to make things foreshadowing across decades of work (Assassin’s Apprentice was published in 1996; Assassin’s Fate in 2017, more than twenty years later), something that strikes me as being entirely thematically appropriate.

(I acknowledge that I’ve not done enough in this rereading series to connect themes across chapters and works. Part of the problem of working on it across years and with less focus than a more formal academic treatment–which is the kind of treatment that would bear out such connections–would expect is that I don’t always remember from session to session of work on the project what all I’ve done. Too, I’ve realized as I’ve gotten further and further into the thing, as I’ve refined my approach and expanded on my work, that I’ve not been as consistent or as detailed in indexing as I probably ought to have been. I have ideas about what to do, but whether I will ever have the time to enact them is an open question.)

There are some tantalizing things that come up for me as I reread the chapter. Prilkop’s long history is something hinted at across novels, its exceptional length being teased but not necessarily confirmed (I am not alone, I find, in wondering if Prilkop had once been called Hoquin, mentioned here, here, and here); whether Hobb will ever take up a project of expounding on that history, I would not venture to say, although I’d definitely read it. Similarly, the other captives held alongside Bee and Prilkop–five others, by Bee’s reckoning (483)–must have some stories of their own to have merited the special incarceration afforded them. And there are any number of other stories that could be told.

Alas, that there is not enough time for them all!

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