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

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Another prophecy, one seeming to summarize the Tawny Man trilogy, prefaces “Candles.” The chapter, proper, opens with Bee watching Motley depart and listening to her fellow captives. Conversation among them lapses, and Bee confers with Wolf-Father within. She contemplates what she knows and questions her own perceptions of reality, and she voices her beliefs aloud.

In the ensuing silence, Bee employs her skills and the tokens she has purloined to escape her cell and stalk through Clerres. Thinking of her mother and her mother’s determination, Bee douses the shelves of Clerres’s library with oil and prepares to set them aflame. Vindeliar’s magic touches her, and she uses the connection thus made to gain information, but her own intent is revealed. The library begins to ignite, and Bee rushes to set more fires. Once they are well stoked, Wolf-Father urges her to flee, and she does.

The prefatory materials for the chapter once again catch my attention, leaving me to note with some interest that the prophet cited reports dreaming twice of Fitz and the Fool victorious at Aslevjal and seven times of them failing. One might think that a more than one-in-five chance of success would prompt more effort to interdict than it appears to have received; Ilistore did not seem so well supplied from Clerres as she might have been. Admittedly, concerns of time factor into such reckonings; how long she had been on Aslevjal is not entirely clear, and it might well have been long. Still, it is striking that the Fool’s success was so little anticipated, given the odds implied.

As to Bee’s actions in the chapter: I am sympathetic to the underlying motivations. The library at Clerres has been used to perpetuate evil, on her and on the broader world she inhabits. It, as much as anything else, is the source of Clerres’s power. Undoing Clerres means undoing the library–and yet, being who I am, I wince at even the fictional depiction of book-burning, both because of the historical overtones and for other reasons I have addressed once or twice before. (It’s been a while since I’ve thought about those days. I wonder what it says about me that such is so.) But that I am uneasy does not mean it is poorly written or poorly done; indeed, the fact of the discomfort may be taken as a sign of the writing’s success.

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