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

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Remarks from Chade regarding Skill-pillars in the Six Duchies preface “The Quarry.” As the chapter opens, Fitz attempts to reorient himself after his journey through the Skill-pillar from Furnich. Conferring with Nighteyes, Fitz realizes he is back at the Skill-quarry where Verity had carved his dragon. Nighteyes asks Fitz if he remembers anything of his passage through the pillars, during which he encountered Shrewd, Verity, and Chade, and he reports to Fitz that something is amiss in his body. Fitz determines that he must send a message to Buckkeep, for which he must strengthen himself. He undertakes to do so, surprising himself with what the Skill permits him to achieve in doing so.

Fitz wakes the next morning and assesses his location, recalling his prior sojourn in the area. As he considers what to do next, Nighteyes urges him to begin work on his own stone-carving. Motley takes herself off to Buckkeep via the Skill-pillars, leaving Fitz and Nighteyes to confer. Nighteyes again urges stone-carving, and Fitz asks him after his current existence. Nighteyes points out that Fitz carries parasites, and the effects of them in him begin to show themselves.

Fitz begins to survey stones in the area, still conferring with Nighteyes. As the pair reflect on their first meeting, Fitz feels the memory of it pass into the Skill-stone he touches, and he lifts his hand to find a small piece of it shaped. Nighteyes again urges Fitz to begin the work of carving the stone, although Fitz resists, hoping yet to return to his family at Buckkeep. He rests, only to wake in the night to find the wolf has left him again.

The present chapter is not the first to have the title it does, sharing it with a chapter in Assassin’s Quest. As with previous coincidences of chapters, I wonder about reading them against each other; the present chapter makes the comparison easier than many of the other examples I might find, given how much it calls back explicitly to the earlier time Fitz spent in the quarry. Indeed, Fitz repeatedly visits the campsite he had shared with Kettricken, Kettle, the Fool, and Starling, and he pores over the memories of his time there–if perhaps with less vagueness and confusion than afflicted him when he had approached and inhabited the place earlier. Changes to the location are noted; changes to the characters receive some attention, as well. Changes to the readers are more difficult to attest; I may have been reading the novels across a span of years, but some readers will be taking in the whole Realm of the Elderlings corpus at a crack, and their experiences will be different than mine. And even my rereading, going slowly as it does, will show some alterations…about which I should probably do some more thinking that I yet have.

I wonder, too, if I ought to make something of the porcupine that presents itself in the chapter. Hobb does mention, in the present chapter and elsewhere in the Fitz-centric novels, that Nighteyes finds himself drawn to the creatures, but whether this is “merely” a character quirk or something more substantial is not immediately clear to me. It does seem to be the case that the prevalence of the creature suggests a non-European-ish setting for the novels, since, while there are porcupines in the Old World, they are not in the parts of Europe towards which the Six Duchies and Mountain Kingdom motion; at the same time, the porcupines of the New World do inhabit areas to which those fictional nation-states compare. And the symbolism of the animals themselves might be at play; Fitz, after all, is himself somewhat prickly and self-isolating, and Nighteyes does rather cling to him. So there’s another scholarly someday to be addressed, perhaps.

There is more to do with the novel, to be certain. Even in my rereading, this is still the case; there are yet four chapters and nearly fifty pages to address. I am presently at work on one paper that takes it up to some extent; I know there are many others yet that can be written. How many of them are mine to write, I do not know, but I expect I’ll be at work on at least a few of them, even as this series ends and I move on in my rereading to other things, yet.

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