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

Evidently, too, this is the 1500th post to this webspace. Hooray!

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After a brief quotation regarding secrecy, “The Felling of Fallstar” opens with a shift in season from Winterfest to summer on a day years after that finds Fitz seated in a tavern and reflecting on news from Hearth and Just, two of Molly’s children with Burrich. He considers gifts for family until interrupted by a Skill-sending from Nettle expressing concern for Chade, who has evidently fallen and is comatose. The sending contains a summons from Dutiful, now fully King of the Six Duchies, and an order to travel by portal-stone. Fitz balks, citing earlier experience, but the order is reiterated, and he makes arrangements to comply.

Fitz reluctantly leaves Molly behind to answer his king’s summons and goes trepidatiously through the nearest Skill-stone. He arrives at Buckkeep in as good an order as could be expected and hastens in.

Fitz, in his guise as Tom Badgerlock, reaches Chade’s side, where the halting coterie of which he had been part is assembled, along with Nettle and her half-brother, Steady. Fitz, overstepping, issues orders that Dutiful echoes, compelling compliance, and he assesses Chade’s situation, finding it grim. He confers with those present to learn more details, finding Chade sealed off from the Skill much like Burrich had been. Fitz posits reasons for the action and begins to puzzle at how to address the issue. Kettricken joins the conversation, and suggests that Fitz likely knows or can most likely guess the answer. Fitz makes an initial attempt and fails, after which he and Dutiful confer.

Attempts continue into the night, and Fitz stumbles into the answer to his problem amid continued conversation with Dutiful. Finding it, he pulls Skill-strength from those in his company and works to Chade’s healing, guiding it with the expertise of long anatomical study. Chade regains consciousness and makes some complaints before lapsing into sleep, followed soon by Fitz.

Fitz wakes to Thick tending Chade, and he reports to Dutiful and Kettricken. Kettricken again urges Fitz to spend more time at Buckkeep, which he refuses, and Fitz calls back on Chade. The two converse together for a time, both of them much as they had always been together. Fatigue begins to tell on the old man, and Fitz takes his leave.

The comment from Chade at the beginning of the chapter is an interesting one. The old man is correct, of course, even if it is something of a pat statement; the more people who know a thing, the less of a secret it can be. And I am put in mind of earlier events in Fitz’s narrative, such as noted here, pointing to how much knowledge is and can be lost simply because it is never made available to someone who might keep it. But then, that’s one of the things for which fiction is good; it prompts rumination, and thinking is always a useful thing to do and have done.

Something I notice the chapter doing is musing on the approach of age. There are motions toward it in earlier chapters, of course, explicit mention of Molly passing her childbearing years (to which Fitz’s slowed aging is explicitly juxtaposed) and Patience’s own advancing age. The maturing and going-out of Molly’s younger children is also attested

The present chapter makes note of Kettricken going entirely gray, although the remark is made that it is seemingly early. Chade, on whom the present chapter focuses, had always been older in the series, having been the older brother of Fitz’s grandfather, Shrewd; there had been several comments made about his fading powers in the Tawny Man trilogy, for example. To have him fallen and be unable to rise again, however, points directly toward a commonplace of aging (LifeCall and similar products having made much of it for many years in the consumerist programming typical of the last decades of the twentieth century); even more than in previous entries in the Realm of the Elderlings novels, Chade’s situation in the present chapter comes across as something of a shock. Donne’s Holy Sonnet 6 comes to mind.

Biographical criticism is always fraught–authors can well write of things not in in their direct experience, after all–but it is irresponsible to assert that the circumstances of writers’ lives will have no impact upon the writing they do. I note that the novel is published in 2014, at which point, Hobb was in her 60s. I grew up in Kerrville, Texas, a town that boasts a large population of people at or past retirement age. My own parents, even now, are in their 60s. Experience suggests to me that no few people in that age range give no small thought to their advancing years and the decline of physical and mental capacities that often attend thereupon. I have to wonder the extent to which such was on Hobb’s mind as she composed the text, though I know it is an idle wondering; whether it was, and how much it was if it was, doesn’t much change the effect of the text on the reader or how it is achieved, and that’s really where the focus of criticism has to be.

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

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Following introductory commentary from an older scribe about the magics in use in the Six Duchies, “Spilled Blood” begins with Fitz rushing to assist Patience, whom he thinks has fallen again. He finds that it is Molly who is in need, however, and attended by both Nettle and Patience. Fitz assists Molly to their bedchambers and into bed amid her apologies, and after she lapses into sleep, he quietly retreats to his private study to contemplate matters.

Fitz is interrupted by Revel, sent by Riddle, who shakingly reports violence in the home. Fitz dispatches him to guard Molly’s room and stalks into a more public study, where he finds Revel amid signs of violence and upset. Fitz issues orders and begins a search that ends up being fruitless, and he confers with Revel again, getting more details about the messenger whose presence he has missed.

The search of Withywoods continues, Fitz communing through the Skill with Nettle as he proceeds. He confers with Riddle, who joins him in the hunt as he offers some rebuke for Fitz having long set aside his recommendations regarding security. The search takes them outside, where queries to staff yield additional details but nothing of immediate use.

Further search yields sign of further infiltration already departed, and Fitz finds himself swept up in his magics by a careless handling of a cube of memory stone that the Fool had carved for him. The experience confirms for him the fate of the messenger he has missed, and he begins to seethe in anger at the violation. But there is nothing to be done at the moment, and Winterfest continues as if nothing had been amiss, time passing ever onward.

The present chapter is still firmly in the explicatory phase of the novel, the first act in Freytag’s Pyramid familiar to many from high school English classes. To my rereading, it does more to lay out social particulars than the previous chapter–but then, it has the luxury of doing so. The first chapter has to do more to establish the broader milieu; the second chapter can be more local because the more global view already motioned towards affords it a context in which to exist. Or, again, so it seems to me; I readily admit to having preferences in my worldbuilding, as well as approaching this novel from a position of familiarity with it and with the broader literary contexts in which it exists.

(I may well be among the expected primary readership, but I do not know that I am necessarily representative of that readership. I would probably be arrogant to suggest as much, and to a degree excessive even for my often-hubristic self.)

I do, as I consider the present chapter, find myself put in mind of the beginning of the Tawny Man trilogy. Here, as there, Fitz has been living a life away from the intrigues of court, out in the country and away from many of the dangers he had previously faced. Here, as there, the habits of mind to which he was trained in his youth have fallen away, and he moves about his day-to-day existence. There is the pleasant counterpoint that his present life is one that, while perhaps not offering more ease, does offer more comfort; he is part of a community, respected and honored, and he is with the woman he has long loved.

But, here as there, there remains an undercurrent of violence in Fitz; when confronted with the threat posed by the infiltrators, although he is unable to meet it, his mind immediately returns to how to do such things. The statement being made about early training is something that can be teased out, I am sure; perhaps those more current in their scholarship than I could attend to such things.

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