“Oh, good. Perhaps this will be more a task for shovels and ice saws than for a prince and a sword.”

a jest, of course, but wrong. So, so wrong, nonetheless. The huge sense of - inevitability? Of the implacable path of parenthood? However you think on it, it's there, and it sweeps one up and makes you feel sorely for Fitz. it's a trial unlike many of his previous, but it still pulls. The masterful way in which Hobb takes us from the little joys of rediscovering court life to the deepest levels of unease and dissatisfaction as the threads of Fitz's life tangle and knot is truly potent stuff.

“You would ask a promise of your queen? Do you not think you presume too much?” I set my jaw. “Perhaps. But perhaps for a long time, the Farseers have presumed too much of me.”


Duty is becoming ever more a pressing watchword, and of course the conflict of loyalties and allegiance is going to feature heavily in the conclusion to this adventure. There were some parts of it that excelled for me - the whole of the seventeenth chapter seem to exude revelation upon revelation, and the atmospherics of the challenge in the thirteenth stirred me, too. But I think what gripped me most of all about this work was the marvelous sense of power it holds: Chade's aging, Hap's youth and Fitz's experiences here all coalesce to form an almost irresistible read.

And what next? Well, as our beleaguered narrator observes - The Prince was right. Buckkeep Castle was stuffed full of secrets, and half of them were not secrets at all. They were only the things we dared not ask one another for fear the answers would be unbearably painful.
Will the climax to this trilogy be "unbearably painful"? Only time (and another eight and a half hours of reading, according to my ereader, will tell.