The chapter opens with Kate (!!! 😀 😀 :D) in her dressing room, trying to hurriedly cover up the evidence of opium use because Duke P has shown up suddenly.  Since laudanum was considered a valid medical treatment until less than a century ago, this does not actually make me view Kate any worse.  Haha, book, history strikes again!

Plus, Kate’s narration while high is actually kind of fun.  Low-level hallucinations produce some marvelous descriptions, and on top of that, I’m just happy to see drug use with some consequence.  I’ve read more than one book that had people use drugs and then carry on like nothing had changed.  Kate here is displayed as someone relying on a reality-altering drug because it helps her deal with pain (headaches) and stress, just like a medicine is supposed to, and yet at the same time we get to see it having weird, distorting effects on her mind.  Nothing about this is actually bad.  I don’t hate drug users on sight just because, even less so if their drugs are being marketed as medicine and therefore it’s even easier to get addicted under the assumption that something is safe, and this isn’t being displayed to impressionable readers as a happy-fun-time, so all around pretty awesome.

On top of that, I really like Kate and Duke P’s scenes together.  They’re polite and reserved and they speak between the lines, just how I like my court intrigue to be.  Not the most nuanced example of double-speak ever, but at least a step in the right direction.  Better than Cally’s “fuck you guys, I’m awesome” approach.

They talk about Cally and Dorian getting chummy.  Kate thinks that Duke P would get rid of her if only she weren’t noble, because Duke P has standards, so Kate decides to start subtly suggesting and rumoring that Cally’s cover “Lady Lilian” is actually a bastard. 

Something wild and foreign issued a cry within her, shattering through the pain in her head, and thoughts of poppies and cages faded away.

Poor Kate.  All she wants is to do the best she can within the constraints that society has placed on her gender, and instead she’s being possessed by magical evil. 😦

Late at night, Nemmy comes into Cally’s room, crying.  She’s just found out that a group of Eyllwe rebels were caught by Adarlan (I only just now realized I’d been spelling that as ‘Aldaran’) soldiers.  Instead of taking the rebels to a slave camp, all five hundred of them were killed.

“What is the point in being a princess of Eyllwe if I cannot help my people?” Nehemia said. “How can I call myself their princess, when such things happen?”

While this is a terrible thing to have happen and certainly the vehicle for some emotional angst on Nemmy’s part…this line really ruins it.  What has Nemmy been doing until now?  Apparently she only recently realized that she shouldn’t be a rude brat to other monarchs, so…?  We’re told she helps the rebels, but we’ve never seen it, and we’ve never seen her put any kind of effort into things or even care about what’s going on.  Nemmy has glided through this story so far on criticisms and disdain, so we’ve no indication that she even cared about the rebels until now.  Furthermore, we still don’t have a good picture (or even a bad picture, or any picture at all!) of what’s going on in Eyllwe, so it’s hard to put a context to this news.

It would have been better if this had been a turning point for Nemmy, if she’d honestly been a brat before now and this came as a sort of “holy shit, I need to get my act together” moment.  The book tries to take a different tract instead, and that makes all the emotional potential of the scene feel forced and insincere.

After Nemmy cries herself out and then leaves, Cally stares out the window, doing what Cally does best.  Then we find out she has menstrual cramps!  Yay for non-invisible periods!  She even talks about how her period had stopped when she was near starving, but now that she’s healthy again they’ve started once more.

Celaena groaned. How was she going to train like this?

…wait, what?  Didn’t you have cramps before you went to salve camp?  How did you deal with it then?

My experience with the issue has been: grit your teeth, be cranky, and take an extra lap around the track.  Exercise actually has an alleviating effect on period pain, and someone who exercises regularly would get that boon as a matter of daily habit.

How could Elena expect her to defeat some evil in this castle, when there was so much more of it out there? What was any of this compared to what was occurring in other kingdoms?

Oh my god, really?  Has it really escaped your attention that all the ‘evil’ out there HAS ITS ROOT IN THE MILITANT POLICIES OF YOUR COUNTRY?  What if the ‘evil’ in your castle is the king that keeps going to war?  Does it not occur to you that stopping him would also stop his armies from murdering other countries?  Even if they’re not the same, she treats that rebel massacre and the slave camps as if they’re outside, self-contained entities, not something controlled from where she’s at.

Chaol comes in to try and be nice to her, but in the middle of him saying that it’s nice she’s friends with Nemmy, she vomits all over the place.

…readers, help me out here.  Is spontaneous vomiting a menstruation symptom?  I know there’s slight nausea and lack of appetite, but I’ve never heard of someone up and vomiting just because.  The internet doesn’t mention it as a symptom.

What is it with this book and making Cally throw up?

Cally manages to tell him she’s got her period, and Chaol beats a hasty retreat.  Later Dorian shows up and tells her that she doesn’t look bad, so she obviously can’t feel bad, so she should sit up and play cards with him.

Dorian started out as a Nice Guy, but now he’s degenerated into absolute asshole.  What kind of utterly selfish, horrible person says “you don’t look sick enough to satisfy me, therefore you must be faking”?

Even after Cally repeatedly tries to throw him out, Dorian sticks around and “banters” with her, which I guess is the new word for harassment.  It’s not cute.  Banter involves both parties participating, not one party stringently trying to put a stop to the conversation.

Eventually Dorian wears her down until she stops insisting that she leave, and that’s not cute because he just exhausted her into compliance.  That’s not cute.  That will never be cute.  I hate you, Dorian, and no amount of joking about Cally’s books will change that.

This is all so pointless, too.  It’s just “bantering scene #1348792.”  They’ve had a pretty devastating military event, why not talk about that instead of the exact same light, fluffy bullshit as before?

Oh, there we go, several pages later and we finally get to talk about the dead rebels.  It’s only so that Dorian can moan about how it’s so hard to be him, because he can’t stand up to his father.  Well…have you tried?  Because we’ve no evidence of that if you have.  Did you just give up without effort because trying is for other people and you’d rather be a pampered brat?  That’s not admirable.

Cally assures him she doesn’t hate him, because the pretty prince cries such pretty emo tears.

It’s all for naught.  A pretty speech about wanting to do good doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, especially not when there’s slave camps and conquered countries in the mix.

You want to talk about helpless angst?  Go read the later Animorphs books.  Jake’s got heaps of it, because he’s doing everything in his power to be good and the world keeps going to hell in a handbasket despite all his efforts.  That’s angst.  Not sitting around playing with puppies and saying “oh well” with a shrug and tear.

They switch tracks to talking about a masked Yulemas ball that’s going to happen soon, and how Cally can’t go to it, and then Dorian has to leave.  So much for character growth and dissecting hard subjects, no, clearly Cally’s going to dress up and sneak into a party soon!

Drinking Game Count:  Epithets – 5, Exclamation Marks – 14

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