The chapter opens in Chaol’s POV, as he watches Cally and Dorian take a walk.  He muses about how his gut instinct is to keep the dangerous criminal away from the heir to the throne, but…well, gosh darn it, she’s just so cute. 

No, really.

Because of her genuine laugh, because he caught her one afternoon sleeping with her face in the middle of a book, because he knew that she would win.

Chaol, when you get stabbed in the back after being either seduced or bromanced by a real assassin, I won’t be the least bit surprised.  A little sad about it, but not surprised.

This part of the book goes on about how ‘genuine’ she is and even calls her a ‘little girl’ and marvels at how she can be so whole after all the stuff she’s been through.  And…well…we have a word for people who can murder their way through a pile of bodies and still be emotionally fresh as daisies on the other side.  We call them sociopaths. 

Switch down to Cally and Dorian as they walk.  We find out it’s been three more weeks, there’s three more dead Champions, and Pelor got sent home after one of the tests.

the three Tests she’d had, the most exciting of which being an obstacle course, which she passed with only a few minor scratches and bruises.

My main gripe about this book so far is that it’s just so tepid.  There’s no commitment to anything in it.  We get bits and pieces of stuff, but nothing is really focused on and explored.  The tests and the competition get glanced over and large chunks are just summarized, and the dead champions gets the same treatment since people keep dropping like flies in between chapter breaks.  But at the same time, nothing else is stepping to fill the void, not even the character bits.  Every character-focused scene we’ve had has been self-contained, not part of a character-driven arc.  The book is tip-toeing around everything that has the potential to be interesting because it can’t seem to decide which one to actually focus on.

I’ve fallen into this trap many a time before.  You know how it happened?  I was writing fanfiction one chapter at a time.  Every chapter would be whatever I was thinking about right then, and I didn’t have an overall plotline or plan to keep it all focused.  I was literally writing one scene at a time and thinking about nothing except that scene.  However, I was an amateur writing for free on the internet and doing no editing.  Once you get to the level of charging money, that shit stops being even a little bit acceptable and you have to start fixing this sort of stuff when you edit.  It takes a lot of work.  Editing doesn’t mean fixing stuff one line at a time; in some cases you may write your whole book four or five times over.  But that’s part of this job.  Part of doing it well, at least. (It’s also why I’m such a huge fan of outlining.  You can rewrite an outline a lot faster than you can rewrite a manuscript.)

As they’re out walking, Dorian notices her necklace, the protection charm Elena gave her many chapters ago.  He asks about it, because he recognizes it from drawings of Elena and stories about her and Gavin in magical battles of old.  Then he decides it must be a replica, but he sounds cagey about it.

Which is strange.  If the amulet has such a big part in the history/myths of the country, and if people know what it looks like, shouldn’t there be replicas of it running rampant all over the place?  If there aren’t, why not?

Also, Dorian’s little brother is stuck at school over the holidays.  Um…yay?

Later, Cally is moping (because when is she not?) and reading in bed.  She drops her book and it falls under her bed.  When she looks under to grab it, she sees there’s a ton of weirdmarks written there in chalk.  One (in the center) is the same as one that was at the murder scenes.  She moves the bed and washes the chalk off, then heads out to the library with her guards in tow.

There, she finds Nemmy reading from a old, thick book and wonders how she can since her command of the language isn’t that great.  Oops, no, turns out she can speak it perfectly.  Not sure why Nemmy revealed that right now, since it’s not like she was backed in a corner with that whole “you’re looking at a book” evidence.  She could have just been trying to challenge herself.  Then again, Nemmy has been suspicious as fuck so far and Cally hasn’t picked up on that, so whatever, maybe something will actually happen now.

Nemmy leaves and Cally sees that she left behind a scrap of paper with a weirdmark on it.  She goes all in a tizzy about how Nemmy lied and what’s she doing and oh I thought we were friends!  And…for someone who couldn’t put two and two together before, she’s jumping right quick on the “Nemmy is the murderer” ball.  Obviously Nemmy is up to some sneaky shit, but we don’t know for sure what yet.

God, things really do happen at the will of the author in this book, don’t they?  When it’s time to drag things out, Cally never makes connections.  When it’s time to accuse Nemmy of murder, Cally jumps to conclusions.  It’s never based on evidence or personality.  Just like the rest of Cally’s actions, it’s always “whatever the scene calls for.”

Nehemia had every reason to deceive them, to plot against them. To tear apart this stupid competition and send everyone into a tizzy. Who better to target than the criminals living here? No one would miss them, but the fear would seep into the castle.

You know what would help here?  Getting to see the rest of castle.  There’s a very narrow cast of characters here, and bit characters are always glanced over as nothing but furniture.  We have no idea if the other servants or nobles are afraid or not, because we never hear anything about them.  For all we know, the murders were kept secret, or the castle inhabitants don’t care, or they assume it’s some enemy of their war-mongering king.

Days passed without seeing Nehemia, and Celaena kept her mouth shut about the incident to Chaol or Dorian or anyone who visited her chambers.

Because when you suspect someone is a murderer on the loose, you should absolutely never tell the people who can do something about it.

So she spent her spare time researching the Wyrdmarks, desperate for a way to decipher them

She keeps saying this, and it keeps amounting to nothing.  I know research is like that sometimes, you can spend days, weeks, months looking for stuff and not getting anywhere.  But in that case, at least show us some consequences of the time spent doing that instead of training, or tell us a bit about what she has been learning, or something.  I mean, the weirdmarks are just another language, right?  Or wrong?  I don’t really know.  Has she just been…looking through dictionaries?  It’s so bland, we really have no idea what she’s doing besides ‘books.’

Cally wakes up on Yulemas morning and finds a bag of candy on her pillow.  Her reaction?  To squeal with delight and immediately start stuffing her face.  Not “huh, that’s suspicious as fuck” or “how did someone get in my room without me knowing, they could have done anything, I need to rethink my security system” or “those fucking useless guards!”  Nope, just whee-candy.

You know, she keeps claiming that she was betrayed by someone when she was caught, and I believe that.  She’s so quick to take everything at face value and ask absolutely no questions and have absolutely no suspicions that I bet someone could just say “hey, want to work together?  I promise not to turn you in at the first possible moment” and she’d go along with it.

She paused to examine the bag again. Who had sent it?

Yes, stop to think about that halfway through eating it, great timing there.  Why aren’t you dead yet?  How did you even survive to the start of the book, never mind everything in this book.

For some reason the candy stained her teeth read, and Philippa comes in to exclaim about that, then get her ready for the temple service.  After she’s done getting dressed, she goes out to see Dorian in her room.  Turns out he sent her the candy.

He trailed off as he weighed the bag in his hands. “Didn’t I give you three pounds of candy?”

She smiled impishly.

“You ate half the bag!”

God, now she’s downgraded from teenager to child.  This is the stereotype for small children on Halloween, not grown-ass adults.  Furthermore, she should be concerned with keeping herself in tip-top physical condition, which means not making herself sick by eating a pound and a half of sweets in one go.

The more they go on about how much candy she ate, the more creepy it gets.  Like the book wants to hammer home how much like an 8 year-old she is.

Dorian has another present, and it’s the recalcitrant puppy from before.  He even mentions that it kept trying to bite him when he was bringing it up.  Not really the sort of dog you want to give to someone with a busy schedule and not enough time to train it.  Those kind of behavior problems don’t go away just by being nice to it.  It takes work to properly socialize and train a dog into behaving.

But—she didn’t seem so frightened when you were around, and I remembered how my hounds followed you when we traveled from Endovier.

Except Cally is special magic Mary Sue who has all the animals fawning at her feet, so I guess we won’t get to cover the perils of dog ownership.

“Of course I want her,” Celaena said, then realized what the implications would be. “But I want her trained. I don’t want her urinating on everything and chewing on furniture and shoes and books. And I want her to sit when I tell her to and lay down and roll over and whatever it is that dogs do. And I want her to run—run with the other dogs when they’re practicing

…wait, what?  So not only does Cally get to keep the problem dog, but she gets to demand that someone else train the damn thing? 

Do you realize that if it was trainable, it wouldn’t be a problem dog?  That’s the ‘problem’ part of being a problem.

[Dorian] was kind—unnaturally kind, for someone of his upbringing.

Ah, no.  Not even close.  Giving you the dog that no one wanted and then forcing someone else to train it for you is not in any way, shape, or form a kindness.  If anything, it’s just throwing his weight around.

Cally gives him a kiss on the cheek, and that sends him all giddy and blushing before he leaves.

After he goes, he thinks on a comment he made about Nemmy being at the ball and worries she’d do some monster-unleashing there.  Kind of out of the blue, since something so far has indicated that the killer would.  On the other hand, when murderous monsters are on the loose, it is better not assume they won’t do something.

Fine, she wouldn’t mind if Kaltain and Perrington met horrible deaths, but Dorian would be there. And Chaol.

First of all, you’re a horrible person.  Second, I would hope there’s going to be more than four people at that ball.  Do you just not care about the rest of them?

She couldn’t warn Chaol—because if she were wrong, then it would ruin not just her friendship with Nehemia, but also the princess’s efforts at diplomacy.

Hm, death of dozens of people, or friendship.  Hm…

Why can’t she just tell Chaol that she has suspicions?  He wouldn’t believe her, but at least then he’d know to keep an eye on her just in case, and that’s better than sending him in completely unwarned.

Naturally, Cally decides to go to the ball anyway and enlists Philippa in helping her get a suitable dress and mask.  Because, you know, off-the-rack costumes were so common in those days.

Drinking Game Count:  Epithets – 9, Exclamation Marks – 17

\~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/ \~/