Their business in Estill was with an Estillan borderlord who had arranged to purchase lumber from the southern forests of the Middluns. He had paid the agreed price, but then he’d cleared more than the agreed number of trees. Randa wanted payment for the additional lumber, and he wanted the lord punished for altering the agreement without his permission.

Well…yeah.  That’s called ‘theft.’  What do you expect?

I mean, it depends on how relations between a monarch and someone else’s vassal go; direct dealings and going through the other guy’s monarch are equally viable, and dealing with conflicting customs and laws could get dicey when you cross borders, but oh who are we kidding as if this book thought about that.

No, instead let’s talk about how the lord they’re there to intimidate has a daughter with mindreading magic.

This segues (and by that I mean jumps immediately into) an info dump about magic in this world.  Apparently all the graced people have heterochromia, and when their different-colored eyes settle, they’re sent to live with their monarch.  If they have a useful skill, they enter into royal service.  Otherwise, they’re sent home where they are reviled and mistrusted. 

…but why are they reviled?  I mean, I can imagine such a thing happening, but I can also imagine the opposite, and there’s lots of reasons for both.  Why they are mistrusted would actually tell me something about the culture.  Is there a myth that all gracelings, by dint of being raised in a royal nursery, are secret spies for the king?  Is there some sort of religious belief about them?  (Well, there would have to be a religion for that to happen, so probably not.)  Are in-service gracelings used like Katsa, to do bad things, and so the stigma hangs around on all the rest, too?  Because if it’s just because they have some sort of skill, I’m not buying.  One of the examples of a ‘useless grace’ is talking backwards.  Who would be scared of that?  Another is climbing tress.  …yeah, so?  What’s next, are you going to tell me Michael Jordan is secretly hated by everyone because he’s good at basketball?  Because all this book is giving me to go on is that they’re skilled to a high degree in something, and that’s really not something that gets you kicked out of a community.

When we see examples of in-service gracelings, they include stuff like cooking and doctoring and counting, so the ‘do bad things stigma’ reason probably isn’t the answer, either.

He had a woman brilliant with numbers, the only woman working in a king’s countinghouse in all seven kingdoms.

Out of all the list of graceling examples, this is the only one that’s definitively female.  One other is definitively male, but the rest are ambiguous.  Add in Katsa, the girl mindreader, and Mysterious Fighter Boy, and so far we’ve actually got confirmed magic girls than boys.  And here we see that when a woman has a grace that doesn’t follow her gender expectations, she’s going to go ahead and use her awesome skills anyway, damn convention.

So why is Katsa constantly harping on the fact that she’s a girl graced with killing, instead of simply “graced with killing.”  Are there really no other girls that get that?  The implication is that these skills are randomly distributed, but then the exceptionalist attitude is that magic that goes against genre conventions deserves a ‘wow, look at that’ comment.  Why the disconnect?  Are Katsa and the counting lady actually outliers or not?  And why would the magic do that?

If you think these questions will be answered in this book, then you are a hopeless optimist and I envy you.

But it seems as if this one reads desires. She knows what it is other people want.“

“Then she’ll know I’ll want to knock her senseless if she so much as looks at me.”

To a certain point, I get why Katsa has such a thing against mindreaders.  Due to her magic, she’s used to solving every problem with punching and surly hermitism.  Physical skills and staying quiet and prickly are her two main defenses, against physical threats and social threats.  Mind readers bypass both of those things, things that she’s basically built an identity around, so it’s like they invalidate her whole personhood by existing.  I can dig that.

They get to the lord’s castle, only to be greeted at the gate, invited inside, and walk straight into the lord’s presence.  Wow, truly I can see why they need a magic fighter for this mission.  Her magical fighting skills are coming in so handy!

Then Katsa stands there silently while the lord gets all flustered and Giddon sort of taunts him.  There’s no trouble at all, and the lord gives in right away and promises to pay for the extra trees he stole and then some.

Obviously Katsa is here to intimidate by reputation, but it’s still a boring narrative choice, since even in flashbacks we don’t get to see her really stretching her skills.  From the way things are told, this is how every errand she’s ever been on has gone, and I still fail to see why someone non-magic couldn’t achieve the same effect.  Hell, you don’t even need one person, just a uniform.  “Oh, shit, that’s the Randa’s Personal Kneecapper Guard uniform!  Anyone who wears it is part of a group of especially nasty thugs who do his bidding!  Shit!”  See?  Easypeasy.

Left alone with the lord, Katsa finds she doesn’t have the stomach to actually cut his fingers off.

It was easier to follow Randa’s orders when they begged or cried, when they gave her nothing to respect.

…wow.  I just hated your book before, but now I hate you, Katsa.

Besides, the forests would grow back one day. Fingers didn’t grow back.

…yeah, but it’ll take like 50 years.  This guy could have grandkids with all their fingers ruling his castle by the time that forest grows back to being a useful size.

So Katsa just knocks him out and leaves.  Because last chapter “defiance took too much effort,” but in this chapter he’s too tired to follow orders.  Consistency, what’s that?  After she leaves the hall she finds the little mindreader girl and glares at her until the girl runs away.  …wow, so dramatic.  I mean, really, that had all the impact of being startled by a mouse.

This whole chapter was just sort of boring and flaccid.