King Randa comes to watch Katsa and Po fight one day, and this is greatly distracting to Katsa, because even though she’s (almost) literally untouchable, she’s still scared of him.  He…hasn’t done anything that we know of to warrant this fear, not even when she was small enough that he could have, but we’re going to go ahead and carry on with the plot line that some very squishable dude who just stands around and brags a lot is some sort of villain.

The terrible thing is, I could see this working with only minor changes.  Her magic came out when she was very young, and it came out by her killing someone, that’s traumatic enough.  It wouldn’t take much for him to become psychologically intimidating to her in such a vulnerable time, and mental and emotional scars quite often carry through despite logic or what is physically possible.  He could have ‘tamed’ her when she was young and scared her to the point where she doesn’t think of fighting back now.

But the problem is he didn’t.  And if he did, we have no knowledge of it, because the book straight-up skipped pretty much all of their relationship.  And to add insult to injury, every time he’s shown up since then, he’s been distinctly non-scary in every possible way.  He’s just a cocky braggart, full stop. 

Randa tells her to come see him later, because he has a mission for her, and that makes Katsa get all seething-angry.  After that Po refuses to keep sparing with her, rightly pointing out that ‘practice’ while one party is working out aggression is not really a good idea.

He would send her, and she must go, for the power sat with him.

Okay.

But.

How?

You’ve already told us that you can beat 10 full-armored knights at a time and are in all ways unpunchable, so something tells me his “power” of having a thug-guard isn’t the one controlling you.  You don’t care about socialization or status, so his power of controlling the court and wealth isn’t affecting you.  What power does he have that is keeping you down?

Later, as Po and Katsa eat lunch, they talk about Randa and Katsa complains that she gets ‘savage’ whenever he’s around.  Because, you know, getting miffed but not doing anything is totally the definition of ‘savage.’

Po points out that she could just…not do what he tells her.

Katsa, being unappreciative of logic as she is, decides to respond by punching him in the face.  I actually like it.  I wish we’d seen more of this Katsa.  A character who is mentally browbeaten and intimidated by her uncle and who responds to all her problems with punches because she doesn’t know anything else, doesn’t know how to handle emotional stuff.  And when Po says what he says, it challenges her worldview, and she doesn’t know what to do about that so she lashes out in the only way she knows how.  I like it.

The problem is that it’s not the Katsa of the past 11 chapters.  We’ve been told about this Katsa, but we haven’t seen her yet.  Instead we’ve seen a Katsa who settles arguments with actually arguing and who’s best claim to anger is to clench her fists and shake a little.  A Katsa who has several personal friends and a whole council of supporters to boot.

She reached up to the table and dipped her hands into the water pitcher. She scooped blocks of ice onto a cloth and wrapped them up. She brought the ice to his jaw.

Is this some alternate reality where they have only the tech of medieval Europe, except also there’s ice machines?

When Katsa asks why Po didn’t defend himself from her punch,

“I told you before, Katsa. I won’t fight when you’re angry. I won’t solve a disagreement between us with blows.”

Okay, that explains why you didn’t punch her back, but if memory serves correctly, “ducking” is not considered an aggressive action.

“I’ll never do it again,” she said. “I swear to it.”

He caught her eyes then, and held them. “I know you won’t. Katsa. Wildcat. Don’t blame yourself. You expected me to fight back. You wouldn’t have struck me otherwise.”

But still she should have known better. “It wasn’t even you who angered me. It was him.”

The emotional stuff in this is so fucking stilted, I just can’t even.  I keep imaging this kind of dialogue coming out of a PBS cartoon.

“What do you think would happen,” he said, “if you refused to do what Randa ordered?”

She didn’t know, really. She only imagined him sneering at her, his words crackling with contempt.

Wow.  So scary.

“But Randa isn’t even worth your anger,” Po said. “He’s no more than a bully.”

Katsa snorted. “A bully who chops off people’s fingers or breaks their arms.”

“Not if you stop doing it for him,” Po said. “Much of his power comes from you.”

…pretty sure there are other people in the world who can break fingers.  Just sayin’.

Katsa ruminates on what Po says about her being afraid of her own anger and how she needs to control it.  But, again, outside of this one isolated episode right here…she’s got a handle on her anger.  In fact, she’s never lost a handle on her anger.  The worst thing she’s done in anger is yell at people.  And punch Po, but as she said, she only did it because she expected him to fight back.  Not exactly the attitude of someone about to go on a punching spree among the weak and defenseless.

Katsa offhand mentions that the queen of Monsea (Po’s aunt) is sequestered in grief.  Po seems puzzled by this out of character behavior from her.  All I can think about is that this pretty damn obvious ‘foreshadowing.’