The morning was cold, and Katsa was wide awake, and quiet. For she was shy of her riding partner; and she felt strange about Raffin, so strange that she wished he wasn’t there.

…dafuq is going on with that punctuation?

So Katsa and Po get ready to leave, and Katsa is confused by these weird sad emotions she keeps getting while leaving all these people she cares about, but who most definitely are not her friends because Katsa has no friends.

“Po’s a prince of Lienid,” she said. “Why do you think he rides such a big horse, if not to carry his bags of gold?”

I sure hope to the gods that don’t exist in this novel that you’re being sarcastic, because gold is a terrible travel currency.  Not only is it heavy like woah, few people you encounter are going to be able to accept it, unless you plan to horrifically overpay for everything.

So they set out on the road and head for a popular inn that’s along the route they think the kidnappers took.  We’re told that they don’t bother to wear disguises because their eyes would give them away.  Um, okay, but, how many times have you been walking down the street and took the time to look every passer-by in the eye?  Eye color can be quite distinctive, yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s noticeable from a distance, especially if you stay looking down.

Then again, I’m not sure why they’re bringing up disguises at all, since there’s no reason to be needing one.  So…thanks for the utterly useless aside?

Along the way, Katsa still isn’t sure about this whole “Po’s a mindreader” thing.

“Katsa, […] you’ll get used to me, in time. We’ll find the way to relate to each other.

Tell me that doesn’t sound like a precursor to Stockholm.

“I think,” she said, “if you always know what I feel about you, then you should always tell me what you’re feeling about me, as you feel it. Always.”

“Hmm.” He glanced at her sideways. “I’m not wild about that idea.”

I was told that I was going to like Po for being such a sweet and understanding love interest, because he’s such a treat of a difference from the assholes that pepper YA today.

I am failing to see the sweetness.

Mostly I’m just seeing a selfish asshole who puts a modicum of effort into hiding that fact.

He does eventually relent and start telling her all his feelz.

I’d like to see you defend yourself for real, fight someone to the death, for it would be a thrilling sight.

o.O

O.o

You and Oll the Torturer are going to be great friends, I see.

And then they both talk about how their eyes are such a curse because everyone’s afraid of them.  I’m kind of getting sick of the eyeball talk.  Every time it comes up, it just reminds me that these two characters have been given the Most Super Special of the Special Eyeballs, because they can’t just have heterochromia, but instead have to have the prettiest colors of all.

…does regular heterochromia exist in this world?

And as they climbed back into their saddles and returned to the forest road, she didn’t feel exactly comfortable with him; but she felt at least that she could look him in the face now and not fear she was surrendering her entire soul.

Oh, right, there’s been a running theme where Katsa thinks that Po’s eyes are magical because she becomes ‘ensnared’ by them every time she looks.  Since, you know, Katsa doesn’t understand feelings because she’s so broken and shit.

Stuff like this doesn’t make me think that they’re soul mates or whatever.  It makes me think that Katsa is just a late bloomer with no emotional support in her life who is going through her first crush and doesn’t know how to process it because she’s never had any healthy examples or context.  And that’s not romance, that’s just life.  I mean, do you remember your first crush?  I do.  It wasn’t exactly a shining example of commitment.

“Yes, and [Murgon]’s the type to do something foolish. If we arrived at his court he’d probably mount an offensive, and we’d have to start hurting people. I’d prefer to avoid that, wouldn’t you? If there’s going to be an enormous mess, let it be at the court of the guilty king, not the king who’s merely complicitous.”

How shitty is this world that someone who kidnaps and tortures (those living conditions count as torture) senior citizens and yet they’re not considered ‘guilty’ just because they got paid to do it?

Do murderers for hire get a free pass, too?  Is that an official occupation?  “Oops, sorry, you can’t arrest me, I was just collecting a paycheck when I split that guy’s head open in front of his children.”

When she came back minutes later with a great, fat, skinned rabbit, Po had built a fire. The flames cast orange light on the horses and on himself. “It was the least I could do,” Po said, drily, “and I see you’ve already skinned that hare. I’m beginning to think I won’t have much responsibility as we travel through the forest together.”

“Does it bother you? You’re welcome to do the hunting yourself. Perhaps I can stay by the fire and mend your socks, and scream if I hear any strange noises.”

He smiled then. “Do you treat Giddon like this, when the two of you travel? I imagine he finds it quite humiliating.”

What even is this?

Po goes on to explain that he’s totally cool with Katsa being awesome, and he’s humbled but not humiliated, and it seems shoved in just to highlight that he’s awesome and Giddon is terrible.  (Again.)  But…really? 

Did we really need an entire conversation to explain that one person can hunt while another makes a fire?  We are talking about pseudo-medieval land here; fire making isn’t easy.  Hell, even today campfires aren’t the easiest thing to build.  Why did we need all that to justify a simple division of labor?

What bothers me most is the obvious elevation of physical strength in this conversation.  There are plenty of things to do when setting up a travel camp, all of them important, but hunting and killing are held as most important (when, in fact, they are the least) and the person who does them is by association held up as most important as well. 

Fuck that.

And besides that, someone can want to feel useful without that making them an asshole.  It’s not always about gender bullshit, sometimes it’s just the very basic human desire to feel useful.  That’s a thing.

(If it’s really that big a deal, why can’t they trade off who hunts?  There are so many things unsettling about such a short passage.)

The next morning Katsa asks Po if he’ll cut her hair off, because it annoys her, and he says if he doesn’t it won’t look good.

Because when I hear “this is annoying, get rid of it,” I always assume they mean “in the most attractive fashion possible.”

He insisted that when she set the pace, they always started out reasonably, but without fail, before long they were racing along at breakneck speed. He was taking it upon himself to protect Katsa’s horse from its rider.

“You say you’re thinking of the horse,” Katsa said, when they stopped once to water the horses at a stream that crossed the road. “But I think it’s just that you can’t keep up with me.”

You are a horrible person who has undoubtedly left a string of equine corpses behind you and doesn’t appear to spare a single thought to that fact.

They ride along and Katsa has apparently completely gotten over her issues with Po being a mindreader, because now she’s teasing him about it and experimenting with it.

That night Katsa decides to wrestle a goose to death for dinner.  It’s as ridiculous as it sounds.

The goose would be delicious, they must eat as much of it as possible, they must not waste it

BTW, an average sized goose will feed like six people.

Po comes to dinner shirtless, and Katsa sees he’s got a lot of tattoos on his arms.

“The Lienid people are fond of decoration,” he said.

“Do the women wear the markings?”

“No, only the men.”

“Do the people?”

“Yes.”

Women, men, …and ‘people’?

I was reading between the lines earlier when I said you don’t consider non-royalty/nobility to be real, but you’ve just gone ahead and brought it out in the open, haven’t you?

“[The arm tattoos are] meant to be attractive to my wife,” he said.

Wait.

So.

Apparently he’s from a culture where people don’t go around shirtless except in very intimate situations, but he decided to just up and walk around shirtless for shits and giggles?

Or is he trying to force some intimacy on Katsa?

I mean, if only your wife is supposed to see your bare chest, isn’t this roughly comparable to showing up to dinner without any pants on?

He just gets creepier and creepier.

They start talking about marriages, and the lack of any desire to have one.

“Raffin and I talked once about marrying […] We get along, I wouldn’t try to keep him from his experiments. He wouldn’t expect me to entertain his guests, he wouldn’t keep me from the Council.”

Wait, so one of your reasons for not wanting to marry is that you’d have responsibilities, but also you realize that you could marry without having to do all that?

“I don’t know if you have another name for it in Lienid. It’s a small purple flower. A woman who eats its leaves will not bear a child.”

And you won’t marry for fear of children, but also your world has a readily available contraceptive?

Katsa, you have no problems, you just insist on whining about things anyway. 

Later that night, Po tells Katsa the story of King Leck of Monsea.

He wandered into the kingdom as a child WITH ONLY ONE EYE and the old king and queen adopted him and named him heir.  Then they both mysteriously died a week later.

WOW, JEE, A WORLD WHERE MAGIC PEOPLE  HAVE DIFFERENT COLORED EYES AND NOW HERE’S SOMEONE WITH ONLY ONE EYE, JEE, I WONDER IF HE’S MAGICAL, I JUST DON’T KNOW, IT’S SUCH A FUCKING MYSTERY.

“But I’ve always had a feeling I wouldn’t take to him as others have. Despite his great reputation for kindness to the small and the powerless.”

Well, besides the INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS POINT OF HIM OBVIOUSLY HAVING MAGIC, have you ever considered the fact that you are neither small nor powerless?

(I get that his magic is him being able to make people trust him, but that does not excuse the fact that, to the reader, this is about as much a mystery as “there’s scribbles on the wall and the toddler has some crayons, I wonder what happened.”   There is nothing about this plot for us to wonder about.)