The next day they’re both antsy so they decide to start running again.  Fucking running.

I just…I don’t know what to make of this.  I honestly don’t.  Travelling by foot is exhausting, and there are methods for how to deal with it, methods that basically stress the need for a consistent pace that can be maintained.  Pushing oneself means getting tired, and getting tired means needing a rest, and resting means wasting time.  We even have a phrase for the concept.  “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.”  It applies to a lot of things.  It basically means that doing something and doing it consistently is always going to be better than messing up because you’re in a hurry.

But this book.  This book either doesn’t understand how people travel long distances, or it doesn’t care.  This book is so concerned with making Katsa special and then shoving that specialness in our face that it completely skips over the reasons for the conventions that it’s ignoring.  Without addressing those reasons, without admitting that there’s more going on here besides ‘everyone not-Katsa is just fucking weak,’ all of Katsa’s special snowflake skills start to feel like mindless bragging.

Also, Po is still a squishy normal human, but for some reason he can keep up just fine.

It was midmorning, and the snow still drifted down, when they neared the place where the forest stopped abruptly and the fields began.

What is up with the climate in this place?

They get out of the trees and see Po’s aunt running towards them, with Leck and bunch of soldiers chasing her.  Leck shoots her dead, and Po starts screaming for Katsa to shoot him in return.

but she had already swung the bow from her back and reached for an arrow. She pulled the string and took aim. And then the horses stopped. The man with the eyepatch screamed out, and Katsa froze.

Seriously?  An entire book that couldn’t shut up for bragging about how fast Katsa is, and now in the moment of truth she’s slower than molasses?

Fuck, even a non-magic shooter would have gotten an arrow off before that.

“Oh, what an accident!” he cried.

His voice was a choke, a sob. So full of desperate pain that Katsa gasped, and tears rose to her eyes.

“What a terrible, terrible accident!” the man screamed. “My wife! My beloved wife!”

And that is literally all Leck says in this moment, yet it’s enough to make Katsa completely forget the several chapters from before about how he’s got magic and she promised to follow Po’s orders.

I understand her hesitating to shoot him after he says that.  I mean, it’s one thing to say “sure, I’ll kill anyone you point at” and another thing to actually do it.  And despite Katsa’s endless wanking about being so murderous, she’s been fairly normal in her desire to not kill innocent/distressed people.  It’s perfectly reasonable for their plan to fall apart right here.

But why does she forget that Leck has magic?  Nothing that he’s said even approaches that topic, and yet all that information gets wiped from Katsa’s mind anyway.

As she continues to refuse to remember basic information, Po asks her to just run away into the forest instead, and so they do that.  The soldiers chase them, but they’re on horses and Po leads them through the thickest parts of the forest, so they eventually get away.

Once they’re safe, Katsa tries to puzzle out what just happened, and she can’t quite remember the shooting incident clearly.  She can remember each of the parts that should add up to a whole of “Leck killed Ashen,” but they refuse to come together in her brain.  I like that.

What continues to baffle me, however, is the fact that Katsa can’t remember anything else.  If Leck’s magic is to be super convincing, and all he talked about was the fact that Ashen’s death was an accident, then what the fudge is going on with the rest of this?

Po has to remind her that Leck does, indeed, have magic, and that makes her remember everything else.  What’s completely absent from this scene is any conversation about why she would have forgotten that.  I don’t really mind that this is a thing that happens, but they spent like three chapters slowly realizing what his magic was in the first place, yet they can’t spare a few lines to refine their definition of it?  I’m perfectly happy to see characters be wrong about something, or at least not spot-on, but the book fails to acknowledge that fact and has them carry on with the same understanding as before.

And this isn’t just a matter of saying “we were wrong” for the sake of it.  They’re trying to defeat this man, so pinning down the exact limits of his powers is actually important.  Refining their understanding of those limits based on new information is important.  We don’t get any of that, though.  We just stick to “he’s super convincing” and that’s it, with no consideration given to the fact that he can apparently convince people of things he’s not even talking about.

it’s my Grace that sees so much more than a person should.

Furthermore, I still don’t get how Po’s magic helps him.  Unless Leck was specifically thinking about Po while lying for the benefit of the entire group?

Po learned from Ashen’s thoughts that her daughter is hiding in the woods somewhere, so the two of them decide to go look for her.  But before they go, Katsa gives Po all her weapons, in case they run across Leck and he orders her to kill Po.  Even though earlier in the book it was made clear that she can take weapons from someone so easily that they might as well be her own.  So helpful.

Hey, I wonder if Po’s magic works against the mindcontrolled.  If Leck tells Katsa “kill that person standing next to you,” can Po read her intentions to protect herself?  What if she’s thinking about a random stranger who isn’t there, does his magic read that as still being about him?  Does she even have intentions of her own if she’s being controlled?

All this and more our intrepid characters will never care about.

“Princess Bitterblue,” the man called. “Come now, Princess. Your father is very worried for you.”

The soldier wandered away, but it was a number of minutes before Katsa was able to climb down. She’d heard the man’s words, even with her hands over her ears. She’d fought against them, but still they’d clouded her mind. She sat in the tree, shuddering, while Po grasped her chin, looked into her eyes, and talked her through her confusion.

I really don’t understand why this confuses her.  If even benign statements like that send people into a muddled mess of forgetting just everything ever, how can anyone in this country even function?

They continue through the forest, avoiding soldiers and looking for Bitterblue.  They have a vague sense of where she is that Po pulled from Ashen’s thoughts, so after a bit of searching they find her hiding in a log.

“She’s afraid of me because I’m a man. Take care. She has a knife, and she’s willing to use it.”

…

…

…

Book, do you know what you’ve just implied?

Because it’s really fucking creepy that you throw that line out there with no other commentary.

See, Po isn’t just a man, he’s a man who looks a lot like her mother, while Katsa is someone who looks to be the same ethnicity as her super-scary father and also all his minions.  But if there’s something specific to maleness that overrides any inclination towards familial trust…well, you’ve got a limited number of options for that that is.

But the book doesn’t go there.  I think it wants, instead, of simply push Katsa into the role of being comforter and gentle one, because, you know, she’s a girl and shit.  To be fair, it reads more like they’re playing on cultural expectations of gender, but it’s still annoying that in order to use that they have to ignore all the other considerations going on here.

They sweet talk Bitterblue out of her hiding place by telling her that they know of Leck’s magic (even though that means nothing, Leck could easily tell someone that and then order them to forget it), and they’re in a hurry because soldiers are coming.  I don’t know why they can’t just pull her out and convince her later, since time is a pressing issue.  If they had plenty of leisure, of course don’t traumatize the child, but they’re about to be discovered!

Bitterblue comes out, and she’s going into hypothermia and all her clothes are wet.  Katsa decides that the answer is to give her an extra coat.

Because when a person has no body heat, the obvious fix is to give them something designed to trap body heat!  Which they don’t have in the first place…

Fuck, they don’t even take off her ‘soaked’ boots.  She’s going to lose some toes, poor girl.

They try to run, but the soldiers catch up to them, so instead they decide to kill 17 innocent men as fast as possible.

…She wouldn’t kill Leck earlier because she thought he was innocent, but has no problem murdering her way through this group.  I guess since they aren’t nobles, they don’t count?

They ambush the soldiers and kill seven of them in the first volley, before anyone has a chance to talk, and then they murder the rest of them without any problem. 

You know, it’s really hard to feel any tension in this situation after you find out that people talking actually isn’t a problem at all.

They go back to retrieve Bitterblue.

“I feel warmer,” Bitterblue said.

Apparently Katsa’s survival magic is literally magic, and it extends to other people, because that is the only explanation for how a girl still covered in freezing wet clothes is magically getting warmer.

Bitterblue calmly explains that they’re going to have to kill Leck in order to stop him for good.  Um…wasn’t that our assumption from the start?