We’ve got three chapters left and every last one of them is denouement lord help me okay let’s get this over with.

They all sit around and tell Po the story of what happened (with, of course, much praise for Katsa the entire time), but Po acts a bit dodgy.  He seems perfectly hale, but he gets moody at odd moments, won’t look at anyone, etc.

“I want to know what’s wrong,” she said.

He pursed his lips, and still he didn’t look at her. His voice was carefully matter-of-fact. “I wouldn’t force your feelings from you, if you didn’t want to share them.”

Uh, you’re a mindreader and you can’t actually stop yourself from doing that.  In fact, you promised to always say what’s on your mind because you can’t stop yourself from knowing what’s on hers.  Remember that?  It was kind of a big point for a couple of chapters.

So, Po the moody drama queen declares that nothing is wrong, but at the same time Katsa should keep his ring because he wants to keep living in the forest.

Po continues to drama it up, and everyone notices, and finally Katsa puts the clues together and realizes that he’s blind.  He wasn’t before, but it set in slowly after she and Bitterblue left.

Pretty fucking functional for a blind guy, he is.

Somehow he got blind because when he fell of that cliff way back when he hit the water face-fist?  …???  I know you can go blind from brain or nerve damage, but I don’t think the operative part of that injury is “smacked really hard in the face.”  If it was an injury that affected the eyes directly, wouldn’t it set in faster?

But on the heels of that storm came another, and after that storm another, as if winter had torn up the schedule and decided it wasn’t going to end after all. Bitterblue sent two guards with a letter for Ror. Ror wrote back from Bitterblue’s court that the weather was just as well; the more time Bitterblue gave him to sort out the stories Leck had left behind, the smoother and the safer her transition to the throne would be.

I know he’s the perfect king from the perfect land of perfect people, but isn’t letting someone set up a power base without interference kind of what got us in this trouble in the first place?

When Po and Katsa get some time to talk, he tells her his story.  And it turns out that while he’s blind and all, he’s really more of a Toph-blind, because he’s got magic and he can ‘sense’ everything around him.  Which means he can actually ‘see’ better than ever.

So.  You made the guy blind but then you gave him magic that’s basically the same as super-sight?

How fucking ridiculous is that?  It’s literally negating his blindness.  He has no hardships from this disability, nothing to deal with.  He’s basically not fucking blind, but trying to cash in on the emo-tastic credit for it.

Not only is he completely missing out on everything that makes the disability an actual disability, the book is compounding the issue further by crying about how fucking miserable it is to be disabled, as if it’s just SOO terrible that even when you take out literally everything important about it, you still deserve pity?  “Oh, man, being disabled is the WORST.  Even though I suffer no consequences at all, just being like this makes my life not worth living!”  There are very few ways you can be any more insulting on this subject, book.

“I’ve no right to feel sorry for myself,” he said to her one day, when they’d gone out into a quiet snowfall to fetch water. “I see everything. I see things I shouldn’t see. I’m wallowing in self-pity, when I’ve lost nothing.”

Katsa crouched with him before the pool. “That’s the first truly idiotic thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Shut up, Katsa, Po was right for once.

Katsa goes on about how he ‘lost beauty’ by not being able to see.

They’re not the same, sight and your Grace. Your Grace shows you the form of things, but it doesn’t show you beauty. You’ve lost beauty.“

…no, he lost colors.

Literally, that’s all you’ve said.  If you can see the shape of things perfectly fine, then all you’re not seeing is the colors of it.

That is all Po has lost.

Colors.

He’s wallowing in self-pity and declaring himself fit for nothing but living in the woods forever BECAUSE HE’S COLORBLIND.

“I won’t go back to Lienid. I won’t go to my castle, if I’m not able to see it. It’s hard enough to be with you. It’s why I didn’t tell you the truth. I wanted you to go away, because it hurts to be with you when I can’t see you.”

I hate you and I want you to die in a fire.

And then the whole rest of the chapter is them just sitting around while Po gets used to being colorblind and also having uber-sensing-magic.  There is so much talking about absolutely useless shit.

The next chapter is just Po and Skye sparring a lot, “to help Po get his strength back.”  Katsa ends up as a teacher of sorts for them, Bitterblue, and some of the guards.

I have a hard time believing that someone who can magically fight can be a teacher.  Her training was mostly in terms of how not to do (deadly) things.  She shouldn’t have the right base of knowledge for this.

Of course, her having a ‘killing’ grace never made sense anyway, so maybe she did actually learn fighting and the book just sucks at saying so.

And then they all go to Bitterblue’s coronation ceremony and are happy and la-de-fucking-da.  I feel like I should care more that it’s over, but that final section was just so fucking tedious.  It was, what, four chapters of people sitting around and doing mundane shit?  FOUR CHAPTERS of just nothing.  Oh, sorry, nothing except “let’s cry over Po being blind even though he’s not really.” Uhg, I can’t even muster up the energy to be relieved that it’s over.

But it is over, and do you know what that means?  It’s time for something completely different!  I can dredge up a smile or two for that, at least. 🙂