Next morning, Gudruny’s husband shows up pitching a righteous fit about his wife and waking everyone up.  Sandry gets all fired up right back at him, puts on her attitude, and tells him (politely) to go screw himself because he’s officially no longer married.

This book continues to be a hot mess when it comes to attitudes about nobility.  When Ambros says the man really should be punished (flogged) for his behavior, Sandry says no, but then Tris and Briar get uppity at her for acting like a high and mighty noble?  Apparently, Sandry is a good noble for not whipping people but not good enough to avoid mocking because she got stern while dealing with people who yell at her?

Really, everyone’s talking about what a spitfire Sandry is, but all she did was refuse to cower (while standing on a balcony and surrounded by guards) and “no, now stop yelling and GTFO.”  I mean, I’m in favor of that reaction in general, but I don’t really see what’s so badass about it.

Sandry hires Gudruny as a maid on the spot, then Sandry and Daja chat together about how the whole situation is just so sad, especially the part where Sandry’s mother ignored it all.

“I didn’t think my mother was like that.”

“Like what?” asked Daja.  “Like a noble?”

“Uncaring.”

The novel is strangely un-self-aware when it comes to lines like this.  Daja has a good point here – the system is unfairly weighted towards the nobles, and most of them act this way, in no small part because that’s how they keep power in the first place.  Sandry’s counterargument is that it’s not the whole system doing this, just a few ‘silly, flighty’ nobles who aren’t doing their duty.  And while I could believe that she has that personal belief (she was raised on it, after all), the fact that Daja drops her comment and the book blithely continues on makes it seem like it’s agreeing with Sandry’s assessment.

The problem is not that some nobles are bad.  The problem is that when nobles are bad, their people have no recourse.  The problem is that there’s no checks and balances to ensure the people are protected from corrupted leaders.  The problem is that the majority of the population is at the whim of a few, and if the few aren’t honorable, there’s nothing to stop them.  The problem is not that more people aren’t like Sandry; it’s that Sandry has the power to stop being nice.  She could literally wake up one morning and say “doing the right thing is hard, so fuck that for a day” and there would be literally nothing in place to stop her.

And I know these books are set in a monarchy setting and that’s a lot of the draw.  I like a good princess story as much as the next person.  Hell, I can even ignore how fucked up the feudal system is for the sake of a rip-roaring fantasy adventure.  But if you’re going to focus a lot of drama on noble/serf relations and dynamics, well…that’s the point at which you really can’t continue ignoring how unfair the whole system is.  You can’t center your plot on this matter and then say “lol, nope, never mind, we’re going to blame it all on a few people being mean” midway through.

At least in Kel’s books, when Lalasa was kidnapped and the noble responsible just got a fine, everyone involved said “yeah, this is fucked up at an institutional level.  We’re trying to change it, but change is slow and difficult.”

They spend several pages getting Gudruny settled in and explaining their weird magic to her, then Daja starts telepathing with Sandry again, because Daja…spontaneously remembered that Sandry has good intentions?

Well, her forgetting it was spontaneous, too, so I guess this resolution makes sense.

We summarize the next several days of Sandry being responsible and getting tours of all her lands.  Also, Daja nd Rizu are still flirting, and Briar and Caidy (one of the “guests” Berenene sent along) start flirting.  Tris spends her time working with Zhegorz and in general acting like flirting is a waste of time.

In the middle of all this responsibility and records-reviewing, Tris has to point out to Sandry that the empress kept leveling extra taxes on them trying to make Ambros call Sandry in for help (except I thought we already covered that?) and Sandry gets all in a tiff about it.  Ambros’s wife comes in to explain that a landowner can apply for relief from a tax, but only one at a time, so if she goes back to Emelan, then Berenene can start the whole process over again.

She notices that a lot of planned expenditures were cancelled, including one that was supposed to repair a village damaged by flooding.  She wants to go see the Pofkin place and asks Ealaga to arrange it.

For…some reason, this makes Tris accuse her of “acting the countess” and saying she can’t hang out with her and Zhegorz unless she acts like a “decent person”?  What was she doing wrong?  Delegating?  Saying please?  Being mad that the empress has this totally unfair means of control?  Should Sandry have pitched a fit in order to satisfy Tris’s notions of “real-ness”?

I’m really confused.  Tris and Briar (in particular) seem to get upset every time Sandry does her countess job, even when she does it politely and responsibly, leading to the implication that they don’t like the system.  But then instead of saying anything even near to that, they just get mad at Sandry for some vague behavior-related badness with no hint of what, specifically, is pissing them off or what they think she should do otherwise. 

It’s like if someone walked up to the President of the United States and, because they were pissed off at national policy, said “you’re talking like a politician, how dare you!”

They next day, Tris, Sandry, Ambros, and a bunch of guards go to Pofkin, but the rest stay home because it’s raining and they don’t want to go.  There’s much fuss made over Sandry saying Ambros should sell her jewels to get funds for the repairs, because the village is in bad shape.

While Sandry is off being politely social to the village elders, Tris notices that the river going through town is eating away at their bridge supports, so she settles in to do some magic to fix that.  She tries to be subtle about it, but to no avail.  Everyone within spitting distance gets scared because she made the ground ripple and shake when she moved a bunch of stones around to line the riverbed with them.

Tris gets irritable between the villagers being afraid of her and Ambros going off about how incredible it is, because Tris likes being helpful but she hates being singled out and fussed over.  Can’t blame her, not after what kind of “attention” she got for being different during her childhood.  But in today’s case, it makes her want to ride off so they’ll stop talking to her.

And straight into a kidnapping party!  It’s a bunch of hired swords and two nobles, who plan to kidnap Sandry!  Oh, noes!

Oh noes for them, of course.  After a bit of banter and Sandry getting furious, she magically undoes every single stitch in their clothing, armor, saddles, everything.  They end up falling off their horses and running around naked and scrambling for weapons that dropped off their belts.  After delivering a bit of “you’ll regret this!” the guys all run off.

BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MESS WITH SANDRY, BOO-YA.

SERVES YOU RIGHT FOR THINKING SHE HAD WEAK LITTLE GIRLY POWERS.

HAHAHA!

Which really is one of the things I love about the magic in these books, especially Sandry’s power.  They’re tied up in things that are so ordinary, so everyday, that they get overlooked.  But, no, the stuff that’s that ingrained in your day to day life is the stuff that’s going to fuck you up the most, of course it is.  And we do this sort of assumption a lot even without magic.  We think that housework or middle management or ordinary, quiet things are unimportant, and we assume the people who do them are unimportant as well, when in fact they have more power to totally fuck up your life than the best doomsday device out there.

On the way home, they talk about the kidnapping thing, giving more information like how it’s so accepted that even if someone brings it up before a magistrate he’ll only get a small fine for it, and families are forced to either arrange marriages for their girls early to keep them protected.

Somehow this comes back around again to Sandry being mad at her siblings about how they’ve grown apart.

Tris mentions that last part to Daja and Briar after the trip, and they all sit around explaining Sandry’s character arc to all the readers that haven’t been paying attention.

Later, Sandry is sulking in her room, and Jak and Fin each come in (separately) to swear to protect her and yadda-yadda and Jak asks if she wants to go arrest them.

“Suck men are their own worst enemy.”

…not just no, but fuck no.

And this is where Sandry’s tale of kicking ass kind of falls off the wheels.  The guys that attacked her did so because they needed money and this was a way to get it.  They clearly have no problems with the kidnapping tactic, and now that Sandry’s off the table, they’ll be on the prowl for other monied heiresses to do the same thing to, or possibly other ways to make money that will be no less despicable and damaging.  And other people are not going to have Sandry’s super-magic to beat them off with, and they’ll probably not have her oodles of guards, either.

Sandry, here, is no better than Berenene.  She’s basically saying “don’t bother stopping them from hurting other people.  After all, I got away from them, didn’t I?”

What is with this book’s weird reluctance to have Sandry actually punish anyone?