Today we begin with sword training lessons from an instructor who apparently has no idea what he’s doing. Thankfully they aren’t actually fighting, but he’s got her doing complex patterns on her first lesson, isn’t making her practice moves one at a time before stringing them together in a sequence, and is pissed off that she’s stumbling and tired and slow on her first lesson and while still recovering from being stabbed.

“You require conditioning, Lady. You’ll never be as lithe as a dancer, but you’d move faster if you carried less weight.”

…WTF, book?

So, we had a couple comments about Kelsea being…full figured, I guess. We never had any indication that she was anything more than ‘not thin.’ It hasn’t been a factor at all in the story. She obviously doesn’t have any health or mobility problems, weight related or not. Oh, yeah, and fat people can be fast and graceful, too. I know the world in general doesn’t like to admit it, but people of literally all shapes and sizes enjoy (and excel at) dance, martial arts, sports, gymnastics, exercise in general, etc.

ALSO this is a world where her guards are made up of big, beefy, muscle-bound men. So stocky dudes can be swordfighters but not stocky women?

ALSO, ALSO this shittastic teacher must be really eager to fatshame her if this is literally his first comment, and he doesn’t reach for anything like “you’ll get faster the more you practice” or “I bet that torn up shoulder of yours is slowing you down.” Like, just how much do you have to hate fat women for that to be your assumption during a student’s very first lesson.

After the fail lesson, Mace comes in to tell her he’s going to assign her a full-time personal bodyguard (other than himself).

Then I can be free to investigate this matter, to do other things.”

“What things?”

“Things Your Majesty doesn’t wish to know about.”

Kelsea looked sharply at him. “What does that mean?”

“You don’t need to know every detail of how we defend your life.”

Can this guy get any creepier? I kind of expect him at any minute to pull a Yzma.

After a short diversion into Carlin’s backstory for no good reason (this book’s specialty) they get back to talking about bodyguards and agree Pen is a good choice.

Mace mentions that Father Tyler wants an audience, and Kelsea says to grant it and ‘extend him every courtesy.’

Mace asks why?

Kelsea’s answer is, shockingly, not “WTF, Mace, why not, he’s a sweet old man who hasn’t done literally anything wrong, what do you think we should do when he visits, slap him?”

Her answer is, instead, that the Church probably has books and she wants them.

“You know, Majesty, there are places down in the Gut that cater to all tastes.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means a fetish is a fetish.”

“You really don’t see any value in books?”

“None.”

First, you’re obviously an idiot, Mace.

Second, a few chapters ago he said no one sold them on the black market because they have no value. Make up your mind.

Third, I’m really, really sick of this ‘only a few people value books’ bullshit that makes no sense.

Fourth…did Mace just imply people are fucking them? Because…I don’t really want to know how that would work.

Maybe he’s talking about those porn books, the ones with the really nice, salacious illustrations. Which, really, there should be some new ones of those by now. I refuse to believe humanity went 300 years without creating some fresh porn.

Mace leaves, and Kelsea thinks about being thick again.

She was carrying too much weight, she could feel it. She’d always been thick, but now she’d been indoors too long, and between that and her injuries, whatever physical condition she might have had was gone.

So, if she spent her childhood running around and climbing trees, then she’s probably got exactly as much weight as she should. I mean, there is such a thing as being too heavy, but it’s more ‘too heavy for your specific physiology.’ If you’re otherwise healthy, physically active, and not eating like a late-era Henry VIII, then what weight you’re at is the weight your body is supposed to be, which is going to be different for everyone. Some bodies want to carry more. It’s not wrong.

Second, being injured and sedentary is a problem completely unrelated to weight. Skinny people deal with it, too. It sucks all around, promise. (I mean, not having strangers think they get to comment on it definitely is a bonus and makes it easier, but the problem is still there.)

Kelsea notes that the room has a large balcony, and sometimes when she misses being outside she goes out there to soak up some fresh air. Occasionally she wishes she could just run away.

Kelsea felt a rogue urge to run a long way, to be under trees and sky.

This is how women are trained to stay indoors, she thought, the idea echoing in her mind like a gravesong. This is how women are trained not to act.

…huh? What’s training? The…balcony? I’m pretty sure you don’t go outside because everyone wants to kill you, not because feminine training.

If we’re going to broach that subject, I think Mace’s tendency to do things without telling you then change the subject every time you ask fits the bill much better.

Kelsea heads to her room to take a bath, but along the way notices that something is wrong with Andalie.

“Yes, Lady, but I don’t know what it is.”

And then Kelsea goes on to her bath. Well…that was helpful.

Kelsea sits in her tub and thinks morose thoughts about her home. Currently it’s the census figures she recently got, which say there’s just plain old too many people in the country for their current condition to support. Also, still no doctors.

Now the Tear’s poor died regularly from botched appendectomies conducted at home.

I am regularly baffled by this book’s ability to somehow believe that high level medicine is the only medicine, and also zero people are capable of learning it.

Andalie at least had the good fortune to be able to go down to the market every day, although she went always with the same heavy guard of five.

Then why not just send a guard? Aren’t you people short-staffed? Or is shopping an impingement upon your ‘manliness’?

Pen said that Andalie’s quality of anticipation was the mark of a seer, and Kelsea was sure he was right.

I really wish we had more info on the status of magic in this world. This kind of low-level shrug-off acceptance of magical talents is cool, but it want to see it developed further. As is, it’s so spotty that I’m not 100% sure intentional, and not some sort of idiom.

Kelsea’s sapphire starts burning, and she looks around to notice a man in the room with her. Dude, kind of useless magical necklace, isn’t it? It couldn’t have warned her before the guy came in? Also, how did he get in the room and lock the door behind him without her hearing? It’s a giant empty tile-covered room. Not great for sound-dampening.

The man has a mask and a knife, and he makes her get out of the tub and demands she hand over the necklace. She stalls long enough for Mace to show up, and the guy puts his knife to Kelsea’s throat to make Mace stay back. He demands to know where the other necklace and the crown are, and Mace tells him only Caroll knew the answer.

Also apparently there’s a missing flagstone in the floor and a tunnel below it, which the assassin used to enter, although how Kelsea didn’t hear that is even more amazing.

“You can’t hope to escape.”

“Why?”

“I know every hidden passage through this wing.”

“Apparently not.”

Assassin guy has a point. Unless Mace just decided to leave a tunnel directly into his queen’s bathroom unguarded.

The assassin tries to take the necklace off her by force, but it doesn’t work.

The sapphire didn’t want to be removed.

Why not? she asked. And although she had not expected an answer, one came smoothly, bubbling up from some dark place inside her mind. Because I have so much to show you, child.

The voice was alien, incredibly far away.

It’s amazing how many voices Kelsea has in her head that are not her own. It’s like she doesn’t have to think at all, memories of her tutor and a magical necklace do all the thinking for her!

The sapphire suddenly flares up and makes the assassin drop dead, though it’s unclear how much of that sudden killer magic came purely from the necklace and how much was fueled by Kelsea’s coinciding flare of anger.

They find a brand of a hound on the corpse’s shoulder, and Mace says this means he’s Caden, part of that super-special-assassin-group. You know, the one that has done nothing in this book besides 1) be defeated by Mace in a 20-to-1 fight and 2) failed to kill someone who was naked and napping in a bathtub. Super deadly assassins, y’all.

She wished he would let her get dressed first. She didn’t want all of these men to see her bare arms and legs. Then she felt even worse. Vanity.

What the fuck is going on with this book? First it shames her for being fat, then it says that wishing to be not covered by only a towel is a sign of being vain?

I mean, I know what’s going on with this book, I just hate it. Because what’s going on is “it’s terrible to be anything except thoughtlessly conventionally attractive.” Girls have to be thin and pretty, but without putting any effort into it or thinking about it. Because their looks are not their own, they’re for other people, therefore they can’t take any pride in them, but also they have to look good for other people, but also showing any effort towards this goal is evil because how dare you imply that looking perfect isn’t a good woman’s natural state.

Mace jumps in the tunnel and follows it, then comes back to report that it opens into a room a couple doors down, he knew about it, and he wasn’t worried because both ends are within their controlled space. Although this means that one of the guards is a traitor who let the assassin in.

In one seamless movement, he picked up the chair from the vanity table and hurled it at the far wall, where it shattered into several jagged lumps of wood.

Well that seems like a reasonable response.

“It takes more than one traitor to smuggle an assassin in here. It would take a Gate Guard as well.”

Several of the guards nodded, murmuring agreement.

“I don’t care about the Gate Guard,” Mace hissed. “They’re worthless, that’s why they guard the gate.”

But…isn’t guarding the gate exactly why you should care? And this case proves it? I mean, the more layers a traitor has to work through, the less likely they are of succeeding. This why systems have multiple failsafes! So that if one doesn’t work, another will.

God, Mace will just never stop sucking at his job, will he?

Why is Mace even in charge? Was he second in command behind Carroll at some point? I don’t remember that being the case, but he just sort of automatically took everything over, didn’t he?

They don’t even have any proof Carroll is dead, beyond the fact that he isn’t around and Mace said “I’ve got a feeling.”

Sorry, tangent. The book is being a bad influence.

Anyway, Mace decides that the traitor is probably the same person who knifed Kelsea during the coronation, because earlier there was some talk about how they couldn’t figure out how a knife thrower got through their 360 coverage of Kelsea. Having a guard throw it satisfies that mystery.

“He’ll be all right, Lady,” Pen assured her. “We’ve seen him like this before. He only needs to go off and kill someone and he’ll be right as rain.”

This guy is seriously unstable, why is he allowed to be calling the shots on shit? Is he just ruling by fear at this point? The other guards are too scared to defy him, and everyone outside the Queen’s Wing thinks it’s Kelsea calling the shots so they don’t know any better? I’d forgive (almost) everything else in this book if it had the stones to make Mace the ultimate villain.