Today we follow Thomas, as he morosely mopes his way through the rain.

Thomas and three cronies that he convinced to go with him are on the road to Mortmesne, but the going is slow because of the weather and they keep hiding any time someone approaches them on the road. Also that one paragraph? Four pages in the book.

They hide again as someone approaches, but then the new person starts singing (really bad) songs about Kelsea’s “deeds” and Thomas knows it’s that Fetch dude.

Fetch kills his companions and then begins a long, drawn out torture scene demanding information, but Thomas has none because, much like Kelsea, he’s a fuckup and no one wants to tell him anything. Fetch then wants information about the Red Queen, figuring Thomas must know something because he slept with her. (And naturally that tells you just soooooo much about a person, right?)

Of course this kicks off a flashback, because why pass up anything that could possibly pad this book out even further? It’s rather pointless, since you know what happens in this flashback? PEOPLE NOT TELLING STUFF. Seriously.

Well, after Thomas gets done remembering how the queen touched his peen and then no one said anything, he decides to tell Fetch everything. In summary. So we still know nothing.

Fuck this book. Good lord a’mighty, that was how many thousands of words wasted on absolutely no progress whatsoever? I swear this 448 page book should be a frikkin novella, the plot is so thin.

Well, at least Fetch kills him at the end of it. One less character around to waste pages with all his uselessness and not-telling-ness.

Oh joy, and next we get to play with religion!

This sect was less concerned with the moral salvation of souls than with the biological salvation of the human race, a salvation viewed as God’s great plan in raising the New World out of the sea .

So…New World is…literally a new world?

Sooooo………magic?

Father Tyler goes to visit Kelsea, looking all harried and unhappy, but dutifully offers himself as a candidate for Keep Priest. Tyler is also “secularly holier than thou because books” and apparently only decided to help undermine his nation’s ruler because he was afraid his boss would take his books away.

I mean…like…damn. I like books, too, but damn, that’s all it takes? “I won’t get to have a personal library in my room so I guess it’s time for treason”?

It’s amazing how in this story so many people can so severely undermine the value of books, and then the remainder can somehow make up for it by being a one-person-overminer.

She stared at him, and Tyler began to glimpse, if only dimly, how this girl could command such a fearsome character as the Mace. One could watch the Queen and almost see her thinking, a series of rapid and complex calculations. It made Tyler think of pre-Crossing computers, machines whose great value had essentially been the ability to do many things at once. He felt that hundreds of small variables went into the Queen’s deliberation, and wondered what sort of variable he was.

Um…I’ve seen the inside of her head. That’s not even close. She mostly makes split decisions and/or lets the voices in her head call the shots.

Kelsea accepts, with conditions.

“The Keep chapel will be converted into a school.”

…why? I mean, do you not have room for one elsewhere? If you’re going to let religious people be religious, why take away their chapel? That just seems pointlessly petty. To take this one room in the whole of the castle and make it be a school instead of…any of the other rooms just really seems like thumbing your nose at the church. And, like, not even at the corrupt parts of the church. It’s a chapel for goodness sake; even a 100% nice and agreeable and uncorrupted church would still need the actual church part.

Also, she won’t stand for him preaching to her, but she won’t keep him quiet if he wants to debate or offer advice, and she won’t stop him preaching to the rest of the castle inhabitants.

“If there’s no chapel in the Keep, Majesty, and you yourself reject the word of God, what exactly am I to do here?”

Exactly! She says he can preach to others and then took away his avenue of doing so. She says she doesn’t want to be proselytized at, which I totally understand, but then she limited his ability to conduct religious affairs for literally everyone else in her house. That’s just rude. That’s assuming that every single noble and clerk and cook and butler in the Keep is every bit as unreligious as she is, and then punishing them if they’re not.

“You’re an academic, I’m told, Father. What is your area of expertise?”

“History.”

“Ah, good. That will be your use to me. I’ve read many works of history, but I’ve missed many also.”

Fuck off, Kelsea, he’s supposed to serve everyone in the Keep, he’s the Keep’s Priest not the Queen’s personal priest. “your use to me” shove you and your pretentious notions.

Uhg, just such an utterly fucking self-centered thing to say.

They go to look at Kelsea’s library so they can squee together about how books are awesome, then there’s some banter about the slave thing, about belief, and Kelsea’s arguments against religion are so passé. Like, if you don’t believe in God because the world is a shitfest, fine, that’s your choice and there’s a lot of arguments to be made in that favor. But if you’re going to be writing a supposedly smart character with that belief…there’s a lot of arguments to be made in that favor and maybe you should make some of them? Especially since there’s a lot of arguments against that as well, and a life-long priest should know a few. “I don’t believe in God because bad things happen” is so, so, so very boring as a writing choice.

Although it does fit with Kelsea’s actual character, which seems to be just “repeat things Carlin said without really understanding the underlying purpose.”

Kelsea then brings up her idea of having a printing press made and encouraging wide-spread literacy and book distribution and WHY, IF YOU KNOW WHAT PRINTING PRESSES ARE, HAVE THESE THINGS NOT BEEN ALREADY MADE AND USED? Jesus Christ on a cracker, presses aren’t even that hard to figure out and people love books. What proof? HISTORY. LITERALLY ALL OF HISTORY. PRINTING PRESSES WERE INVENTED AND THEN EVERYONE SAID “YAY, GIVE US BOOKS, WE WANTS THEM.” I MEAN, DO YOU REALLY THINK SOMETHING ELSE HAPPEN TO GIVE US THE BOOK-SATURATION WE NOW ENJOY? BECAUSE IT WASN’T THE PYRMAID ALIENS, PEOPLE JUST FUCKING LIKE BOOKS AND STORIES.

I’m really starting to think this book thinks pyramid-building aliens did everything pre-crossing and that’s why humans aren’t just naturally inclined to do stuff like “invent shit” and “seriously crave fiction.”