Last time, Katsa and her imaginary anger issues.
The last paragraph of Ch12 was He left her then, to find Raffin. She stood and stared at the place where he’d just been. And tried to shake off the eerie sense that he had just answered something she’d thought, rather than something she’d said.
Ch13 opens with NOT THAT IT was the first time he’d left her with that feeling. So the chapter division is completely meaningless because we’re still working our way through one chain of thought.
Katsa thinks a bit about how weird it is to interact with someone with a perception score above 0, then we move on to the present issue.
Randa had made a deal with a Nanderan underlord. The underlord couldn’t attract a wife, because his holding was in the south-central region of Nander, directly in the path of Westeran and Estillan raiding parties. It was a dangerous place, especially for a woman. And it was a desolate holding, without even sufficient servants, for the raiders had killed and stolen so many. The underlord was desperate for a wife, so desperate that he was willing to forgo her dowry. King Randa had offered to take the trouble to find him a bride, on the condition that her dowry went to Randa.
Lord Ellis had two daughters of marriageable age. Two daughters, and two very great dowries. Randa had ordered Ellis to choose which daughter he would prefer to send as a bride to Nander. “Choose the daughter who is stronger in spirit,” Randa had written, “for it is not a match for the weak-hearted.”
Wow, book, wow.
Okay, even if you assume no one at all in this society gives a fuck about peasants (which is pretty unwise given they’re also lazy enough that they deal with raiders by arming the peasants) noble women are real people and noble women’s dowries is real people’s money.
If the guy can’t get a wife, he could just offer to marry someone with no dowry. There’s going to be other nobles out there who need to get rid of a daughter cheaply, or they could dip into the handful of middle class families around who want to marry up.
What you absolutely do not do is say the dowry is getting redirected into someone else’s pockets, let alone that you have the right to pick whoever you want. What the king’s done here is declare that there’s no difference between nobles and commoners. Everything everyone owns can be taken from them if he wills it.
More, dowries roughly correlate to power. A guy who’s got two daughters and is able to supply both of them with enormous dowries is not someone to fuck with, because if he can raise the money for that he can pay for swords and armor as well. So the king’s not just trampling on the rights of his lords, but he decided to start off by going for one of the most powerful.
Anyway, so, the guy writs back to say that no, he doesn’t think he’ll be doing that.
The king has greater power than any, but I do not think he has the power to force an unsuitable marriage for his own convenience.
The worldbuilding of this is so very terrible. It’s like no one actually knows what a king is, they’re all five year olds playing make-believe. “I say the king can do that!” “Nuh-uh I don’t want to!” This kind of thing should be long and well established. People should know exactly how far the king is allowed to push them and when they can push back.
This is all particularly inane given that it’s standard in Western society that you can’t actually force someone into a marriage, there has to be some nominal amount of acceptance, and this world seems to be far more liberal about women, given Katsa thinks that all she has to do to not get married is say no. And he’s her only living male relative, so if anyone would have the power to force her, it’d be him. There’s no way he can’t do anything to make her get married but can take someone else’s kids and money.
But Katsa actually gasps when she hears what the guy said, because it’s inconceivable! Even though all her behavior before now has made it clear there’s no way the king has the power to do anything even near this.
So the king’s orders are to tell the guy to give up a daughter, and then torture him in front of them until one agrees. And it’s not just Katsa being weirdly dumb, the others are just rolling with it too.
“This is a gruesome task we’re asked to perform,” Oll said. “Even without Ellis being your neighbor, it’s gruesome.”
“It is,” Giddon said. “But I see no way around it.”
No way around it. Because the book can’t imagine that you can just overthrow a king. It doesn’t matter how bad one is, a king is a king and you don’t get a say in that.
It says horrible things about us as a country that we’ve become more pro-monarchy than actual monarchies.
Katsa just asks if the long grass waving in the wind is what the sea looks like, and Giddy acts weird.
Then they reach his castle.
The servants flowed into the sunny courtyard to greet their lord and bow to him, and he called them by name and asked after the grain in the storehouses, the castle, the bridge that was being repaired.
Interestingly, this is the first sign we’ve seen of a lord actually doing his duty, which is make sure his holding is functional and that there’s enough food. It’s very odd that it’s put on the character being snubbed by the narration.
The servants are nice to Katsa, and she thinks it must be because Giddy told them to not be obviously fearful around her since he intends to marry her – can’t possibly be that it’s because they’re friends and he’s trying to get her to come out of her shell a little. Next up, the only reason the little inn girl came up to Katsa is Giddy ordered that too. And she also wonders if they’ll be relieved when she refuses.
That night Oll’s having an attack of conscience.
“I can’t remember if he’s ever asked us to perform a task so cruel.”
“He has,” Giddon said, “and we’ve performed it.
God, what else have you assholes been up to? Why are you still supporting this guy?
Oll says that the council would act to protect the daughters from them. Well, considering you guys aren’t actually the council by this point, it being a giant sprawling network, why don’t you ask for someone else to intervene? Then limp back home to Pandaman and say whoops, the girls were already gone.
They rationalize it as that they can’t do council work to help anybody if they get thrown in the dungeons, because actually fighting back against the king is so wrong it’s inconceivable.
PO HAD SAID it was in her power to refuse Randa. And maybe it was in her power, as it was not in Oll’s or Giddon’s, because Randa could punish them in ways he couldn’t punish her.
Katsa not being the brightest bulb in the anachronistic medieval box, it doesn’t occur to her that Pandaman can punish them to punish her, despite the fact the plan for handling the marriage thing is to hurt one person to make someone else do what they want.
If she were forced to injure Lord Ellis today as Randa wished, it would set her into a rage. She sensed the rage building, just at the thought of it. Her rage if she hurt Lord Ellis would be no less catastrophic than her rage if she didn’t and Randa retaliated.
This is bizarre. I’m not even going to try to untangle what the fuck the author is going on about here, and will just say that this is the final proof Katsa is an utterly reactive, directionless lump of a protagonist. She can’t even decide on something, she’s only doing it because of her uncontrollable emotions.
Still, at least she’s direct. When they meet with the guy, instead of letting Oll or Giddy do the drawn out “do you know why we’re here?” thing, she orders the servants out, explains her orders, and says she won’t do it.
The king is just in some matters. In this matter, he is not. He wishes to bully you.
We’ve seen no sign of that, but hey book, don’t let reality or morals get in the way of continuing to insist kings are somehow right to have power over others like this.
“Well,” Lord Ellis said. “This is quite a surprise, My Lady. I thank you, My Lady. Indeed, I can’t thank you enough.”
Katsa didn’t think a person should thank her for not causing pain. Causing joy was worthy of thanks, and causing pain worthy of disgust. Causing neither was neither, it was nothing, and nothing didn’t warrant thanks.
I think he’s thanking you for volunteering to take pain instead of him, Katsa.
Also ugh capitalization.
Oll and Giddy say they’ll help, and she says no, they need to say they tried to force her and failed. That way no one will blame them. When they don’t agree, she threatens to kill the king if they don’t. I don’t think Katsa quite understands how threats work, butt apparently neither do they, because this works.
Later, they’re back at Giddy’s castle. Katsa’s roughed them up a bit to make the story more convincing. She confesses that she didn’t really hurt the lumber guy either.
Oll cleared his throat. “Perhaps the Council work has put us in touch with our better natures,” he said.
Katsa picked up her knife and fork, cut into her mutton, and thought about that. She knew her nature. She would recognize it if she came face-to-face with it. It would be a blue-eyed, green-eyed monster, wolflike and snarling. A vicious beast that struck out at friends in uncontrollable anger, a killer that offered itself as the vessel of the king’s fury.
Katsa goes on to say that maybe there’s something else, because sometimes she doesn’t like hurting people. God, shut up Katsa, you never like hurting people and I’m tired to death of hearing about your nonexistent temper and how terrible it is.
Later, she’s shooting archery targets in the dark.
Giddy shows up. So yeah, he’s going to propose.
“Marry me,” he said, “and our marriage will protect you.”
Finally, he’s done something worthy of the way everyone’s acting like he’s a dick.
“Our marriage wouldn’t protect me,” she said. “Randa wouldn’t pardon me simply because I married.”
“But he would be more lenient,” Giddon said. “Our engagement would offer him an alternative. It would be dangerous for him to try to punish you, and he knows that. If we say we’re to be married, then he can send us away from court; he can send us here, and he’ll be out of your reach, and you out of his. And there will be some pretense of good feeling between you.”
…ooor I guess no he could have an actual plan and not be implying he can protect her just because he’s a guy. Why do we hate him again? Getting her away from Pandaman seems like a really good idea for her own mental health, and without her to back up his orders, his ability to push others around will be curbed.
She would be his wife, the lady of his house. She’d be charged with entertaining his wretched guests. Expected to hire and dismiss his servants, based on their skill with a pastry, or some such nonsense. Expected to bear him children, and stay at home to love them. She would go to his bed at night, Giddon’s bed, and lie with a man who considered a scratch to her face an affront to his person. A man who thought himself her protector-her protector when she could out-duel him if she used a toothpick to his sword.
He didn’t actually say that, Katsa. As I just mentioned, he doesn’t even imply he’s going to be the one protecting her, just that the marriage would protect her politically. Also, why do you hate guests so much? They’re just your fellow nobles, you entertain them all the time at council meetings. I don’t see why hiring someone for their skills is nonsense, but anyway, it wouldn’t actually be your job, you can delegate. Similarly, if you don’t want to deal with the kids, that’s what wet nurses are for – noblewomen do not need to interact with their kids if they don’t want to. Also, and I know this involves more reasoning than this book has, consider that maybe someone who’s heard your rantings about hating the little brats has already accepted the no-kids thing. And while I know the book is going for him being a chauvinist pig, in the same way it was going for Cousin Badtouch to be a pedo, it never actually has him saying he’s pissed about it because how dare someone mar his property instead of the fact he’s upset she the person is injured.
Katsa is filled with RAEG and so naturally is completely polite and calm because she just got through telling us how she can’t control her temper.
We finally get Giddy being vaguely jerkish. Katsa says she doesn’t want to marry, and then that she doesn’t want babies.
“You’re not an unnatural woman, Katsa. You can fight as other women can’t, but you’re not so different from other women. You’ll want babies. I’m certain of it.”
The problem with this is that Katsa doesn’t actually know her own feelings and her opinions on babies have been especially confused even for her. If you want a moral about how guys shouldn’t tell women they don’t know how they really feel, maybe you shouldn’t write a story revolving around a woman who doesn’t know how she really feels. In fact, her objections seem to largely stem from exactly what he’s saying here – she’s not that different than other women, she just thinks she’s an unnatural freak and sets herself in opposition to everything about them. I expect we’re supposed to read this as him refusing to realize how special and unique and not a stupid girl she is, but insisting on that in the first place is way more fucked up than what he’s saying.
She reiterates that be that as it may, she’s not getting married or having kids. Giddy takes this exceptionally badly, and starts insulting her for expecting a better proposal, which, I must admit, isn’t exactly different than how stupid everyone else has been in this book so at least it’s consistent. He then starts to rant about how the Lienid guy sucks.
“Nor is he honorable,” Giddon said. “A man who fights you as he does is no better than an opportunist and no worse than a thug.”
And Katsa pauses because Metaleyes used that exact phrase line earlier when describing what Giddy thought of him.
She asks if he’s said that to Metaleyes, and Giddy’s like you think I talk to that jerk?
Shut up and answer my questions, says Katsa. So did you say it to anyone else?
No but why would-
So you’ve only thought it is my point?
I suppose but I’d certainly tell him if-
Well, thinks Katsa. Fuck.
She had thought him a fighter, just a fighter. And in her foolishness, she had thought him perceptive. Had even admired him for his perceptiveness.
She, admire a mind reader.
She had trusted him. She had trusted him, and she should not have. He had misrepresented himself, misrepresented his Grace. And that was the same as if he’d lied.
…what, no threats to torture him over it like you did with that poor girl? I guess it’s different when it’s a hot guy, huh Katsa.
Anyway, wow, for someone who can read minds Metaleyes sure is shitty at this. That’s presumably why he could tell whenever she entered a room or his grandfather woke up or whatever, but if he was trying to keep it a secret why would he do those things? The only reason the room thing worked was because Katsa was holding an idiot ball and suddenly didn’t care about her incompetence in moving quietly and because somehow it was more plausible he had an extra grace that gave him super hearing.
I guess it’s got to be there so we can look back and say oh, so that’s what was going on, but surely there’s ways to do that which don’t require characters acting like idiots?
Ah well. This does introduce an issue into their otherwise perfect partnership, as well as explain why it was so perfect in the first place.
I think part of the American pro-monarchy thing is how little we learn about actually having monarchs. We hear a little talk in history class about Isabella and Ferdinand, and Elizabeth and James, and then America has been discovered and settled, cut forward to King George, who was a bad king so we founded a democracy the end. I never learned any European history in school after the fall of Rome until WWI, so none of the civil wars between rival claimants for king, nothing about what Parliaments were doing during those times, or how the feudal system actually worked. I suspect European authors would be less likely to write fantasy monarchs as either perfect or evil, or to completely ignore the possibility a king can be overthrown and replaced with a different one.
And this continued historical ignorance of Americans is just so pointless and infuriating because it’s not like it’s some big secret — the material is available, easily available, you can go to a library, you can get it on the internet… and it’s a thousand times as inexcusable in authors, and authors who are writing for “young adults.” I recently read a steampunk novelette that I need to review, because it shows this historical ignorance and refusal to do even basic research all over it. Naturally the author is American.
I mean really. My father was a history teacher. This makes me angry.
In fairness, it’s hard when you’re not even aware of how much you’re missing. Eighth grade American history was just a list of battles for me, so it wouldn’t have even occurred to me to do research about how people were different, because they weren’t. They just had crappier guns and had to communicate by mail since there were no phones.
And that wasn’t even as bad as the earlier classes where we learned about how Thanksgiving was about showing the Indians about all how there were delicious vegetables to eat, like pumpkins and squash and mashed potatoes!
O_O
I will no longer listen to anyone who tells me the Florida public school system sucked in the Seventies.
My class spent awhile arguing with our eighth grade teacher, because in our first grade Thanksgiving play this one guy played Christopher Columbus, which made it canon.
I think a big part of it is that History isn’t stressed over here. It doesn’t fall into one of the “productive” subjects like Computers, science, and math, so it doesn’t get much attention. In high school, I was teaching my history teachers rather than the other way around because I actually read historical books outside of class and was interested in history. My school had dozens of different sciences and maths, but only three history: World, American Civil War- Present, and Civics/History of Government. History didn’t make the school money. History wasn’t covered in the SAT, ACT, or standardized tests. People didn’t make great inventions or become billionaires from studying history. So history was seen as a pointless subject, like how a lot of people view philosophy and women’s studies. It breaks my heart too because I love history. I love all the liberal arts, but people believe they are becoming pointless fields that people only go into because they aren’t good at science or math.
It’s sad that history teachers generally can’t even explain why the subject matters. It’s just that well, you’re stuck with the class and you’ll be graded on it.
Then there’s the problem that the tests aren’t necessarily perfect either. My teacher had a lot of supplementary stuff that wasn’t on the test, and then he used the post-AP period of American History to teach us that America is really, really racist.
Actually, I learned that part of the democracy thing was not because the British were actually doing a bad job – the British citizens were currently funding the soldiers to defend the existing colonies from the people we’d kicked out, and they were trying to get some of the funding back from us, and that the Americans were never seriously pushing for just representation because our representatives would then have to abide by what the whole group voted.
Outside of class I learned the latter fact had more to do with the fact the British system was completely broken with representatives that had no connection to population size, so of course we didn’t want a token representative.
Do most high schools not offer Euro History? It was an elective AP at my school, but everyone who took Junior-year American history at the honors or AP level took it. Basically, anyone who cared about their academics.
Well, it is an elective. And plenty of people don’t take any AP courses, and they’re the ones least likely to be learning about it anywhere else. I have no idea what the distribution of kids at my school was total, but there were plenty taking the regular and we-know-you’re-useless-so-just-sit-quietly-and-don’t-break-anything levels. And I was initially told to not take them because they were hard and only for the very best students, so it’s not like my school was doing that much to push people into the only decent courses they offered.
I don’t know how many offer, but at least some don’t have any. So the number of kids taking AP courses is limited, and the number of those who take European history is smaller, and then there’s going to be a few AP European classes that don’t really teach the material just because there’s always some bad teachers…
Ah, that makes sense. I’m always glad I went to private school.
We were the opposite. Teachers tried to track us into AP classes if they thought we could handle it, and if you did B-or-better and then tried to move down it would be really discouraged.
I’d be surprised if anyone in my class graduated without an AP course. We were all overachievers.
“I’m always glad I went to private school.”
As someone who’s there right now, let me assert that terrible teachers still crop up. That AP Euro test is looming and I only recently learned who the hell Otto von Bismarck was. America really just doesn’t talk about Europe between the Revolutionary War and WWII because it doesn’t involve America being a badass. (Even the AP Euro textbook can’t refrain from the occasional update on how America’s doing in the 18?0s.)
Oh, lord, Otto von Bismark…the only thing I remember is that he’s, er, Prussian.
I recently got gifted with an AP Euro textbook, and I’m genuinely surprised at how there’s absolutely NO AMERICA.
I wonder if that’s how it’s like for other countries- whatever historical textbooks they make are also interspersed with their own country’s achievements?
Well, most countries teach their own history. I bet some buy our textbooks, though, which must be interesting.
Late, but over here in a fancy private school in Australia we only really spent about a term on Oz history, because there’s so little of it to learn (young nation, 40000 yr Aboriginal history unrecorded). Of the things I remember, we also did: Ancient Egypt (kinda), China, WWII and American history, and we will be covering WWI and the Cold War.
The good thing about not being American is that the suckiness of white people’s treatment of the native Americans isn’t glossed over. I did notice that the bit about white settlers killing a lot of aboriginal Australians was a short and undetailed though; certainly we had nothing like the first person accounts of slaves being whipped or having their arms cut off if they learned to write.
We don’t learn about Australia at all. Which is a shame because that is a lot of gloriously fucked up history packed into so short a time! Also, Mom brought a bunch of illustrated educational comic things back with us about Australian explorers. Apparently everyone to explore ever set out, got lost, slowly ran out of food and water, and then the survivors managed to crawl their way to rescue.
I hope we still have those, they were some awesome elementary school reading.
We do learn about how we fucked over the Native Americans and should feel very bad in a general sort of way and not complain about the casinos, though. It’s just we only learn about a couple discrete incidents late in the game, like the Trail of Tears and then reservations. We did learn about this time soldiers shot up a whole camp with kids and everything, then told the survivors who were hiding if they came out no one would hurt them, and then shot them too.
Did you learn about Australia’s plan to rape the aborigines out of existence, or was the badness confined to the early days?
Yep, that’s basically what happened! Burke and Wills come to mind. The European settlers basically assumed Australia could be handled like or even somehow made into Europe, right down to genociding the nasty black people, refusing to farm in ways that made sense, and going out into unfamiliar bushland without realising they would get completely owned.
Are you talking about the Stolen Generation and related terribleness? Stuff like that is taught in schools, and the PM made a public apology a couple of years ago – it’s not really a secret.. I remember learning about the inhumanly awful stuff the white settlers did to indigenous people, and stuff like the White Australia Policy is sadly pretty recent history. What I don’t think we’re really looking at enough is the awful crap indigenous people are going through right now.
Okay, my comment is ridiculously skinny :/
Threadception!
Well, that’s good to hear, anyway.
They also can gloss over some of the worse parts. Like much how the Irish potato famine was not because the potatoes failed, or how fucked up the penal system was, or everything involved with poverty, really. And we learned about mill girls and union breaking over here, and a reference to the fact we tried to keep things more civilized after seeing what happened in Europe, but not how bad what happened in Europe got.
Plus, fucking Catherine the Great? We got two paragraphs on the one minor king who actually made sweeping reforms but died young, then it’s pages of AND OVER IN RUSSIA, NOTHING REALLY CHANGED BUT LET’S PRETEND SHE’S REVOLUTIONARY FOR IT ANYWAY. Then we watched a movie about how her husband was a childlike sadist and she slept with a hot guy instead.
I actually tried to take some mid-level English classes in high school because for the first time ever there was one that was going to study fantasy novels like Lord of the Rings! (This was in 1978!) And I was told “no, you’re too smart for those classes, you’re taking AP English.” And I got stuck studying bores like Beckett and Pinter and so on. ;) (I think the history classes I took were just regular ones not CP or AP but that was because I decided to focus on English and foreign languages.) I was, however, going to one of the higher level high schools in the area.
When I started reading this, I immediately noticed that
a) Katsa sounds a hell of a lot like Katniss.
b) There’s a guy that she’s known forever who she’s friends with named Giddon who seems to be into her even though she doesn’t realize it.
c) She meets a startlingly hawt love interest named Po.
d) She has no idea when boys are into her and is shocked, SHOCKED, to discover that it’s ever the case.
e) She ultimately discards Giddon as a non-entity in the supposed love triangle.
And then I flipped to the copyright page and discovered that this was published the same year as The Hunger Games.
Huh.
I’d say Katsa’s somewhat of an improvement – she hasn’t wangsted about how she’s the ugliest duckling no one could possible love (or, well, kinda, but at least the baby hate is a legitimate stumbling block), and mostly seemed like someone who just wasn’t considering it.