Last time, Metaleyes says they need to leave him behind.
IN THE PINK of dawn they stumbled upon a small cabin with little to offer except its shell; an abandoned cabin
Well, that’s ridiculously convenient.
Katsa points out it’s obvious, but no worries. Because there’s also a waterfall.
“There’s a waterfall like this in the mountains near my brother Skye’s castle,” Po said. “We were swimming one day, and we found a tunnel underwater that led to a cave.”
And it just happens that it’s the one with a cave, but not the kind where the cave is visible behind the waterfall like usual. Katsa doesn’t even comment on how since when has Metaleyes’ grace let him do this sort of thing. She just goes with it.
Also
Here and there at its edges the pool overflowed, and a number of streams trickled downward and eastward toward the Monsean forest.
This is the opposite of how water works. Small streams form into bigger ones. If water overflows, it might start off being in several points, but before long one would wear down faster and become the primary and then only stream.
To try to keep up the fiction for Bitterblue, Katsa has to dive into the freezing water and “check” if there’s anything there. Naturally, she finds it.
She felt around and found the rock whose underside she’d struck. It jutted above the surface and felt flat and mossy on top. She pulled herself onto it, teeth chattering.
It was blacker in this cave than any night she had ever known.
THEN HOW THE FUCK IS THERE MOSS
This is the second time the book has mixed pitch black and moss. Does she not know moss is a plant?
She decides that yes, this is a pretty secure hiding place. If it wasn’t for the ridiculously convenient hut, I’d have no problem with this, but the idea the perfect hiding place is right next to the already impossible perfect hangout is just adding insult to the injured plausibility.
On her way back she catches a fish because Katsa is like that. She then insists they’ll stay and gather him firewood and stuff, because the horse needs to rest anyway.
It was cold enough for Po to be uncomfortable during the day, when he couldn’t risk a fire. But it wasn’t cold enough for freezing meat; nor did they have salt to treat it. She couldn’t kill him meat now to last the winter, or even to last him a number of weeks.
God damn it.
The author writing this book lives in a world with refrigerators, but she apparently doesn’t understand that meat doesn’t have to be frozen solid for cold to help preserve it. Meat doesn’t rot that fast if you remove the viscera even in hot climates. And as long as the meat’s kept out of the sun, it’ll stay more than cold enough to preserve it. Furthermore, you can keep meat from actually going bad just by cooking it again, as that’ll keep killing anything that tries to grow on it, and extended heat will dry and preserve it.
Then she makes him a bow and kills some birds for arrow feathers by throwing rocks at them. Then she weaves a basket, puts it in the water and fills the basket with fish for him. For some reason he stops her before she makes him crutches, despite the fact that can hardly take anywhere near as much time as any one of the other things did, and tells her to get going.
“Cousin,” Po said, “don’t let her run the horse ragged. And be sure she sleeps and eats every once in a while. She’ll try to give all the food to you.”
Survival: being so dumb you accidentally kill the animal you need to survive, then drop from hunger and exhaustion because you forget to eat.