Last time, not-Katniss manages to get the old royal guy to her own country’s prince.

Now she’s running back to meet up with her fellow conspirators.

She had to move carefully now, lest she break branches or leave boot prints and create a trail straight to the meeting place. Already the way looked a bit traveled. Oll and Giddon and the others on the Council were never as careful as she

Katsa is now out-sneaking the spymaster.

It’s perfectly fine for her to have learned this, but the rest of the group should have too! If anything, it’s more important for them, because they can’t rely on always being able to just murder anyone who happens to find them.

When she gets there, she’s livid to find them sleeping. But she just checks over the horses to make sure they’re okay. Oll wakes up while she’s doing so.

if someone had discovered you,” she said, “sleeping at the edge of the forest when you were supposed to be halfway to the eastern border?” She spoke into her saddle and scratched her horse’s shoulder. “What explanation would you have given?”

The same explanation he’d give if they found him awake?

I’m not sure what she really expects here. It’s one thing to be worried about getting attacked, but there’s not much they can do about being found, especially when they have horses with them.

Giddon brushes her worries off by saying she’d have thought up a story and smiles at her, but she keeps seething. While, as I said, not sure what she expects, the seething is reasonable in that you don’t want the other people saying they’re not going to even try because you’ll bail them out.

Katsa thinks that she’d have never slept, but also that they’d have never let the fighter who saw her live – and that’s all, she doesn’t connect them or have any further thoughts on the matter. She’s only thought that they’d want the guy dead a dozen times by now and the sleeping thing was covered by her insistence this page. Are we going to spent the book with Katsa thinking the same damn things on an endless loop without ever having a new thought on the subject?

THE FORESTS of the southern Middluns gave way to hills, low hills at first that would grow as they neared Estill. They stopped only once, at midday, to change their horses at a secluded inn that had offered its services to the Council.

…how many people are in on this? Not much of a “secret” council, is it.

See, that alibi earlier wasn’t an alibi, it was an actual mission the king sent them on, so they’ve got to get to the place and back in the allotted time.

“I’ll sleep well tonight,” Giddon said, yawning. “It’s lucky that inn came forward to the Council. We would’ve ridden the horses into the ground.”
“It surprises me, the friends the Council is finding,” Oll said.

Wait. So they’re not letting people in to the council, people are learning about it on their own and volunteering? And this happens regularly?

I guess that explains why they don’t need to worry about all the obvious leaks involved here, everyone already knows.

What had she expected when she’d started the Council? She’d imagined herself, alone, sneaking through passageways and around corners, an invisible force working against the mindlessness of the kings. “I never even imagined it spreading beyond me.”

How do you “start a council” of one person?

I mean maybe she meant she figured she’d have her friends as backup but be going on missions alone, but in that case it would be “beyond us”, not just her.

Also, Katsa? If you want to work against kings, may I suggest cutting out the many middlemen and just going right for assassination? You keep saying the problem is that the current kings suck, so get rid of them.

Giddon says that now they’ve got supporters across the kingdom.

“People are opening their homes. Did you know one of the Nanderan borderlords brought an entire village behind his walls when the Council learned of a Westeran raiding party? The village was destroyed, but every one of them lived.” He settled down onto his side and yawned again. “It’s heartening. The Council does some good.”

This is a weird chain of logic. I think it means that supporters of the council means they’re willing to do stuff like this at all, not that it was possible to get them inside in time because of the advance warning. Which, in turn, implies the system is absolutely fucked – the point of the walls is for villagers to hide behind while knights do the grand fighting. That’s the feudal system – you give part of your work to the lord, and in return he protects you so you can keep working. If things have degraded to you give part of your work to the lord so he won’t kill you now, they’re minutes away from an all out peasant uprising. It also suggests overpopulation, because the loss of workers would be a problem otherwise.

In conclusion, often assassination is the best answer.

Anyway, Katsa hasn’t slept in two days, but she’s still wired and decides that instead, she should think about how much her life sucks.

She says she was first sent out against a traitor, someone spying for a neighboring kingdom. Uh, actually, that really is a pretty big deal. There’s a reason societies tend to have ridiculously harsh punishments for treason. If you think of societies as a collection of rules that evolve to be the most successful, being chill about direct harm to the society itself is not a rule that survives. I’d argue that this is now outdated, as in modern times the breadth of society has expanded so far, but certainly in feudal times, when it’s a bunch of tiny kingdoms that are a day’s ride from each other, treason needs to be dealt with viciously.

I’d say that the modern equivalent of this is more like, say, people betting large quantities of money of the failure of their businesses or society at large, then causing that to happen so they can clean up. Only instead of giving them tax money to keep doing it you torture them to death on television.

Huh. I wonder if the moral here is that while feudal societies were generally awful places, they were at least better at adapting to serve their own interest.

Katsa had been all of ten years old. Randa had come to one of her practice sessions and watched her, an unpleasant smile on his face. “Are you ready to do something useful with your Grace, girl?” he called out to her.
Katsa stopped her kicking and whirling and stood still, struck by the notion that her Grace could have any beneficial use.
“Hmm,” Randa said, smirking at her silence. “Your sword is the only bright thing about you. Pay attention, girl. I’m sending you after this traitor. You’re to kill him, in public, using your bare hands, no weapons. Just him, no one else. I’m sure we all hope you’ve learned to control your bloodlust by now.”
Katsa shrank suddenly, too small to speak, even if she’d had something to say.

So hey, Pandaman is a dick. A cartoonishly evil dick to cartoonishly pathetic Katsa.

Of course it’d be useful! She lives in a world where people kill each other all the damn time. Where the entire social structure can be boiled down to the person best at killing people is in charge. Where the way you protect other people is by killing the person trying to kill them. She’s spent all her time training among people who use violence for things.

Katsa helpfully explains to us that he’s saying to use her bare hands because he wants blood and screaming. Except that Katsa’s initial kill was with her bare hands and instantaneous, so isn’t the obvious guess that she’d just smash this guy’s face in the same way?

She also seems unconcerned about the actual crime, despite the fact she’s been working with actual torturers who presumably are doing it to people for far less than treason. There’s no “Well, I guess as a traitor he deserves this” or even “Well at least it’s someone who did a really bad thing”.

Anyway, Katsa instead snaps the guy’s neck. While not a great move, it’s a good attempt for ten year old Katsa. But naturally it makes Panda angry.

After that his commands included specifics: blood and pain, for this or that length of time. There was no way around what he wanted.

Actually, tiny Katsa, there still kind of is! As you should know from the fact you’re being trained by the “spymaster” whose people are “good at getting information without killing” there’s lots of ways to cause pain that aren’t showy, and in the opposite direction, lots of things that look terrible but aren’t that much more painful than any other death. Plus, you could always keep mangling the body after killing the person! I don’t think anyone’s going to do an autopsy to make sure the guy was still alive the whole time.

I realize this still sucks, but, options.

And Randa got what he wished, for her reputation spread like a cancer.

This simile bothers me. Do they even know what cancer is? For most of history people only recognized the big tumors as a problem, and they fixed it by cutting them out. From their POV when people ended up dying from the disease it just meant the disease kept coming back, not that it was spreading.

If you’re using a disease metaphor, why not one that actually travels between people and is easily visible, like plague?

After a while Katsa forgot about defiance. It became too difficult to imagine.

And this is just…

Apparently, she tried to go against what he wanted her to do once. She wasn’t punished for it or even forced to do something even worse, he just made sure to be explicit about what he wanted from then on. And that’s all it takes?

Oll told the girl of things Randa’s spies learned when they crossed into the other kingdoms. Young girls who had disappeared from an Estillan village and reappeared weeks later in a Westeran whorehouse. A man held in a Nanderan dungeon as punishment for his brother’s thievery, for his brother was dead, and someone had to be punished. A tax that the King of Wester had decided to levy on the villages of Estill-a tax Wester’s soldiers saw fit to collect by slaying Estillan villagers and emptying their pockets.

The whorehouse issue depends on how society functions, but your average feudal society should be crushing enough that women are forced into prostitution without needing to be kidnapped – and also, given that every kingdom is apparently just a short walk from another, it’s easy to think that’s just what happens when girls who decide prostitution is their best option leave their home village for somewhere they won’t know anyone.

Punishing one person for another’s crime seems senselessly cruel until you realize a lot of punishments are meant to be deterrents. It’s not that you just need to fill your prisoner quota, it’s that you’re holding everyone responsible for the crimes of the few because it makes your life easier if people police themselves first. And if you consider how wars in this time are usually carried out with a lot of people rounded up by their lord and told to fight or die because one lord is mad about something another lord did, it’s not like suffering for someone else’s mistake is at all rare. (And once again, if you have people who “get information” and “know how to hurt without killing”, you have people who regularly torture people for information – which means hurting innocent people.)

Now, obviously there’s the issue of if this kind of thing actually works, but we don’t need to consider that here, because the point isn’t whether or not this is actual ethical behavior, just if people would think it is. And the answer is yes they did, so Katsa shouldn’t blink at the idea unless she’s also Graced with the ability to invent sociology and start collecting data.

And the last thing is just a stupidly convoluted way of saying raiding parties, again. Stupid raiding parties, because it’s not like villagers have much.

While we don’t know how much money is in circulation here, it should be pointed out that much of the middle ages functioned on barter because there weren’t enough coins to go around. Now, you can loot villages for food so you don’t have to bother feeding your soldiers on your own dime, and you can make off with their livestock and that’s like money, and sending your soldiers off to rape people does occupy them so they won’t be causing trouble for you and certainly works to terrorize your neighbors.

It’s just stupid to be doing it because you said they owe you a tax and then make off with three copper pieces.

Anyway, so, Katsa’s upset because the king doesn’t care. Look, kingdoms are different countries. You can’t just waltz in and tell them to do it your way, that’s called “starting a war” and it’s probably going to be even more bloody and awful for the people involved than whatever their king’s doing. It sucks, but that’s why it’s important to have constitutions and human rights bills and NO TORTURERS I’M NOT FORGETTING THAT LAST BIT BOOK

Now, a Middluns lord who had hidden the majority of his harvest in order to pay a smaller tithe than he owed? Here was worthwhile news; here was a problem relevant to the Middluns.

Yes. It actually is!

I mean, say what you will of what the money’s being used for, but a tithe is a tax. If you’re using the tax income wisely, for things like paying an army so people from the other country don’t kill people from yours, then one lord not paying means the rest of them are paying a greater proportion for something everyone benefits from. And if you’re not, you’re probably the sort of dick who’s going to spend X amount of money one way or another, so you’ll just raise taxes for everyone until you make up the difference. In either situation, one guy cheating hurts the larger group.

This kind of behavior also makes it harder to have a flexible rate based on the harvest instead of a flat tax. When farmers have a bad year and can’t afford to pay or they’ll starve, they need to be trusted, but if jackass lords lie about it on good years so they can afford extra baubles, then you very quickly end up with situations where it’s assumed a large part of the harvest is hidden, and part of tax collection is ferreting those out, and it’s impossible to say how much food there actually is, and suddenly half your population is dying of starvation because oops! Someone overestimated how much they had total (and “someone” will very fast because the higher the estimate the more they can take).

Katsa recounts her missions. The first one was midnight looters that the Estillan king had set on his own people. Which, yes, clearly an issue…but if they’re sanctioned by the king, what happens if he just sends them back at noon under his banner, instead of pretending to be uninvolved? What happens when a king just demands a tax that’s too high? Where are you drawing the line here?

Then there’s freeing enslaved boys from one country from a mine in another – and what if it was boys of that country getting used as slave miners?

The news of this kind of thing began to trickle into useful channels so how the hell did none of the kings they’re fucking with ever learn?

Some of Oll’s fellow spies joined the cause

And what, did they kill the others who learned about it and knew the king would reward them for the news? Because you would get a pretty hefty reward for this.

This isn’t even an issue of Pandaman being a bastard, members of his court are attacking the lawful government of other countries. These are acts of war. He’d want to stop it because he’s going to be held accountable when it comes out.

We do get some mention that the spy/torturemaster’s wife joins up, as well as other women of the castle…they just don’t seem to be saying anything at council meetings so far. Well, at least they theoretically exist.

There was an atmosphere of adventure at the meetings, of dangerous freedom. It felt like play, too wonderful, Katsa thought sometimes, to be real.

I really can’t overemphasize how hideously dangerous this all is. They’re subverting the rule of the other kings. It doesn’t matter why they’re doing it, anyone actually ruling is going to look at that and see it as someone saying they want the job.

Okay, I’ve been trying not to mention ASoIaF so soon. But arg. This is like how people in the early books make a huge deal about the iron throne. Because ultimately power comes down to who wins, so you have to always, always be on watch for someone who might be thinking about challenging you, and you’re paranoid and you’re always looking for any sign at all of disrespect because you need to crush it before it gets to a full rebellion. After Jaime kills the king, he’s sitting on the throne waiting to see who comes back – he doesn’t actually want the damn thing. But the new king doesn’t forget it, and he’s always thinking maybe Jaime only gave it up because he had no choice.

And it seems absolutely insane to us, because it’s just a damn throne. So does every other time people make a big deal about proper respect and not overstepping your bounds. But when you know practically everyone would murder you for the right to be king, you’re going to look for every possible hint of when someone’s considering actually making an attempt. You can’t let someone disrespect you. You can’t risk it. Because ultimately you’re only in charge because other people think you are, and as soon as they question that, it all falls apart.

Now. If things are stable and have been for some time, if nobles get different rules than everyone else, you’ll get people who treat incredibly serious things like this as play. But that’s not how things work here, or else the old prince would have been kept in a cell “befitting a prisoner of his status”. And they would have been shocked by his treatment otherwise, because they’ve been raised to assume that while, yes, horrible dungeons where you die of hypothermia exist, if they personally ever get into trouble they’ll be locked up in a nice tower room with servants to wait on them.

Inevitably over time they attracted allies outside the court. The virtuous among Randa’s borderlords, who were tired of sitting around while neighboring villages were plundered. Lords from the other kingdoms, and their spies. And bit by bit, the people-innkeepers, blacksmiths, farmers. Everyone was tired of the fool kings. Everyone was willing to take some small risk to lessen the damage of their ambition and disorder and lawlessness.

That’s called a coup.

If you make it clear you would do a better job of ruling than the current ruler, you are saying things would be better if that guy happened to have a tragic accident and you became the current ruler. At the most, if this is a world where conflict is ritualized enough you don’t kill anyone with blue enough blood, it means he’s going to be locked up somewhere while you do the actual ruling thing.

But let’s continue our ASoIaF comparisons because that complaint is ignoring the bigger failing of this section.

What’s virtue? What’s lawlessness?

People may hate Sansa, but she’s a great character because she tells you how things are supposed to work. Ladies are powerless and commoners aren’t allowed to stand up for themselves, but it’s okay because knights protect them.

This isn’t true. It was never really true. But when people visibly break the rules of how things are supposed to work, everyone else gets upset. They stop supporting you and the other guy can come in and win followers on the platform of not being an asshole like you.

But what’s the social contract here? By implication, it seems thinks like enslaving people or stealing stuff is wrong, because kings only enslave people of other countries and when they steal from their people they pretend it’s not at their own orders. And you’re not supposed to ask for farmers to pay a tithe if you destroy their crops, or punish one person for what another does.

So – what happens if another king destroys the crops, can the first king demand the farmers pay in that case? What happens if instead of stealing you just hike the tax to accomplish the same? Is it actually against the rules to enslave your own people, or is it the opposite and they only bring up the kidnapping because that’s why? How do you distinguish between regular enslaving and debt-slavery? How do you handle conspiracy or people who aid a criminal? Would it have been acceptable to kill the farmers for not paying their taxes if they’d just had a bad year instead of it being someone’s fault in particular? How much power are kings accepted to have?

All we see here is Katsa listing things they don’t like, but she’s giving us no grounding for what kings are allowed to do. She seems to be referring to some uniform system of ethics, but there’s no mention of one. And it’s not like it’d be hard to insert this, just say they’re a constitutional monarchy. She’s said that the five kingdoms were once one family, which presumably meant they were originally one kingdom. Say that they all kept the same rules of what you are and aren’t allowed to do, and the current kings are violating that.

It was out of her control now. Missions were carried out in the name of the Council in places she’d never been, without her supervision, and all of it had become dangerous. One careless word spoken by the child of some innkeeper, one unlucky encounter across the world between two people she’d never met, and everything would come crashing down.

So, aside from the fact that what she’s saying is the council is now the shadow ruler of all the local kingdoms, this should have happened ages ago. The only way it hasn’t is that the number of king-haters is so high that the odds are against ever running into someone who would report them, and even if there are practically no loyalists left, there’s got to be plenty of people who will do it just for personal gain.

One careless word spoken by the child of some innkeeper, one unlucky encounter across the world between two people she’d never met, and everything would come crashing down. Her missions would end, Randa would see to it. And then, once again, she would be no more than the king’s strongarm.

Uh, no, I’m pretty sure Pandaman will be too busy dealing with the war. You know, the one that happens when all the other countries learn that his personal enforcer has been operating in their countries to subvert their rule. This will be followed by either continent-wide purges to remove members of the council, or a bloody civil war between the council and the loyalists.

The least of things at stake is her ability to run around stealing prisoners.

But Katsa is too busy making this all about her.

Normal. She wasn’t normal. A girl Graced with killing, a royal thug?

What does being a girl have to do with it?

No, seriously book. I’m waiting. What does being a girl have to do with it? We haven’t seen anyone, male or female, with her ability. Even the graceling guy earlier lost to her in a fight and besides, he can’t have been that awesome if she didn’t know who he is while everyone knows who she is. She’s not normal because she’s a Graceling and her particular Grace is incredibly powerful. We have seen absolutely zero sign that the powers normally go by gender and if that was the idea I expect you’d have said it outright. So what does being a girl have to do with it?

A girl who didn’t want the husbands Randa pushed on her, perfectly handsome and thoughtful men, a girl who panicked at the thought of a baby at her breast, or clinging to her ankles.
She wasn’t natural.

God fucking –

Look. I will try to use simple words, because this is apparently very hard for people to understand.

If you do not want a baby, you can just not want a baby without being scared of them.

If you are scared of a baby, that is not the same thing as not wanting a baby.

It is completely possible to simply not want to be pregnant without having any feelings regarding the end product.

If you are not girly, that does not mean any of the above must apply to you, just as you can be girly and not like babies.

It would be completely appropriate for Katsa to fear babies out of fear she would hurt them – or would have, except the book seems to have already had her work through her worries about self-control in the backstory. It’s also easy for her to just not give a shit about babies and so have no interest in marrying and having that be her job. And considering how much she seems to value personal competence, it’s easy to believe she would be terrified of pregnancy itself (…especially given the death rate, and there’s no sign of Katsa’s mother so far…) There are many, many legitimate reasons for Katsa to not want babies without just going back to the tired excuse of her finding them terrifying.

Katsa, satisfied she’s checked off enough new boxes on the tragically damaged sue list, finally decides to go to sleep.