Last time, dramatic revelations about nothing important.

The snow is getting worse so they decide to wait out the bad weather, because they apparently don’t get the concept of “seasons” where if it’s cold and snowy in early winter it just gets worse over time. The weather continues to storm as was completely unforeseen by a half dozen adults.

Metaleyes tells her that actually, he wasn’t blind when she left, his eyes were just having trouble, which doesn’t make much sense given at the time he seemed to be hiding something and last chapter he seemed to have wanted her to keep the ring at the time because he planned to never return home. Anyway, when he woke up the morning afterward his eyesight was gone.

So he spends the next few days refusing to get up out of misery, but when the soldiers come he hides.

“My thoughts cleared. There was no light in the cave; there was nothing to see. And yet I sensed the cave with my Grace, so vividly. And I realized what I was doing. Sitting in the cabin, feeling sorry for myself, when Leck was out there somewhere and people were in danger. In the cave it struck me how despicable that was.”

Apparently that didn’t last, though.

Metaleyes says he knows it’s dumb to be sulking, and Katsa jumps in to reassure him that no, his emo fit is totally valid.

“You’ve lost something,” she said, “and you’ve every right to feel sorrow for what you’ve lost. They’re not the same, sight and your Grace. Your Grace shows you the form of things, but it doesn’t show you beauty. You’ve lost beauty.”

You mean color. Shapes can be pretty too, and he can still see those. In fact he can presumably see those better.

It’s like Toph from Avatar. Remember all the not whining constantly she did? Good times. Toph had a better claim to actual blind angst than Metaleyes – she lives in a world where writing is common, which she actually can’t do, and she can only see based on things touching the ground, and it only works on solid ground. (Oh, and also everyone knows she’s blind and treats her like an unusually stupid baby.) But Toph, not being a whiny fuck, recognizes that she can also sense things in ways other people can’t, and also that even if there’s some things she can’t do it’s not the end of the damn world.

It’s one thing to be sad you can’t see color. It’s another thing to insist you’ll never leave the cabin and abandon all your former relationships because color is beauty beauty is color life is meaningless.

“I won’t go back to Lienid. I won’t go to my castle, if I’m
not able to see it. It’s hard enough to be with you. It’s why I didn’t tell you the truth. I wanted you to go
away, because it hurts to be with you when I can’t see you.”

Book. Book. Do you realize what it sounds like when he says he doesn’t want to be around her if he can’t physically see her? Because it sure sounds like “I don’t value your company but just used you for eyecandy. Now, the sound your voice merely reminds me of how much I wish to stare at your boobs and/or ass, and I mourn their loss.”

Luckily he suddenly does a 180 and says that if she doesn’t mind him being a sack of irritating whine, he actually doesn’t want her to leave him.

“I’ll not go,” Katsa said, “for a long time. I’ll not go until you want me to; or until you’re ready to go yourself “

Does this mean marriage? Because I seem to remember the whole issue there was your inexplicable obsession with not getting tied down even with things that are more like imaginary pretendy ties you can forget about any time, while this sure sounds like an actual tie.

It was an impressive act-and for the most part, it seemed to satisfy them. Enough, at least, that they never had reason to suspect the truth of his Grace, which was ultimately all he was trying to hide.

He doesn’t need to. He could totally say “Hey, remember that fighting grace I have? Well, the wallop on my head changed it so now I sense things like a bat but can’t see.” It’s not like graces make any sense, so no matter what shit you make up no one should know you’re lying. The only secret part of his grace is the mindreading part, and he can just keep not mentioning it.

The author seems to realize that all this is just making him look like a whiny idiot, so she adds in another wrinkle – Metaleyes is having trouble processing the jumble of info.

Of course, it’s still uber, because sues sues sues.

One day beside the pool, during a rare break between snowstorms, she watched him notch an arrow calmly to his bow and aim at something she couldn’t see. A ledge of rock? A tree stump? He cocked his head as if he were listening. He released the arrow, and it sliced through the cold and thwacked into a patch of snow. “What-” Katsa started to say, and then stopped when a spot of blood welled to the surface and colored the snow around the arrow’s shaft.
“A rabbit,” he said. “A big one.”

Yeah it sure is hard being Metaleyes and having a superpower. And then he dramatically falls to his knees because omg geese he senses them and that means collapsing even though there must be a fuckton of animals everywhere such that a couple extra flying overhead should be nothing! Even the flaws are sue flaws.

“Katsa, do I seem to be looking at you?”
They were working with their knives before the fire, shaving the bark from the branches of a tree to make arrows. She turned to him and met his eyes, full on, gleaming directly into hers. She caught her breath and set her knife down, flushed with heat; and wondered, briefly, how long it would be before the others returned. And then Po’s failed attempt to keep from grinning snapped her out of her daze.
“Dear wildcat. That was more of an answer than I reckoned for.”

So now his not-sight is so precise he can fake looking people square in the eyes. So well that Katsa very nearly fucks him on the spot.

Katsa gives him some suggestions to look more focused when he aims his gaze at people, and they declare the problem of people noticing anything odd about his eyes solved.

Apparently they end up spending the whole winter there, with King Ror sending them food all the time. Bitterblue says she should ask for a sword, and there’s a long conversation about fighting and how everyone wants to see Katsa fight and how she’d kick their asses and who should Katsa fight and so on. Metaleyes leaves to tell the returning soldiers about Bitterblue’s request for a sword, and then Bitterblue says Metaleyes is feeling better because he’s started eating, and for some reason this makes Katsa rush out after him.

“You know I’ve been fighting my Grace all these months,” he said, “trying to push it away. Trying to ignore most of what it shows me and concentrate on the little bit I need to know.”
“Yes.”
“Well, a few days ago in a fit of, well, self-pity, I stopped.”
“You stopped?”
“Fighting my Grace, I mean. I gave up, I let it all wash over me. And you know what happened?” He didn’t wait for her to guess. “When I stopped fighting all the things around me, all the things around me started to come together. All the activity, and the landscape, and the ground and the sky, and even people’s thoughts. Everything’s trying to form one picture. And I can feel my place in it like I couldn’t before. I mean, I’m still overwhelmed. But nothing like before.”

Oh so even your fake problem has been solved. How very fascinating. Do go on at even further length about it.

It’s as if when I open myself up to every perception, things create their own focus. I mean, think of us now, standing here. There’s a bird in the tree behind me, do you see it?”
Katsa looked over his shoulder. A bird sat on a branch, plucking at the feathers under its wing. “I see it.”
“Before, I would have tried to fight off my perception of the bird, so as to concentrate on the ground under my feet and you in my arms. But now I just let the bird, and everything else that’s irrelevant, wash over me; and the irrelevant things fade away a bit, naturally.

Good for you, now you’re back to unqualified superhuman powers. It must have been so hard before when you were merely superhuman with certain limitations.

Katsa says he should start fighting with his brother to get back his strength, because Katsa sees fighting as the solution to everything. And he says okay.