Last time, Metaleyes successfully wears Katsa down into forgiving him.

Oh hey, remember how also she disobeyed her uncle? Because that’s still totally a thing that happened.

So she shows up in his court and for a second she panics.

Randa sat high on his throne, blue robes and bright blue eyes. His face hard, his smile frozen. An archer to either side of him, an arrow notched in each bow and trained, as she entered the room, on her forehead, on the place just above her blue and green eyes. Two more archers, one in each far corner, also with arrows notched.
The king’s guard lined the carpet on either side, three men deep, swords drawn and held at their sides.

As with all description in this book, it’s followed with a shitty summation.

Impressive; it was an impressive battalion Randa had arranged in preparation for her appearance.

I mean, was the editor drunk? Were they getting fired after finishing this last manuscript and they decided to take it out on the book and its future readers? What the hell happened here?

You may think this means real conflict. Yay! But then Katsa looks around and says never mind, they’re not laid out right.

Randa was not so clever when it came to assembling battalions. This one, he’d assembled all wrong. Too few archers, and too many of these clumsy, armored, lumbering men who would trip all over each other if they tried to attack her. Tall, broad men who could shield her easily from an arrow’s flight. And armed, all of them armed with swords, and each with a dagger in his opposite belt, swords and daggers she might as well be carrying on her own person, so easily could she snatch them from their owners. And the king himself raised high on a platform, a long blue carpet leading straight to him like a pathway to direct the flight of her blade.

Katsa goes on to say none of the archers are graced. But there’s apparently multiple swordfighters with graces? The worldbuilding of this book seems to run on whatever’s convenient at the moment. Earlier, there’s graced fighters so Katsa can be better than them. Now, there’s no graced archers so Katsa can be untouchable.

So Katsa, Pandaman says calmly. What. The. Fuck.

“I didn’t agree with your order, Lord King.”

Oh, come on, that’s a terrible thing to say and you know it.

The whole king thing? It’s about being the guy in charge. You can’t say you didn’t do it because you didn’t want to. It’s like being in the military.

You can make an appeal to the concept of a just king being the only true king, and say that his behavior has made it clear he isn’t the true king who must be obeyed. You can make an appeal to the rights of nobility to not have their property stolen, to chivalry and protection of women from forced marriages. There are a lot of ways to say that what he’s doing is not acceptable within the existing social contract. But not agreeing? Your own feelings are not a valid answer. You can appeal to tradition or religion or current social thought, but you are not the king, you can’t say your own decision is law.

I really do mean “can’t”. You’re a bunch of people with big sticks lording it over a bigger bunch of people without sticks. Literally all that holds your shithole of a society together is a chain of command and a vague understanding of how far you shouldn’t push people. One person suddenly realizing the emperor has no clothes, or divine mandate, or whatever you want to call it, threatens to make everyone else suddenly realize this is all bullshit and start hitting each other with their sticks over who has the biggest one. You know how you’re always hearing about small countries and military coups every couple years? It’s because people in the modern day know a ruler’s power is entirely conditional on everyone else saying he has it, so of course whoever ends up controlling the military supplants him.

Pandaman starts belittling Katsa, and she says that he’s doing it to make her feel like a dumb animal, so fuck him she’ll be a dumb animal over there where at least she doesn’t have to deal with his bullshit. When he tells her the men are there to take her to the dungeons, she responds with a lecture of her own regarding the wisdom of not bringing soldiers to a Katsa fight.

Let’s say, for instance, one of your archers lets an arrow fly. You’ve not come to many of my practices, Uncle. You haven’t seen me dodge arrows; but your archers have. If one of your archers releases an arrow, I’ll drop to the floor. The arrow will doubtless hit one of your guards. The sword and the dagger of that guard will be in my hands before anyone in the room has time to realize what’s happened. A fight will break out with the guards; but only seven or eight of them can surround me at once, Uncle, and seven or eight are nothing to me. As I kill the guards I’ll take their daggers and begin throwing them into the hearts of your archers, who of course will have no sighting on me once the brawl with the guards has broken out. I’ll get out of the room alive, Uncle; but most of the rest of you will be dead. Of course, this is only what will happen if I wait for one of your men to make a move. I could move first. I could attack a guard, steal his dagger, and hurl it into your chest this instant.”

Do you know what makes Katsa a boring sue here? It’s that she’s not going to do it. She did that whole lecture to tell us how super awesome she is in detail. If it wasn’t going to happen, a simple “I can take them and your men know it” would have sufficed.

But yeah, she’s not going to do it. She does at least explain why killing Pandaman is a bad idea, sort of.

Raffin would become king, and his first inheritance would be the task of killing the murderer of his father. A charge he couldn’t avoid if he meant to rule justly as the King of the Middluns

Doesn’t explain why she couldn’t have killed him some other, less obvious time, though. I mean, this is basically admitting that it’s not even like Ragamuffin cares about his dad so she can’t do it without hurting him, it’s just that a king can’t pardon the former king’s murderer or it’d look bad. Still, at least it’s something.

But she doesn’t have to, because as she just explained, she’s practically untouchable and we can guess no one in the room actually wants to attack her.

Tears came to her eyes. Mercy was more frightening than murder, because it was harder, and Randa didn’t deserve it. And even though she wanted what the voice wanted, she didn’t think she had the courage for it.
Po thinks you have the courage, the voice said fiercely. Pretend that you believe he’s right. Believe him, for just a moment.

Man, Katsa is really broken. Also again, really wish she’s realized that if Pandaman deserves to die, she could just have been subtle about it. Maybe get some poison from Ragamuffin, even, since apparently there’s no familial relationship there to make the characters seem like real people and not there to reflect on how great Katsa is.

Anyway, so Katsa says screw you I’m leaving, and don’t come after me or else, and then bolts before anyone can react. So, time to go travel the lands with Metaleyes.

We’re not even halfway through, and it seems Katsa’s resolved most of her issues. She’s free of her uncle, she’s realized she doesn’t have to hurt people if she doesn’t want to, and her problem with mindreading was overcome last chapter. Now she’s going to go hang with Love Interest having burned all her bridges with her own court and having absolutely nothing preventing her from joining up with his family instead.

In fact, we’ve resolved so much we’ve finished part one. We’re now entering part two, which is The Twisted King. I wonder if maybe this book is two novellas stuck together. Let’s see if I’m wrong and Katsa still has stuff to work on, or if the second part introduces new elements for Katsa to work through the way a sequel would (or just has her work through the same issues again, the way a bad sequel would).