Last time, they finally set out to address the Teaprince kidnapping thing.

Next morning, Katsa remembers she wanted to cut her hair off. She goes to Metaleyes to ask him to do it, as if she doesn’t have a perfectly good knife of her own.

“If you truly wanted me to, I could cut it off but I don’t imagine you’d be particularly pleased with the result. Why don’t you wait until we’ve reached the inn and have the innkeeper’s wife do it, or one of the women in town?”
Katsa sighed. “Very well. I can live with it for one more day.”

Katsa earlier made it clear she doesn’t take care of her hair in the first place because she doesn’t care what it looks like. Yet now, she doesn’t mind Metaleyes suggesting she wait so that her hair will look good after being cut? No raging about how he’s imposing his views on her that women must care about appearance?

It’s not that it’s impossible for a character to want short hair and want a good haircut, it’s just that Katsa in particular hasn’t been that person. Even if we go with the guess that she would like to look pretty and she’s just not bothering because she thinks it’s futile, that should still apply here – why isn’t she reacting to the idea of trying to get a nice-looking haircut the way she did when her servant told her to try brushing her hair sometime if the knots bother her?

Po led, despite Katsa’s protests. He insisted that when she set the pace, they always started out reasonably, but without fail, before long they were racing along at breakneck speed. He was taking it upon himself to protect Katsa’s horse from its rider

I’m not much of a horse person, but I can’t figure out how only one of them can be overworking their horse if they’re riding next to each other.

Also, I’m pretty sure horses can’t sustain breakneck speed for long and this sort of thing leads to the horse dying under you, which is a bit more serious than anyone seems to be treating it. So on the one hand, not just treating horses as just four-legged cars, but on the other hand, not doing anything more than referencing that fact.

They continue riding and Katsa wonders if Metaleyes’ grace could be distracting, so she mentally yells at him and does manage to startle him, and they work out that she can contact him by thinking his name, and this seems like yet another point where obviously it works that way, so why are we wasting a page on it?

THEY MADE CAMP beside a pond, surrounded by great Sunderan trees.

What I’m getting from this is that mosquitoes don’t exist.

Then it’s time to eat so Katsa goes off to wrestle a goose to death. Because it was there.

“Come out of there, before you catch a chill. And give me that. I’ll pluck it while you change into dry clothing.”
“I never catch a chill,” she said as she waded to shore.

Hypothermia is serious business, Katsa! You’re lucky you’re rich people carrying changes of clothing. Also, from this I’m left with the sense that your missions were always rather neat little things, with no hiding in damp holes in the middle of the night and so on. That’s not really how things should go.

Katsa’s hackles are not raised by Metaleyes’ concern here, presumably because they’re soulmates.

Then they practice fighting and Katsa does better now that she knows not to try to fake him out with blows, so they decide to try it at night where his grace gives him an extra benefit, and he does much better, and then they trip and fall into the pond.

So they go back to the fire, which was apparently untended the entire time, to eat the cooked goose, which ditto, and he pulls off his wet shirt.

She forced her mind blank. Blank as a new sheet of paper, blank as a starless sky. He came to the fire and crouched before it. He rubbed the water from his bare arms and flicked it into the flames. She stared at the goose and sliced his drumstick carefully and thought of the blankest expression on the blankest face she could possibly imagine.

I really hope this subplot won’t last the book. It’s already getting pretty repetitive.

She realizes he has tattoos on his arms.

“Do the women wear the markings?”
“No, only the men.”
“Do the people?”
“Yes.”
“But no one ever sees it,” Katsa said. “Lienid clothing doesn’t show a man’s upper arms, does it?”
“No,” Po said. “It doesn’t. It’s a decoration hardly anyone sees.
She caught a smile in his eyes that flashed at her in the light. “What? What are you grinning about?”
“It’s meant to be attractive to my wife,” he said.

Well, that’s kind of interesting, but then you start to think about it.

See, Metaleyes is saying his culture has this particular thing unique to it, and different from generic Euromerica. The problem is, he’s saying it while sitting with his shirt off by the fire, as if he’s from a culture where men going shirtless isn’t a big deal. And since they’re an island kingdom, they probably swim, which usually means wearing minimal clothing. So how can they have a setup where no one ever sees their upper arms?

Also, if so, Metaleyes is being rather improper here.

Katsa wants to know if he has a wife, and then if he wants a wife.

“Aren’t you concerned about your castle and your land? About producing heirs?”

But the castle he has he got for being the prince. It can’t exactly be hereditary in the usual sense, because it’s not like they have infinite land and castles. I mean, maybe it’s part of a cycle where some nobles lose their holdings each generation, so that there’s always a certain number that belong to the crown, but in that case not having a kid just makes it go back to the crown for the next set of princelings. It also suggests really high turnover among their nobility.

Anyway, he doesn’t want to marry because it’s so hard keeping secrets from everyone.

“I suppose if you married, it could only be to a woman trustworthy enough to know the truth of your Grace.”
He barked out a short laugh. “Yes. The woman I married would have to meet a number of rather impossible requirements.”

So I guess the shirtless thing showing tattoos his wife’s supposed to see is not Metaleyes ramping up the flirting, and also Metaleyes is now well past the point where suspension of disbelief can handle his idiocy.

Then he asks Katsa about if she wants to marry, and she says god, I only tell everyone I’m never marrying. She says she and Ragamuffin talked about marrying once.

“For he’s not wild about the idea of marrying some noblewoman who thinks only of being rich or being queen.

Marriages are actually pretty important political considerations, but since apparently there’s nothing resembling real politics going on in this world, I guess no one needs to worry.

She says that she wouldn’t want to be queen and she’d have to have babies, so it wouldn’t have worked.

Po tilted his head at her. “Do you dislike children?”
“I’ve never disliked the children I’ve met. I’ve just never wanted them. I haven’t wanted to mother them.

This continues to be an incredibly flimsy plot justification. When dealing with heirs, the point is genes, no one gives a shit about if you’re being a properly devoted mom. Get a nurse, pawn them off on someone as fosterlings, whatever.

And then she think about stupid Giddy thinking she’d change her mind just because she seems to have no real reason for feeling like that!!!!!!!

I wonder if he would’ve understood when I planted a patch of seabane in the gardens. Or perhaps he would’ve thought me charmingly domestic.”
Po looked puzzled. “What’s seabane?”
“I don’t know if you have another name for it in Lienid. It’s a small purple flower. A woman who eats its leaves will not bear a child.”

Mm, well, so we do have contraception! That’s a first, I think.

In that case I’m really baffled why she’s insisting she can’t get married. She doesn’t seem to have any problem with the idea of sleeping with Giddy, since her version of where the marriage would go wrong is that she’d plant babybane so she wouldn’t get knocked up. The book doesn’t seem to really have a decent focus on why heirs matter, though – we aren’t dealing with any lineages and no one’s given any impression of being tied to their holdings. In fact, the closest we’ve gotten to anyone caring about their lands is Metaleyes and his assigned rather than inherited castle. Compare this, yet again, to ASoIaF, where the books do everything but actually punch you in the face to get across how important heirs are to people.

And the heir thing isn’t a complete dealbreaker – it just means she should marry someone who already has kids. In fact, they might prefer a wife who isn’t going to want more kids and then compete with the older ones so hers will inherit. Or she could marry someone who doesn’t own lands that need an heir – they make up the majority of the population, it can’t be that damn hard.

And none of this really covers why she’s doing the Katniss thing of assuming relationships = marriage, particularly when one of the major reasons for that sort of thinking is the possibility of getting pregnant.

That night, Katsa’s still feeling awake, so he tells her about King Leck. The previous king and queen were very kind but never had children.

And then one day, a boy came to their court. A handsome boy of about thirteen years, clever-looking, with a patch over one eye, for he’d lost an eye when he was younger.

Aside from the horrible redundancy of the last bit of the sentence, you’d think in this world that people would be suspicious as fuck about one-eyed people. And considering that a graced kid gets stolen by the local king, I wonder if some parents don’t try to hide it.

He’s charming and tells marvelous stories.

wild stories about a place beyond the seven kingdoms, where monsters come out of the sea and air, and armies burst out of holes in the mountains, and the people are different from anyone we’ve ever known.

I wonder if this is supposed to be about an actual place? It’s just that the way it’s described seems to put the focus on it being somewhere else that works differently, instead of him just making up a variety of stories.

So the king and queen meet him and they think he’s adorable, so they give him food and clothing and education like they would their own kid, and then eventually say that he’s their heir.

not a week after the king had named the boy his heir, the king and queen died of a sudden sickness. And their two closest advisers fell into despair and threw themselves into the river. Or so the story goes. I don’t know that there were any witnesses.

So Leck’s evil, then. Okay.

Metaleyes says that he’s always found the story very weird, but that everyone he’s talked to say that Leck’s a wonderful guy and was terribly sad about the deaths.

Have you met him?”
“I haven’t,” Po said. “But I’ve always had a feeling I wouldn’t take to him as others have. Despite his great reputation for kindness to the small and the powerless.”

Well, honestly, neither you nor those dead monarchs were small and powerless, so there’s actually less of a contradiction there than you think. If anything, concern for the weak tends to come with a distinct lessening of fuck-giving regarding the strong.

What if the king and queen were really evil? I mean, you’re easily dismissing his reputation as kind but you’re repeating that the previous rulers were without any more proof – less, even, since it was a long time ago. And just look at Katsa’s own backstory, where she kills Cousin Badtouch who everyone thought was a great guy.

It was hard to reconcile King Leck’s pleasant reputation with this story. Still, perhaps he was innocent. Perhaps there was some logical explanation.

I’m hoping for secretly anti-monarch and trying to take down all the kingdoms. Because fuck kings. Also, because at least that’d be a damn plot.

Katsa waits for Metaleyes to fall asleep, then ponders why she’s so distracted by seeing Metaleyes half-naked when she never cared about seeing shirtless men before. As with every time Katsa thinks about things, she comes to no conclusion and just repeats what we already know. And with nothing much still happening, the chapter concludes.