Lemonade Book Reviews

There are two things that happen in this section of the book that are very important to my autistic gay agenda. Also, all page numbers from here on out are in the Kindle edition unless stated otherwise. I don’t feel like typing all that anymore.

Summary

There’s another time skip/montage from chapter 5 to chapter 6. Fitz learns that even though he’s smart and has the talent to be a scribe, he can’t due to being a royal bastard who can be captured or killed by agents against the regime. He reacquaints himself with Molly Nosebleed. Chivalry dies apparently due to a horse accident, which Burrich thinks is fake. Burrich ends up drawing attention to himself and Fitz by publically mourning Chivalry as a man would his king and a son would his father. Burrich also withdraws deeply into his grief (which could mean nothing). Chade heavily implies to Fitz that Queen Desire is behind Chivalry falling off his horse. Queen Desire ends up dying shortly after Chivalry, which Fitz insists is due to her addiction to drugs.

An appropriate amount of mourning time passes, and then Fitz gets sent on a trip with Verity as a valet for an old lady named Lady Thyme. Before they leave, Fitz comes across King Shrewd’s fool in the woods outside of Buckkeep. The Fool rattles off a riddle at Fitz that Fitz can’t solve and then tells Fitz off for ‘acting like he’s simple’. Fitz’s true role on this trip is to do his first job as an assassin and determine if the Duke of Rippon needs to die in order to supply watch towers to repel the Red Ship Raiders ravaging the coast.

After a trip that involves a lot of shit for Fitz (literally), Verity’s party arrives at Bayguard, where the Duke of Rippon lives. Fitz is able to leave his duties to Lady Thyme and become a part of Verity’s retinue for dinner and entertainment. That night, he goes to the kitchen for a snack, and while he’s in there, the new Duchess of Rippon stumbles into the kitchen with her choking dog. Fitz fixes the feist’s fits (which ends up being the solution to the Fool’s riddle) and gets the Duchess to agree to promise more funds for the defense of the land. Before he can see that enacted, he gets taken to Lady Thyme, who it turns out was actually Chade the whole time. They have to abandon their mission for a new, more important, mission: finding out what’s happening to the people of Forge, who have been told if they don’t pay a ransom, the Red Ship Raiders will return their hostages.

Fitz and Chade undertake a wild ride to get to Forge in less than 48 hours, and when they get there, they find the returned people of Forge in a warehouse. Strangely, Fitz can’t feel them. He suddenly realizes that he’s felt connections to the living things around him during his whole life, but these are people who are somehow moving around seemingly without any life force within them. Fitz forces himself and Chade to gallop off on their exhausted horses, but Chade doesn’t understand what’s going on or believe Fitz until they come across the people of Forge who weren’t hostages. Fitz and Chade return to Verity’s party before the official visit to the Duke of Rippon is over.

General thoughts

The first time I read about Fitz’s reaction to the people in Forge and how Chade didn’t share that sense of his, I cried. I’m going to talk much more about this in the neurodivergent corner, but this is one of the first books I read after getting diagnosed with autism, and it described my experience so perfectly.

We technically get introduced to the Fool in chapter 3, but this is the first time we interact with the Fool without anyone else around. Fitz and the Fool is THEE queer ship from these books, and while it’s actually not my ship, I think it’s the only one of Fitz’s potential romantic relationships that makes sense given the themes of the books. In terms of queer ships, I ship Burrich and Chivalry way more, so I was shocked to discover the lack of Chivalry and Burrich fanfic on AO3. Maybe that’s just because the site is relatively new compared to the age of the books?

This part of the book really drives home the similarities between Fitz and Chivalry. I didn’t mention it in my first post, although it happens in that section, but Burrich tells Fitz a story about Chivalry telling a bejeweled noblewoman about how his jewels were the watchtowers along the coast. This was a huge diplomatic victory for Chivalry, and Fitz uses a similar comparison to get Duchess Grace to get her husband to appropriately fund their watchtowers. Verity and Regal emphatically agree that Fitz is the spitting image of his father. Chivalry will continue to haunt the narrative, but fatherhood is a huge theme in these books, and there will be more to say on the theme of cycles of generational trauma.

Something I really appreciate about these books is how grounded they are in the reality of what is necessary to run a medieval-type castle. I generally hate grimdark books because they typically present a world where women are objects to be raped because “that’s how real life was, bro”. The fact that there would need to be stable boys and groomsmen going along on a royal visit somewhere is realism I actually like in my fantasy, because it represents a historical way of life without assuming it was all one big patriarchal rape fantasy.

Gay Corner

The way Burrich mourns Chivalry is extremely queer coded to me, and I will be speaking more about the queerness of undying loyalty to “your king” in this series when it becomes more relevant to the plot (you pledged your undying loyalty and service to a man? kinda gay). For now, I give you this quote:

“Regal sent a man to rebuke Burrich for shaving his head and cutting my hair. That was mourning for a crowned king, not for a man who had abdicated the throne. Burrich stared at the man until he left.” – Narrator Fitz, page 127

Fitz is in a way the son of Burrich and Chivalry – Chivalry’s biological son and Burrich’s spiritual son. Fitz also describes Burrich as walking around like a man already dead after Chivalry dies. I feel for Burrich in this moment, but I also need to point out how gay it is. Also, I don’t think Hobb was intentionally trying to write kink dynamics into any relationship in this series (maybe one in the Rain Wild Chronicles), but it does sound like Chivalry and Burrich had a Dominant/submissive dynamic going on:

“Suddenly everything was easy and clear. I simply did whatever Chade told me to do, and trusted to him to have it turn out right. My spirit rode high on the crest of that wave of faith, and sometime during the night it occurred to me: This was what Burrich had gotten from Chivalry, and what he missed so badly.” – Narrator Fitz, page 181

There isn’t too much romance in Fitz and the Fool’s first interaction, aside from this:

“Instead, a finger was held aloft, as if to pause not only my thoughts, but the very day around us. But I could not have focused my attention on anything, and when he was satisfied of this, the Fool smiled…” – Narrator Fitz, page 140

Fitz doesn’t describe many characters this way, especially those who are in his peer group. This is mostly important to my gay agenda because it’s such an iconic scene. I went into these books for the first time effectively blind, so I had no idea that Fitz and the Fool was a huge ship. I didn’t really care about the Fool through the first book, but I still remembered his scenes with clarity. It will be interesting to compare this to how he describes other potential romantic partners in the series.

Also, Chade crossdresses and has a great time doing it. Just want to point that out.

Neurodivergent corner

This was the part of the book that made me go from “enjoyable fantasy series” to “wait no I need to make art of this series immediately”. I was going to headcanon Fitz as autistic no matter what after how the Wit is introduced to us, but the scene where he comes across the Forged ones feels so true to my life:

“I hadn’t seen or heard them until Chade pointed them out. I would have ridden right past them. And the other momentous thing that happened to me at that point was that I realized I was different from everyone else I knew. Imagine a seeing child growing up in a blind village, where no one else even suspects the possibility of such a sense. The child would have no words for colors, or for degrees of light. The others would have no conception of the way in which the child perceived the world. So it was in that moment as we sat our horses and stared at the folk.” – Narrator Fitz, page 185

A disclaimer: I know that people online saying they’re empaths is overdone, and I am not trying to claim that I am an empath. I experience alexithymia due to my autism, which Psychology Today defines as “difficulty experiencing, identifying, understanding, and expressing their emotions”. Until recently, I had no idea I had this, and now I’m re-learning how emotions work. Something I’ve always struggled with is that I’m extremely empathetic, especially towards animals, inanimate objects, and people who can’t communicate their needs effectively (like babies) (I couldn’t watch Pixar movies until I was 12 and I still can’t watch Finding Nemo because it makes me so upset). I’m not sure if this is a weird manifestation of alexithymia or autistic hyper-empathy. In a way, I think the Wit is a magical manifestation of autistic hyper-empathy. Fitz can sense the emotions of all the animals around him and feel the connections between human beings. The Forged ones seem to have zero empathy in comparison. I find that weirdly beautiful.

Fitz also goes on to talk about how he experiences the Wit as a sense like his sense of vision or smell. This is a bit of a reach, but I like to interpret this as similar to how sensory perception is weird in autism. Some autistic people can’t stop thinking about how their shirt is touching their neck, others can hear the sound of the fridge on another floor through a closed door. Fitz can see and hear with his Wit-partner’s senses, and it becomes a plot point in later books. I headcanon Fitz as being sensory avoidant, mostly because he hates all the fancy court clothes Mistress Hasty puts him in.

The part of this passage that really gets me, though, is when Fitz explains what he’s feeling to Chade.

“Once aware of this new sense, I couldn’t ignore it. I sensed his skepticism. But I also felt Chade distance himself from me, just a little pulling back, a little shielding of self from someone who had suddenly become a bit of a stranger. It hurt all the more because he had not pulled back that way from the folk in Forge. And they were a hundred times stranger than I was.” – page 186, Narrator Fitz

I think Fitz is actually using the Skill subconsciously here to sense Chade’s emotions, but I digress. As a late-diagnosed autistic person, this is exactly how it feels to come out as autistic to people who don’t understand what autism is. Maybe it’s because I got diagnosed while Robert F. “-ing idiot” Kennedy Jr was the secretary of health and human services, but some people act like they haven’t known me for years. You’re allowed to obsessively read Percy Jackson and the Olympians until the cover falls off The Lightning Thief, but actually acknowledging your neurodivergence? Unacceptable. The line “And they were a hundred times stranger than I was.” haunts me.

Final thoughts

I somehow didn’t mention this at all in the rest of the post, but it’s very interesting how certain Fitz is that Queen Desire wasn’t murdered by the King. It doesn’t make sense that the King would have Chade kill the Queen as revenge for her killing Chivalry because from what we’ve seen of Shrewd, he doesn’t make impulsive decisions like that. If I remember correctly, we never learn the actual identity of Queen Desire’s murderer, but I have a guess, and I think it’ll come up again later on in the Farseer trilogy if not this book.

There’s also some recreational drug use in this section, with Chade using carris seed to stay awake and alert when he and Fitz are charging towards Forge. Something that interests me about the series is the use of drugs and addiction. In this instance, Fitz has big narc energy while he tells Chade that using drugs is bad, which is funny but not super plot relevant. This is another theme I’ll be keeping an eye on as the story progresses.