Charlotte Kersten's Reviews > Assassin's Fate

** spoiler alert ** "To Fitz and the Fool, my best friends for 20 years."

So What's It About?

Fitz, the Fool and their rag-tag group of companions forge onwards on their desperate quest of vengeance for his daughter's murder, encountering old and new allies and fresh dangers. Unbeknownst to Fitz, Bee still lives and fights against her captors with a fierce determination all her own. They share a terrible destination, and this final quest will demand more from Fitz than any that has come before.

What I Thought

I've followed FitzChivalry Farseer's story through three trilogies. He has grown from a tiny boy sleeping with the puppies to a man reeling with the loss of his beloved wolf, from a lovestruck youngster to a father and grandfather, from an assassin's apprentice to a man who can kill without a second thought. It all comes to a head in Assassin's Fate, and this review is a greater struggle for me than any that I've written so far. I know that I won't be able to sufficiently express what Fitz and his companions have come to mean to me over the thousands of pages I've spent with them, but I still owe it to them and to Robin Hobb to try my best.

As we begin I want to take a second to think about how much has changed for Fitz and the Fool throughout their stories. They have shaken the world several times over as Prophet and Catalyst, and the process of doing so has changed them both irrevocably. The Fool is no longer the acerbic enigma cartwheeling around the room with Ratsy, and Fitz is no longer the stubborn, reckless boy dreaming of Molly in her red skirts. At this point, they have both died and returned, suffered loss and torture and pain of the worst kind, and their suffering has marked them both. As Fitz puts it, they are broken:

"She would be as broken as the Fool and I were. Something inside my chest hurt at the thought. My voice creaked. “Well. Who wouldn’t break? I broke. You broke.”

“And we both emerged stronger.”

“We both emerged,” I said, modifying his words."

Fitz's characterization is, in my opinion, a masterclass in how to write a man who has experienced trauma, loss, ostracization and insecure attachments from a young age. We all know that he can be an infuriating protagonist, but I think that many of the things that make him infuriating also make him a psychologically accurate portrait of a man stuck in deep patterns of self-loathing, self-sabotage and cognitive distortions.

"I was never sure I understood what Regal’s torture had done to me. Part of me had died in that cell, both literally and figuratively. I was alive today. I’d never know if I’d lost more than what I had found. Useless to wonder."

It's there in his reckless fight-or-flight responses and his obsessive chronicling of his past, repeating the stories of what has happened to him as if he can force it to make sense. It's there in his inability to confront information that threatens the security of his worldview - people often say that this makes him stupid, but he's only stupid to the extent that struggling with deep cognitive distortions makes someone stupid. (In my opinion, it doesn't.) It's there in his own sense of worthlessness and incompetence:

“I was dying. And I had never been enough for anything.”

And, perhaps the most heartbreakingly, it's there in the way that he sabotages relationships and holds himself apart from the people that he loves and is loved by in return. As Bee reflects:

"He did not feel he deserved anything from me. Not to touch me or even to say that he loved me, for he had failed so badly at being my father. It stunned me. It was like a second wall beyond his Skill-walls, something that prevented him from believing that anyone could love him."

But the Fitz books are essentially the story of how he tries to shape the lives of those around him for the better in little ways and big ways despite his own deep flaws and damage. He gets back up, and he does good, and he continues to love and fight and fix his mistakes to the extent that he is capable. A commenter in r/Fantasy (who I would mention by name if I could remember it) said something along the lines of this: "Fitz deserved better for every line of every book." He did.

Bee is such a ferocious, peculiar, tenacious little soul. I never would have thought that anyone else's voice would be welcome to me in a Fitz book, but she stands as proof that I was incorrect. I clutched every one of her little victories close and savored her growing resourcefullness and realization of her power as a White Prophet:

"Bee. Nothing happens to you. You happen to everything."

I especially loved her friendship with Thick. I think a lesser author would have created a more positive relationship between her and the Fool and I must admit that I wanted it to happen for both their sakes, but it's a testament to how well-drawn the characters and their relationships are that they clashed the way they did due to Bee's resentment of him.

Ultimately, Assassin's Fate made me realize just how much I have come to care for nearly every character that has been written into the Realm of the Elderlings, because the book touches upon each of their lives for at least a moment or two. Alise and Leftrin are still happy and aboard the Tarman while Althea and Brashen are still happy and aboard Paragon, Carson and Sedric are PARENTS, as are Thymara and Tats, Malta and Reyn, Nettle and Riddle and Dutiful and Elliania. Rapskal is just as annoying as ever! Wintrow finally realizes that it isn't going to happen with Etta! We say goodbye to Kettricken, Chade, and even Verity, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't cry my eyes out at the return of Nighteyes:

"How is the hunting where you are?

It will be better with you."

The book manages to visit these characters from the past without detracting from the story in the present, and the story in the present would mean very little without everything and everyone that has built up to it. The stories of the dragons and the liveships are beautifully resolved, but we are left to wonder about the cycles of violence that we have seen over the course of these stories and whether another cycle of violence has been set in motion with the dragon's and Bee's merciless destruction of the Whites and their servants.

As much as it is a goodbye to the entire world of the Realm of the Elderlings, it is more than anything a goodbye to Fitz and the Fool, beloved friends together in adventure after adventure for decades, and now facing what lies beyond life within the Skill together in an ending that is as bittersweet as it is perfect. Listen, I'm not going to sit here in this shitty hostel kitchen in Stockholm and lie to you now, after everything we've been through together: I cried harder about this book than I've ever cried about anything fictional before. I cried when Chade died and resurfaced in the Skill stream with a resounding "MY BOY!" When Fitz started to tell Bee his story in words that echoed the beginning of Assassin's Apprentice and we finally came full circle, I cried. I cried when Kettricken said goodbye to Nighteyes. I cried as Fitz poured more and more of himself into the stone and became more and more distant to his loved ones. I cried when all that was left was his knowledge that he belonged with the Fool, and you KNOW I sobbed my heart out at those last lines:

'“There’s something stalking us. Off to the side of the road, moving through the forest.” Kettricken smiled.'