I’ve finally got around to finishing Assassin’s Fate by Robin Hobb. It’s the final book of the third trilogy about, and narrated by, FitzChivalry Fareer, aka Tom Badgerlock, aka Keppet, a prince’s bastard employed as an assassin by his royal kindred. Fitz is a character like Egwene, in my mind. In both cases, I see a very definite pattern of wrongdoing, but I am sincerely confused as to the circumstances of the narrative, because it really seems like the books don’t recognize that. Egwene’s actions, objectively speaking, are generally morally wrong or tactically ill-advised, and this is a recurring pattern, but she is never called on it by the narrative, or by any characters, even those who oppose her or are wronged by her. Likewise with Fitz (albeit inverted, as he is the victim, not the perpetrator). Every now and then someone pays lip service to the notion that he has done a lot or been put through a lot and might have some justification for his feelings & his position and especially his oft-stated intentions and desires to NOT do or go along with what various other people want for him, but it’s no more than lip service and they spend most the time treating him like he is being utterly selfish, ungrateful and the worst thing to happen to various people in his life. I think Robin Hobb knows he’s got a point and they’re wrong, but it’s hard to tell for a couple of reasons.

First of all, Fitz is the first-person narrator, with occasional nods thrown to the notion of a framing device, namely that the books are his own in-story memoirs, written between the various trilogies. Thus, a really true-to-character portrayal of a traumatized abuse victim would legitimately have him unable to discern his own abuse, and there would be very few opportunities for the narration to explicitly state the extremity of what was done to him, mostly by his loved ones and family.

The second, is that Fitz has a number of undeniable faults and flaws, and is definitely a bit of an emo whiner in his first trilogy (which takes place largely in his teen years and early adulthood), he does make a number of important mistakes and is kind of selfish at times. And it’s also realistic that the other people in his life would harp on that stuff and even conflate his legitimate grievances with those characteristics.

On the other hand, I don’t know how committed to narrative integrity Hobb actually is, since twice she wrote a resolution to Fitz’s story, and twice went back to write another trilogy which undid it. In the first trilogy, he ended up a solitary broken man, who had played a critical role in facilitating all the characters who are recognizable fantasy heroes, but was emotionally and physically devastated by what he was required to do. He had none of the glory or power or wealth that his surviving royal family achieved, his girlfriend married his foster father, and raised his infant daughter, and all but a handful of people believed him dead, and his reputation was tainted with charges of regicide and perverted witchcraft.

The second trilogy called Fitz back into action, and by the end of it, his health and most of his relationships were restored, and the prejudices against magic that soiled his reputation were lifted. He got to marry his old girlfriend when her husband got a heroic death, and even received a clandestine reward of getting to retire to his royal father’s country estate with a family. Where before, he was suffering physical consequences of the acceptable magic he had also used, now those were fixed as well, so he had the benefits of magic without the drawbacks.

The third trilogy finally brings his story to an end. In the Kingdom of the Six Duchies, there is a particular magic called Skill, which is basically a form of telepathy, that is very common among the royal family, but has conveniently fallen into disuse, so Fitz doesn’t have an easy path to mastering it, and all sorts of problems he encounters learning to use it contribute to his physical sufferings by the end of the first series. However, his uncle, the king, in the realm’s hour of desperation, goes looking for help among a group of mysterious magical allies who came to the kingdom’s aid in times past. It turns out, they’re all gone, but they left magic statues, and King Verity carves one such statue of a dragon, and uses his magic to transfer his mind and life into the statue so he can defeat the invading enemy. Fitz wakes up the other statues with another form of magic, the Wit, (for which he has been persecuted nearly to death, of course) and sends them to help, but the King has to come back and sleep with them once the fighting is done, and this is presented as the ultimate answer to the addictive qualities of the Skill, and it is hinted that Fitz is facing such an end himself, and looks forward to it as a kind of surcease from his sufferings. This is averted by the mega-happy ending of the second trilogy, but by the end of the third, with his wife now dead of old age, and suffering an incurable magical affliction, Fitz goes back to the magic statues to make his own, which he completes with the help of all his surviving friends, the closest of whom, the Fool, joins him in merging with the statue (it was historically the effort of a group, Verity managed to largely do it solo, because he’s so awesome), which is a giant wolf, unlike the others which are mostly dragons, and all winged. So based on how EVERYTHING else goes, I imagine if Hobb ever comes back with a story about their descendants coming to wake the dragons again, I assume the other statues are going to give Fitz crap for not putting wings on his statue, and thus can’t follow the group as easily as he should. But that aside, it’s a sort of happy ending, as he gets to sort-of live forever, it is implied he can commune with the dead telepaths in his family in this new state, and all the characters who thought he was dead (he gets left for dead and all-but-killed a lot), get the pleasant surprise of an opportunity to say goodbye.

But it feels like more jerking around the readers to have cake and eat it too, from a Doylist standpoint. First we get the tragic deconstructive ending, about the guy who made it all possible, paid most of the price and gets squat reward. Then it’s undone in the second trilogy and things work out so blatantly to give him pretty exactly the happy ending he would have wished for in the first one, that the author’s puppet strings start to show a little. Then in the third, there is the harrowing escape getting Fitz killed, so everyone can feel sad, but glad to have accomplished the mission, but he survives through a really forced coincidence, so he can run around murdering all the loose ends, so it looks like we’re headed to a happy reunion with his daughters, cousins and friends, only for the death sentence to be pronounced, and he has to go do the statue thing, but the rules have apparently changed so a dead magical character is able to go around and let everyone know he’s making his statue, so they call all say good-bye. It’s like Hobb was trying out two different exits for the character she could not resist going back to two more times than she really should have.

So with that in mind, I want to look at Fitz, and what he goes through, and how I really think he’s the victim of a lot of abusive, if inadvertently so in some cases, relationships.

First of all, Fitz is taken from his mother at age six. This is when the series begins, as it, according to the narrative framing conceit of Fitz writing his memoirs, is the very earliest memory he can recall for more or less the next thirty years, until magical intervention allows him to break through the trauma and recall his mother & early childhood. Then he is dumped perfunctorily into the care of the stablemaster in the royal castle, where his paternal grandfather rules, while his father, the crown prince, abdicates from the line of succession and retires to the countryside in disgrace, because it has become public knowledge that he once had sex before he married his current (and barren wife). It should be noted, BTW that this is the only such case of this happening, many other nobles have bastards, there is no orgnized religion or formal set of mores and only a really uptight fringe gets het up and bothered about illegitimate kids, and limitations on their advancement and inheritance seem more de facto than de jure (as opposed to, say, in Westeros) but Fitz is made to feel guilty about every single sexual relationship in his life, and they are all presented to him by officious, sanctimonious busybodies well-meaning people as selfish, shallow or unhealthy relationships. Because every rule in the series is interpreted or enforced strictly in the way to most inconvenience, traumatize or shame FitzChivalry Farseer.

Anyway, with his biological father removed from his life, Fitz gets all of the bad aspects of a royal father, and none of the benefits. People who hated the former prince also hate his son, and people who admired or loved him are more likely to blame Fitz for his downfall than have those sentiments redound to Fitz's benefit. So he is left to be raised by the stablemaster (effectively classifying this newest addition to the royal family as livestock), who is single, childless, relatively young, with little to no experience in raising kids, and a brusque, surly & undemonstrative manner. So this lonely, friendless kid, in a new home, is dependant on an unprepossessing man whose methods of teaching are more carrot than stick. He is utterly devoid of affection or companionship, aside from peasant kids from the nearby town, but his circumstances isolate him from them. He magically bonds with a puppy through an innate power known as the Wit, but that is held in superstitious revulsion by the general public, and is particularly reviled by Burrich, the stablemaster & Fitz's guardian, so the puppy is taken away from him in circumstances that lead him to believe it has been killed. This, of course, does wonders for his relationship to Burrich, making him even more hostile, resentful & terrified.

Then Fitz randomly comes to the attention of King Shrewd, his technical, biological grandfather, who, in trying to make a point to his spoiled youngest son, Prince Regal, decides to use Fitz, and makes an offer to buy the child's loyalty, promising in exchange, to feed, educate and board him. Because that's not at all something a dependant orphaned child of your immediate family is entitled to. No, that's a special favor for which he expects Fitz's undying devotion and obedience. Burrich forsees no good coming of this, and blames Fitz for putting himself in the King's way and catching his eye on purpose. I assume Burrich also correlates hemlines with rape incidence, because that's roughly as much relevance as his assumption and what actually happens. So Fitz moves up in the world a bit, but shortly after, is taken under the tutelage, at Shrewd's orders, by the King's secret assassin, Chade. When asked if assassinating people on behalf of the king sounds like something he wants to do, Fitz says no, but tough cookies.

So Chade sets about teaching him to spy, manipulate and manuever around people and various social situations and settings, and how to lie and deceive like a motherfucker, as well as all SORTS of stuff about poison and killing people sneaky-like. This has the additional effect of isolating him from lots of other people. Various serving folk take an interest in Fitz's well-being, some of whom offer other professional outlets to him, only for Chade to quash those paths as too dangerous, saying they would leave him vulnerable to his enemies, and by implication, outside the Farseer's circle of trust and too dangerous for his own family to leave alive.

So in addition to the isolating effects of his knowledge and training, and the need to keep it a secret, and other measures taken during his upbringing designed to keep him appearing ordinary and out of casual notice, as well as effectively being compelled to keep people at arm's length, he is all but explicitly threatened with death if he does not remain useful to the throne, and explicitly threatened with harm from unseen & unknown enemies, in order to keep him dependant on the Farseers and Chade for protection against these enemies they have created for him. At one point, he is chatting with his closest childhood friend, a girl, on whom he has a crush and will eventually be the love of his life, and she is discussing plants, and Fitz starts blurting out the lethal applications of the plants, to her horror. So then he has to make up a story to cover his knowledge, which serves as both another point of estrangement from a friend, and an illustration to him of his need to not let his guard down around ANYone.

Then his father (whom he has never met) meets a fatal accident (because he was essentially alone and unprotected, which is all beacause of Fitz), and Burrich is mad at Fitz for not mourning someone who is only an abstraction to him. He also shaves Fitz's head which is a Six Duchies mourning custom, with the amount of hair varying according to the closeness of the relationship with the deceased. You cut it short for a close friend or comrade, a lock for someone less close, or a degree removed, like a friend's wife, but you only shave for a parent or spouse or something like that, so this highlights Fitz's origins to everyone, which is not only uncomfortable for him, but also causes Chade's disapproval, because he's trying to keep Fitz under the radar, to be a more effective assassin. You see how everything, no matter what, blows back on him in the worst way possible? And people like Burrich, who are not officially read in on his double life, nonetheless are highly observant and insightful (because otherwise, how could they constantly note Fitz's shortcomings? ), just enought to make him feel foolish at his failure to keep secrets from them, but very seldom sufficiently to get what's really going on in any way that would be helpful to Fitz, such as alleviating their disappointment in his failures to meet their expectations, or intervening because they see how messed up his life is getting.

The next person to blow into Fitz's life and inconvenience him is his father's widow, Lady Patience, who is a quirky and eccentric dillettante, and has decided to take an interest in her step-son, despite their sole point of connection being dead. Because she is super-capable at pestering people and wearing them down, Fitz is told to attend her so as to keep her out of the King's hair, and has to cope with her mercurial changes in temper and hapazard attempts at educating him. Again, as with Burrich and Chade, eventually a close relationship forms, but the initial impression made to a young boy is that once again, he is a possession or tool for this new person in his life, against whose intentions and plans for him, his own do not matter. He only learns very late in life that she had desperately wanted to raise him and begged her husband to take his new-discovered son with them into exile, but was refused, and has come to court nurturing an obsession that has grown since she learned of his existence, as he is both the child she could never have, and all she has left of her beloved spouse. So more stress & expectations on Fitz.

Thanks to Lady Patience' intervention, it is decided that Fitz shall be taught to master the Skill, the hereditary magic power of the Six Duchies, that is primarily found in the Farseer family, but also in the general population, who are then conscripted into service. They combine strength with the Farseer kings and princes to bolster their powers and accomplish more together than the rulers could alone, like a circe of channelers in WoT, but without the safety limits the One Power has. In fact, there are song which praise such circles as die from the king drawing on all their strength to perform some necessary feat. As with royal bastards, the rationale towards anyone born with such a characteristic seems to be that the Farseers now own you, and if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem, and Chade is there to make sure the problems have as few parts breathing as possible. Oh, and the Skillmaster who is teaching Fitz's class is one of those fanboys of daddy, only his devotion to the late prince isn't merely high expectations for the son who has nothing to do with him, it's resentment and blame for the prince's fall. Galen, the teacher's, methods are austere and harsh, using asceticism to discipline their minds, but he takes it to a special extreme level of outright physical abuse of Fitz, inflicting crippling injuries and then flunking him out. And murdering his second dog-friend, which had been a gift from Patience. Oh, and Chade, who is a royal bastard himself, always felt slighted that he had not been allowed to learn the Skill, and thus sought to have Fitz learn it for his vicarious gratification and class justification, is disappointed in him and keeps nagging him about how and why he failed, despite the physically, emotionally and deliberately psychologically traumatic (Galen utilized Stockholm Syndrome to keep his students respect and obediance) experince of his training. Later Burrich, who knows just enough so we can't stop respecting him, but not enough to get Fitz away from all this horrible stuff in time, beats the shit out of Galen for his treatment of Fitz, in accordance with a peculiar custom that, sort of like trial by combat, proves Burrich is right, so Galen is publically embarrassed and legally unable to raise a hand to Fitz again. But the damage is done, with no real effect for Fitz except to further stoke the enmity of the premier practioner of mind-fucking magic in the building. Chade deals with this with all the grace of a stage-parent, whose child doesn't get into the show, but also when Fitz (and incidentally this reader) is surprised by Burrich's actions as they are the first sign in like, a decade of acquaintance, that he give a damn about Fitz as more than an extension of his worshipped father, he relates the tale in a way as to imply Fitz is a horribly ungrateful child for not realizing the guy who murdered his best friend and was at best a dutch uncle, cares deeply for him.

Chade seems to flip-flop between "we are assassins, we cannot have nice things" when Fitz wants to cultivate a relationship, to a more normal mindset when he perceives Fitz as failing or not appreciating loved ones, then it's all "how can you be so heartless, boy?" Later on, after Fitz finally gets away from him and court, Chade decides that, yes, assassins CAN have nice things, and becomes a fashionable courtier, dashing lover, all-round party animal, and public counselor to the throne, recognized and respected as a power in the land. After spending about a decade treating Fitz like a spoiled brat for merely wanting a job that didn't involve routinely breaching trust & hospitality, daily lies, no friends and intermitant homicide. Or, heaven forbid, a normal relationship with a girl that he liked. When Fitz acts on his own initiative to give advice or support the members of the royal family who are decent people and nice to him, and incidentally the rightful & legal people to be holding authority, Chade is all "we serve, we don't act! Assassins must not use their initiative or intervene publically", but once Fitz is out of the life, he flips the job description around. He literally made the job as traumatic and isolating and psychologically wearing as possible on Fitz, and once he no longer had his dependant sidekick lurking in the shadows alongside him, went out and did everything he had forbidden Fitz, and then some.

Anyway, the first book culminates in Fitz being sent on a diplomatic mission, where he is supposed to murder a foreign prince to further the kingdom's interest, only to discover that his bosses have been given bad intel by Prince Regal who wants the assassination to go down so he can take control of two nations, assassinating his brother, the crown prince, and killing Fitz into the bargain, because Regal's mother died of over-indulgence in her prefered intoxicants, but Regal believes his father, King Shrewd had her killed, and that Fitz was involved. Fitz barely manages to foil this plot, despite getting poisoned himself, and after a long convalesence, has Shrewd lean hard on his personal loyalty to extract a promise that he won't get revenge on Shrewd's son. Said son being an admitted traitor, attempted fratricide and near-inciter of an international incident, which was only averted by nigh-superhuman forbearance on the part of the other country.

Fitz's reward is chronic seizures as a result of cumulative physical trauma from the attempt on his life, his abuse by his erstwhile Skillteacher, and more crap details. Regal's punishment is to be the Fredo Corleone of the Farseer family, not given any critical work to do, because he partied instead of learning anything useful, like magic, administrative or military arts, but instead, be assigned to play host to nobles and schmooze, which incidentally, lets him indulge in recreation to his heart's content and gives him a platform from which he can undermine his father and older brother, and suborn the loyalties of the nobles. While bearing a grudge against Fitz.

Fitz tries to get out of being an assassin, so they find other tasks for him, like letting Verity sap his strength to keep working his magic, or serving as an oarsman and soldier on the brand new royal navy, which consists of a handful of warships, with inexperienced crews, attempting to thwart incessant Viking-type raids, that not only savage the kingdom's coasts, but leave behind living zombies, who terrorize lone travelers and homes. He does this stuff with Verity telepathically bugging his mind, so the prince can see out of Fitz's eyes to observe the war effort. So, yet another factor isolating Fitz from normal people, because he has to be aware that he is effectively wearing a wire and he and anyone around him has no privacy from their ultimate boss. Meanwhile, everyone he tries to warn about Regal's hostility, ambitions and utter lack of conscience (of which he boasted to Fitz before trying to murder him) laughs him off and ignores him until the book ends with Regal in control of the kingdom, Shrewd dead at his behest, Verity lost on a quest to aid the kingdom against foreign terrorists, and Verity's wife a fugitive. Fitz, BTW, ends up in cell being tortured to the point of death, where the only thing his supporters can manage to do is slip him a suicide pill. Then he wakes up with Burrich & Chade digging him out of a grave, because Burrich used a technique of the Wit magic he supposedly despises and tries to all but beat out of Fitz, to fake Fitz's death. Thereafter, Fitz has a VERY violent response to threats or hints of violence, which he attributes to his experiences being tortured by Regal.

One of the last thoughts King Shrewd has before his death, which Fitz observes through a link with the Skill, is regret and horror at all that has befallen his only grandchild, largely as a result of Shrewd's own actions and decisions, and heartily, if belatedly, endorses Fitz's desire to be normal, but that's all too late. Burrich and Chade basically expect Fitz to go seek out Verity on his quest, and pile guilt trips on him for the mistakes he made in his efforts to help Verity's wife, Kettricken, and avenge the grandfather whose murder he telepathically experienced, along with the first EVER expression of paternal affection ANYone has ever given him. Stupid Fitz, losing his cool and chasing down the regicides and slitting their throats for that.

Anyway, eventually, he does go off on his quest, but not to find Verity, which would have been futile, since no one knows where he went (IIRC, Burrich and Chade, who know nothing about Skill magic, expect Fitz to somehow use it to find him, and never mind that it's excruciatingly painful for him, and functions only erratically, thanks to his abuse at the hands of his teacher). Instead, Fitz goes looking to assassinate Regal, who, if there is ANY justification for the existence of an assassin to serve the best interests of the kingdom by removing problematic individuals, is an absolutely legitimate candidate. But right before he can carry out the kill, Verity, who intermittantly touches Fitz's mind, compels him to leave off his planned killing and come find Verity, largely out of concern for Fitz's safety. Shortly after this, Fitz puts together a number of magically obtained clues to realize that his girlfriend, Molly, who had left him in the previous book, is actually pregnant with their child. He decides to go find her and raise their kid together, but he is literally unable to disobey Verity' magic command, and instead has to keep heading off to terra incognita. He keeps having sporadic visions of his girlfriend and her struggles and feels as she tries to cope with her pregnancy alone, and gets to hear all her recriminations.

It turns out, that Molly had given him her breakup story as a test, to see if he would come win her back. See, she had come to the castle looking for his help when she needed a job and discovered he was not the servant she assumed, but a royal bastard, so that was his fault. Then she kept pissing and moaning about how his duties, which he couldn't talk about, came before their relationship. When she caught him suffering seizures and other side effects of his various physical traumas, she assumed he was drunk, and she had issues with alcoholism (needless to say, that did not include the modern view of it as a disease, rather, she has the puritanical assumption of a moral shortcoming), so he constantly had to deal with crap like that from her. When she finally emotionally blackmailed him into confessing his true occupation, she ripped into him for not using his mad assassin skills to save her from goons harassing her one time. Then she broke off their relationship telling him there is someone else, whom she loves enough to put first, ahead of anything else, the way he should have loved her, instead of making his first priority service to a king or master assassin who has little tolerance for people who know royal secrets but are not on board with the royal game plan. Fitz was supposed to devine from this cryptic comment that she referred to an unborn child and abandon his duties to the king to come after her.

And he feels BAD about not falling in line with this manipulative little shrew's games! He feels guilty at inflicting the status of bastardy on his child (despite repeated assurances from his girlfriend that she was using protection), and at not being there for it and all the rest. When he confides the parenthood aspects of his situation to a fellow traveler, she dumps on him for leaving his love interest to the trials of making a living as a single mother. It turns out that Burrich knew and has been keeping watch on her, so that's one thing he doesn't have to worry about... until near the end of the book, with the quest almost complete, and his desperately looking forward to going back to them, he witnesses them having sex and deciding to get married and raise his child together, because Burrich found a pin that Shrewd gave Fitz, and thinks he would never have left it while he was alive and so he must be dead.

Meanwhile, Fitz's quest gets him nearly killed, with an arrow in his back, but he coincidentally gets found by a friend, the person to whom he confided his impending fatherhood sees him, puts two and two together, and tracks down Kettricken, Verity's wife, tells her Fitz is alive and has admitted paternity of a child, so Kettricken leaves a will naming Fitz's daughter as a Farseer heir. Against Fitz's adamant wishes, and apparently the precedent where a universally admired and respect prince was ineligible to rule for fathering a bastard, but his grandbastard is irrevocably locked into the line of succession! See what I mean about rules only ever working to Fitz's detriment? Also, these people are hurt and mad that Fitz would try to conceal a Farseer heir from them when it is so important. While he is lying facedown trying to recuperate from the umpteenth near-mortal wound he has suffered as a result of being born into this horror show of a family.

So then he has to accompany Kettricken and the woman who betrayed him on a mission to locate Verity, where the rightful king is carving a magic statue, and the mind-control command on Fitz is finally alleviated. And one night, near the end of the project, Verity laments to Fitz that he doesn't have anymore feelings to put into his magic statue, but if he had the strength to get it on with his wife one more time, that would put him over the finish line, AND allow him to conceive an heir, so his shitstain of a little brother doesn't become the legit king. So Fitz, with absolutely everything else in his life taken from him, from his lover to his child to his abusive mentor-friends, now shortly his uncle & king, to his health and physical well-being and all relevant life choices, believing Verity is asking for the remainder of his physical strength, willingly give it up. Instead of his life, though, Verity just wanted his body, and switches their minds, leaving Fitz in Verity's older and worn-out husk of a body, while he takes over Fitz's and uses the combination of their familial resemblance and the dark of his wife's tent, to have sex with her and conceive a child to inherit his crown. Then they swap back with Kettricken none the wiser, at there is a lovely interlude where Fitz frantically bathes in a desperate attempt to wash the smell of his friend, and aunt-by-marriage, Kettricken's smell off his body. Verity turns into a magic statue, and carries his queen home to reclaim their castle from invaders and rally the kingdom. Fitz is left alone to face the small army of killers descending on their location at Prince Regal's behest, and only survives by a fluke accident revealing how to wake the rest of the magic statues, which he sends to help Verity after he survives the attack. Then, while everyone who used, betrayed and abandoned Fitz in the name of the greater good gets a mega happy ending, he settles down in an isolated farmhouse, broken in health, and traumatized in his mind, despite being only about 20 or so, to write his memoirs and hide away from the world until the Skill compels him to seek his own end.

That's just the first trilogy. When he gets called out of retirement, everyone is all solicitous to him, but start getting pissy whenever he has the temerity to not ethusiastically embrace their ideas, such as having him dive back into his traumatic experiences with the Skill so he can teach the young prince no one else knows was fathered by his body (and the prince bears more of a resemblance to Fitz & his father Chivalry, rather than the prince's technical and official father, Verity). Also, they want to drag his bastard daughter, who doesn't even know that's who she is, back to court, as a spare royal in case something happens to the prince, and to also be made into a Skill-henchperson for the prince. And Fitz is a selfish asshole for not wanting his daughter to be exposed to the source of all the misery that was crammed into fourteen years of his adolesence and early adulthood. Kettricken's response to Fitz's desperate attempt to protect his child is basically "What about my feelings?" When Fitz first comes back, because they begged his help on a vital mission, he does so because he has a material need he wants help fulfilling. Chade is actually affronted that Fitz thinks he needs to bargain for this help, that he doesn't realize the royal family that trained him to be a paranoid, isolated spy & killer, who have put him through a wringer of multiple murder attempts and near-death experiences, and stripped him of every meaningful life choice, would not have simply helped him out at his request, with no conditions asked!

Anyway, Fitz's efforts to keep his daughter clear of everything come to naught, she gets dragged into court life and conscripted as a Skill weilder in service to the throne, gets along great with the prince, who likes having a new cousin in the family...but is pissed and resentful of Fitz, for not coming clean with her (and incidentally, exposing her parents' deception and breaking up their family) and for her being unprepared for her new lifestyle. Burrich gets killed off, rather transparently for the purposes of freeing up Molly, and Fitz gets to live happily ever after, eventually getting their daughter, Nettle, to stop crapping on him. And, it goes without saying, that he gets run through the wringer on this second go-round as a Farseer henchman, taking yet another traumatic mortal wound he survives only by magical intervention, losing yet another magically bonded canine companion, and having a rough interlude where yet another close friend blames him for not living up to said friend's expectations of their relationship.

I don't want to give the wrong impression of these books. They're a pretty good read, and Fitz manages to generally find some lights at the end of his tunnels, and there are eventually some relationships that aren't quite as abusive as the ones detailed above, but when you pick through all the details and such, you really get this horrible, between the lines picture of an abuse victim on such a large scale, that he has internalized it all and feels guilty for failing his abusers, and letting down a family that takes everything he could possibly give and largely survives only through his sacrifices, while giving him very little familial relation in return.

Do any other Hobb readers have a take on this?