Assassin’s Fate recap

Believing Bee dead, Fitz sails south with the Fool, Lant, Spark and Perseverance to destroy the Servants of Clerres, taking passage on the mad liveship Paragon with Althea and Brashen Trell. Bee, meanwhile, is alive: recovered at Kelsingra among the Elderlings, then dragged away again by Dwalia and shipped across the world to Clerres, where the Servants examine her as the fulfilment of their prophecies. Fitz's party crosses the Pirate Isles and the southern sea, Paragon bargaining for a future of his own in exchange for the voyage, and reaches the island fortress. Fitz and the Fool go in and take it apart: poison, fire and murder, the ruling Four killed, the school destroyed, Dwalia and Vindeliar dead. In the ruins Fitz finds Bee alive. Paragon carries them clear and is released to become dragons; the survivors sail home by way of Bingtown and the Rain Wild River, and Bee is acknowledged as a Farseer princess. But Fitz is dying of what the Silver and the Skill and Clerres cost him. He goes to the Mountain quarry where Verity carved his dragon, gives his memories and himself into the stone, and finds his wolf there. Bee goes home to Withywoods with the Fool to raise her.

Previously: FitzChivalry Farseer, royal bastard, assassin and Skill user, was left for dead by the usurper Regal, survived by hiding his mind in his wolf Nighteyes, and let the world bury him; Molly married the stablemaster Burrich and raised Fitz's daughter Nettle as Burrich's own. Guided by the Fool, the White Prophet who named him Catalyst, he helped end the Red Ship war. In the Tawny Man trilogy he returned secretly to court, and on the ice island of Aslevjal the Fool was tortured to death by the Pale Woman and brought back by Fitz through the Skill; the dragon Icefyre was freed and dragons returned to the world. The Fool then left the Six Duchies for the south with Prilkop, an older White Prophet. Fitz married Molly at last and lived twenty quiet years at Withywoods. In Fool's Assassin Molly bore a late, tiny daughter, Bee, who seemed simple and was in fact brilliant and prophetic, and then died; and the Fool returned to Buckkeep blinded and broken by the Servants of Clerres, the order that bred him, warning of an unexpected son they hunted. While Fitz tended him, Servants and Chalcedean mercenaries raided Withywoods behind a fog that erased memory and carried Bee off. In Fool's Quest Fitz healed the Fool with Silver from Chade's secret store, silvering his own hand, then hunted the raiders across the kingdom and destroyed their camp, rescuing Shine but arriving moments after Dwalia took Bee into a Skill-pillar. Convinced his daughter was dead, he was publicly acknowledged as Prince FitzChivalry Farseer and set out south with the Fool, Lant, Spark and Perseverance to annihilate Clerres. Bee, lost inside the pillars for months, emerged alive at Kelsingra, the Elderling city on the Rain Wild River, still a prisoner of Dwalia and still the Shaysim of the Servants' prophecies, with no one who loved her knowing she lived.

Bee is nursed back from starvation at Kelsingra among Elderlings and dragons, a world she knows only from books. Malta Khuprus works out quickly that the child who fell out of a Skill-pillar is not a member of the party that came with her, and that the pale strangers are her jailers, but Vindeliar's fog makes the truth slippery for everyone around him. Far to the north, Fitz's party travels south with a Silver-gloved hand and a plan that is not really a plan: get to Clerres, kill everyone, and do not expect to return. Fitz's Silver touch is a weapon he cannot control, capable of unmaking whatever it touches, and it is also slowly killing him.

Bee is taken out of Kelsingra again. Dwalia gets her away downriver, and the child who was almost safe is back in the hands of the order that stole her, being carried through the Rain Wilds toward the sea and the long voyage to Clerres. She keeps writing, keeps watching, and keeps working on Vindeliar, the only crack in her captors' arrangements. Fitz's party comes down through the Mountains and out to the coast, where the world grows unfamiliar: dragons in the sky, liveships in the harbours, and southern politics that owe the Six Duchies nothing. The distance between father and daughter narrows and neither of them knows it.

At Bingtown the party takes passage on the liveship Paragon, captained by Brashen Trell and sailed by Althea Vestrit, with the pirate heir Kennitsson aboard. The Fool travels openly as Amber, a woman these people knew years ago and remember with mixed feelings, and Fitz becomes her servant again, which suits neither of them. Paragon is not a stable vessel: he is mad, violent, and made from wizardwood that holds more than one mind, none of which was ever human. He agrees to carry them across the southern sea, but on his own terms, and the bargain he strikes is about what he is to be allowed to become when the voyage is over.

The voyage runs through the Pirate Isles, where Etta rules the kingdom her dead husband built and where her son's future is decided over his objections, and out into open water among sea serpents and the ships that hunt them. Aboard Paragon the party rubs against a crew that did not sign on for an assassination, and Amber's secrets and Fitz's temper both cost them. Bee, on another ship on another route, is shipped south as cargo, sustained by her own stubbornness and by the hold she has quietly taken on Vindeliar. Both journeys converge on the same island.

Bee reaches Clerres and is delivered to the Servants, who have waited a long time for the child their prophecies promised. What they do with her is examination rather than ceremony: she is caged, questioned, catalogued and mined for dreams, and she learns what the order actually is, a walled school that breeds prophets, farms their visions, and sells futures to anyone rich enough to buy one. Fitz and Amber arrive at the island and begin scouting a fortress Amber grew up inside, buying information, bribing where they can, and finding that the place is far better defended and far more populous than a vengeance party of five can handle.

The reconnaissance goes wrong. Clerres notices strangers asking questions, the harbour stops being safe, and the party's cover comes apart in accusations and closed gates. Amber's plans and Fitz's plans turn out not to be the same plans, and the cost of that lands on the people who came along out of loyalty. Inside the walls, Bee is one prisoner among many, and the Servants' internal rivalries prove as dangerous to her as their intentions. Prilkop, the White Prophet who went south with the Fool decades ago, is found to be held there too. The party has to get inside a fortress that is now expecting them.

They get in, and Fitz does what he was trained for on a scale nobody asked for. Poison goes into the food and drink of an entire fortress, fires are set, and the assassin the Six Duchies made forty years ago works through Clerres room by room. The Four are confronted and killed, the school's records and its stores of dreams burn, and the order that has been selling the future for generations is destroyed in a night. It is not a clean operation and Fitz does not try to make it one; a great many people die who were never anything but the Servants' property.

In the wreckage Fitz finds Bee alive, and the death he has been avenging for a year turns out never to have happened. Dwalia and Vindeliar both die at Clerres. Prilkop is freed. The survivors fight their way back to the harbour, and Paragon keeps his side of the bargain: he carries them clear, and is then released to become what his timbers always were, separating into dragons and leaving the sea for the sky. Fitz, however, is failing. Between the Silver, the Skill and what Clerres cost him physically, he is being consumed, and neither the Fool nor his own coterie can stop it.

The long way home runs by liveship to Bingtown and up the Rain Wild River, past Kelsingra and its dragons, and back toward the Six Duchies. Bee, who spent a year as a prisoner and a prophecy, is acknowledged as a Farseer and a princess of the realm in her own right, with Nettle, Riddle, Lant, Spark and Perseverance around her. Fitz spends the journey dying, held together by the Skill and by people who will not let go of him, and knowing perfectly well what is happening. He puts his affairs in order and tells his daughter what he can while he can still do it.

Fitz goes to the Mountain Kingdom, to the quarry where Verity carved his dragon out of memory-stone, and does what the Skilled have always been able to do at the end: he gives himself to the stone, pouring his memories, his self and his long life into it rather than simply stopping. Nighteyes is waiting there, and what he becomes is neither a man nor a ghost but something with a wolf's heart in it. Bee goes home to Withywoods with the Fool, who stays to raise her, and inherits her father's journals, her mother's house and her own true dreams. The Servants are finished and their prophecies with them; the White Prophet's work is over; and in the woods around Bee's home there is a wolf.

Clerres is destroyed. Fitz poisons, burns and cuts his way through the fortress, the Four are killed, the school and its records go up, and Dwalia and Vindeliar both die there. Bee is found alive, and father and daughter are reunited in the ruins of the place that took her. Prilkop is freed. Paragon keeps his side of the bargain, carries the survivors clear, and is then allowed to become what his timbers always were, separating into dragons and leaving the sea. The party comes home the long way, by liveship to Bingtown and up the Rain Wild River, and Bee is acknowledged as a Farseer, a princess of the Six Duchies in her own right. Fitz does not recover. The Silver, the Skill and the wounds he took at Clerres have used him up, and he is dying by inches; the Fool, who has spent his life spending Fitz, cannot mend him this time. Fitz goes to the Mountain Kingdom, to the quarry where Verity carved his dragon, and gives himself to the stone as the Skilled have always been able to do, pouring his memories and his self into it and finding his wolf waiting there. Bee goes home to Withywoods with the Fool, who stays to raise her, and with Nettle, Riddle, Lant, Spark and Perseverance around her. The Servants are finished, the prophecies they farmed are over, and Bee is left with her father's journals, her own dreams, and a wolf in the woods.