Fool’s Assassin recap

Twenty years after he finally claimed the life he wanted, FitzChivalry lives at Withywoods as Holder Tom Badgerlock with Molly, his daughter Nettle running the Skill at Buckkeep and his old master Chade still pulling strings. A hurt, pale stranger comes to the house one winter festival looking for him, and vanishes leaving blood in the snow and almost no memory of herself behind. Then Molly declares she is pregnant, long past the age for it, and holds to it for two years while everyone including Fitz privately concludes she is deluded, until she gives birth to a tiny daughter, Bee. Bee grows with agonizing slowness, seems simple and mute, and is in fact fiercely intelligent, watchful, and troubled by dreams that are not hers. Molly dies; Chade plants his unacknowledged children Shun and FitzVigilant at Withywoods; and Fitz, distracted by all of it, neglects the daughter who needs him. At Buckkeep, a beaten beggar turns out to be the Fool, blinded and broken by the Servants of Clerres, warning of an unexpected son they are hunting. While Fitz tends him, pale raiders take Withywoods behind a fog that erases memory, kill its people and carry Bee and Shun away.

Previously: FitzChivalry Farseer was the bastard son of Prince Chivalry, raised at Buckkeep, trained in secret as a royal assassin by Chade, taught the Farseer Skill and born with the outlawed animal-bond Wit. In the Farseer trilogy the usurper Regal had him beaten and left for dead; he survived only by hiding his mind in his wolf Nighteyes, and the kingdom, including Molly, the woman he loved, buried him. Molly married the stablemaster Burrich and raised Fitz's daughter Nettle as Burrich's own. Guided by the Fool, the pale White Prophet who named Fitz his Catalyst, Fitz found the King-in-Waiting Verity, whose stone dragon ended the Red Ship war at the cost of his life and left Queen Kettricken carrying his heir. In the Tawny Man trilogy Fitz was drawn back to court to teach the Skill to Verity's son, Prince Dutiful, living as the servant Tom Badgerlock while the Fool played the foreign noble Lord Golden. Nighteyes died; a Skill coterie was rebuilt around Chade, Dutiful and the immensely talented drudge Thick; and a betrothal to the Outislander narcheska Elliania was bought at the price of a dragon's head. On the ice island of Aslevjal the Fool was captured and tortured to death by the Pale Woman, and Fitz brought him back to life through the Skill; the dragon Icefyre was freed instead of killed, and dragons returned to the world. Afterwards the Fool, his prophecy fulfilled, went south and out of Fitz's life entirely. Burrich died; Fitz revealed himself to Molly at last and married her, and was granted the holding of Withywoods, where he has lived quietly ever since as Tom Badgerlock. Nettle became Skillmistress at Buckkeep, Dutiful became king, and the persecution of the Witted ended. Far to the south, entirely unknown to any of them, the last dragons were beginning to reclaim an Elderling city on the Rain Wild River.

Fitz and Molly keep Withywoods, a comfortable country holding a long way from Buckkeep, and the life Fitz spent thirty years failing to have is finally the one he is living. Their grown children come and go, Nettle runs the Skill at Buckkeep, and Riddle carries messages between them. During a winter festival a stranger arrives: a pale young woman, hurt and frightened, who has come a very long way looking for FitzChivalry Farseer. Fitz meets her only briefly, and afterwards there is blood where she stood and almost nothing in anyone's memory about her. The incident slides out of his mind as though something has been placed over it, and the message she carried is never delivered.

Molly announces that she is pregnant, which at her age is impossible, and refuses to be talked out of it. The pregnancy runs on past every reasonable term, well over a year and then longer, while Fitz privately agrees with the healers and with Nettle that grief and age have confused her, and hates himself for it. Molly is proved right: she bears a daughter, so tiny that no one expects the child to live through the night, pale and strange-looking and unlike any baby anyone at Withywoods has seen. They name her Bee. Nettle, who has spent years defending her mother, does not know what to make of the sister who has arrived after so long.

Bee grows almost imperceptibly. Years pass in which she remains the size of a much younger child, does not speak, and appears to everyone but her mother to be simple. From inside, she is nothing of the kind: she is alert, retentive and self-possessed, deliberately hiding what she can do because being underestimated is safer. She learns Withywoods' hidden corridors, teaches herself to read, and has vivid, insistent dreams that feel less like sleep than like instructions. Molly is the one person who never doubts her. Fitz is a loving but distracted father who cannot see what is in front of him, and the household treats his daughter as an affliction to be managed politely.

Molly dies, and Withywoods loses the person who held it together and the one person who understood Bee. Fitz's grief is total and largely private, and he handles his small daughter badly at exactly the moment she needs him most. Nettle, made responsible from a distance, wants Bee sent to Buckkeep; Fitz will not allow it. Chade takes the opportunity to solve two of his own problems by lodging them at Withywoods: a young woman called Shun, expensively raised, badly behaved and the target of murder attempts, and FitzVigilant, a disinherited scribe with enemies of his own who is to serve as Bee's tutor. Neither of them is told plainly why Chade is so interested in their safety, and neither is any use to Bee.

The attempts on FitzVigilant's life follow him out of Buckkeep, and a beating leaves him half-broken and Fitz hunting for whoever arranged it. Fitz's old trade comes back to him more easily than he likes. At Withywoods the household reorganizes itself around the two guests: Shun takes rooms, servants and precedence, and treats Bee with an open contempt that nobody corrects, while Fitz is away, preoccupied or simply not looking. Bee, displaced in her own home and mourning her mother, retreats further into her dreams and her secret knowledge of the house, and begins to write down what she sees at night.

FitzVigilant recovers and takes up his duties as tutor, badly at first, and Bee is put into a schoolroom with the estate's children, where she is a curiosity. She finds one genuine ally in Perseverance, a stable boy who treats her as a person rather than an oddity. The household settles into an uneasy peace. Fitz begins, slowly and imperfectly, to see his daughter as she is: not simple, not damaged, but hiding, and formidably capable underneath it. He starts teaching her what he knows, and the two of them build something like a relationship out of lessons, journals and shared silences.

Bee's dreams become undeniable. They are prophetic in the same way the Fool's were, they arrive in sequences she is compelled to record, and some of them show things that have not happened yet to people she has never met. She keeps her journals hidden. Meanwhile the past reaches for Withywoods again: the pale messenger who was lost at the winter festival is remembered in fragments, and the evidence points to something that can take memories out of people's heads, that has been operating in the Six Duchies for years, and that is looking for someone. Chade goes on managing his children from Buckkeep, Nettle and Riddle go on being unable to marry, and Fitz remains a country holder with an assassin's reflexes and no expectation of needing them.

At Buckkeep, a beggar beaten half to death at the gates proves to be the Fool. He is blind, maimed by torture, and terrified, and what he has come to say is that the Servants of Clerres, the order that bred and raised him and that he escaped, took him back and broke him, and that they are hunting a child he calls his unexpected son. He sent messengers north for years and none of them arrived. Fitz hides him and begins healing him with the Skill. At the same moment, Withywoods is raided: pale strangers and Chalcedean soldiers ride in behind a fog that erases memory as it passes, so the people watching forget what they are seeing. Revel is killed defending the door, FitzVigilant is cut down, Perseverance is left for dead, and Bee and Shun are taken away. Almost no one who survives remembers that anything happened at all, and Fitz, hundreds of miles away with the friend he thought he had lost forever, has no idea that his daughter is gone.

Fitz is at Buckkeep, where the beaten beggar at the gate turns out to be the Fool: blind, crippled by torture, half-mad, and carrying a warning about the Servants of Clerres, the order he was raised in and escaped, who hunt White Prophets and who have been hunting him. He speaks of a son he believes was taken from him, and of the messengers he sent north who never arrived. Fitz keeps him hidden and begins the slow, dangerous work of healing him. While he does, Withywoods is attacked. Pale strangers and Chalcedean mercenaries ride in behind a fog that unmakes memory, so that people watching the raid forget it as it happens and forget it afterwards; the steward Revel is killed, FitzVigilant is badly wounded, servants are murdered, and Bee and Shun are carried off. Perseverance, left for dead, is one of the few who remembers anything at all. The raiders take Bee because of what she is: the daughter of the White Prophet's Catalyst, and herself a dreamer of prophecy. The book ends with Bee a prisoner being carried away from her home, and with her father hundreds of miles away, tending the friend he thought lost and knowing nothing whatsoever about it.