Teres

We last left off with Raum confirming that Faraday was chosen as Tree Friend.

God that title is stupid.

Where will the grain for Achar come from then, and is it alright to possible expose more land to agriculture?

This just makes the whole "grr, Farming Bad" crap even worse because WE NEED IT TO SURVIVE. Destroying all that farmland should have caused mass starvation!

Instead of which food just seems to come right out of nowhere, sometimes in the quite literal sense.

if Tree Friend is a Lady of Skarabost and the Duchess of Ichtar, they would have quite some means to make people accept the Avar.

Which she never does! The Avar will NEVER be re-integrated into society and instead will remain a separate community which is generally off limits to outsiders.

Yes, thank you for repeating what we just heard!

What is with bad fantasy protagonists endlessly repeating things anyway?

GoldFeather “[gives] a strangled moan, her hands flying to her mouth, her eyes distressed”

Now I'm picturing her as an actress from an old black and white movie where women must always show fear by putting their hands over their mouths or on their cheeks, bugging out their eyes and screaming a lot while shaking their heads from side to side.

Before this day, she has “hardly thought of him in almost thirty years”,

Our first clue as to what a horrible cold-hearted person she is. At least Selena had the excuse of not rescuing her elder son because she was DEAD.

She thinks this is “[h]ardly coincidence” and wonders if the Prophecy will pull her into “its frightening entanglements”, too.

After this, of course, everyone becomes extremely blase about being controlled by that fucking thing.

He was a “hard and humourless man, more comfortable with his enemy at the point of his sword than wasting time in needless pleasantries”,

As with Borneheld, this means he was pure evil. Because being socially awkward = evil.

Of course, Saint Axis is in no way "hard and humourless" and most at home when he's killing things. Nuh-uh!

Pease is shocked at this and holds Shra tight, who is, by now, “awake and listening to Raum avidly”

And not the least bit traumatised, naturally.

the BattleAxe, “the one man [they] have all been taught to hate and fear without thinking”,

You mean the chief enforcer for the organisation that kills and tortures your people? OMG, how incredibly unreasonable.

Raum says he has “never heard such power” from an Enchanter before, not even from StarDrifter, the “most powerful alive today”.

Guess what, the guy does NOTHING with this "power". He barely even uses any magic at all.

“the facial bone structure and the eyes of an Icarii”,

As we never find out what that is, this statement is meaningless.

and what she thought was his arrogance caused by the Seneschal’s ignorance is actually the “natural demeanour of an Icarii Enchanter”.

Apparently looking like an arrogant ass all the time is meant to be taken as a good thing.

“so disturbing that it threaten[s] to drive her over the edge of sanity”,

This is just melodramatic and childish.

Let me look further… So the Icarii have a different “facial bone structure” and eyes than the Acharites? That is good to know, though it is quite useless without us knowing just what it looks like… which would be a great way to indicate that someone has Icarii heritage without saying it explicitly.

And this will never be addressed. There's a half Icarii present right now, yet nobody picks up on it here for the same reason?

Then we have more Drama with GoldFeather thinking she will “go crazy” if she thinks about Axis still living. A word of advice: if your story’s understanding of mental illness is about as nuanced as Lovecraft’s, do more research into it!

"Going insane" or "going mad" isn't even a thing

The big problem with this, though, is that Barsarbe’s reaction makes no sense!

Exactly! And no, it WASN'T murder. Murder requires intent. It was literally an accident which was mostly self-inflicted. No court of law would ever have convicted her.

So Azhure is now going to lay bare the abuse inflicted on her for everyone to see, for nothing but Drama. I find that in quite poor taste

So do I. Douglass' handling of abuse continues to be horribly insensitive and ignorant.

So she starts fumbling with “the fastenings at the back of her dress”. GoldFeather rouses herself enough to push Azhure’s hand aside and unfasten “the gown” herself.

How the fuck was she putting this thing on in the morning all by herself if it fastens up the BACK?

running down either side of her spine their tracks ruined her pale skin. She was marked for life.

Speaking of insensitive and ignorant, this is a horrible way to describe scars as "ruining" you. Also, surprise surprise, she is not in fact "marked for life". Douglass mishandles the scars almost as badly as Paolini would.

Well, GoldFeather puts the dress back and gives “the tense women” a hug, which is nice of her. GoldFeather tells us that in “all the years she [has] known Azhure”, Azhure has “never, never mentioned this to her”.

But she's quite happy to literally bare it all to a bunch of strangers. Right.

-Shra is still a small child, and is unlikely to understand fully what happened, which means that she cannot make an informed decision to accept Hagen’s death as a sacrifice.

Of course, this goes ignored because in Douglass-land, childhood doesn't exist. All children have adult level judgement and are expected to take the same level of responsibility for their actions, even as babies.

Otherwise I'd have just assumed Shra was imitating something she's seen an adult do without really understanding it, the way actual toddlers do.