Picking up directly from the close of Fool's Assassin, the second volume of The Fitz and the Fool finds FitzChivalry Farseer at Buckkeep Castle, desperately tending the maimed and blinded Fool, who has returned after decades of absence, ruined by torture at the hands of the Servants who shaped him. Consumed by the effort to save his oldest friend and by the demands of court, Fitz is slow to learn that catastrophe has struck at home: his young daughter Bee has been taken from Withywoods, the attackers cloaking their crime by erasing the memories of those who witnessed it. As Fitz and Chade piece together who raided the estate and why, the novel widens to the politics of Buckkeep, the workings of Skill magic, and the painful, shifting bond between Fitz and the Fool. Bee, meanwhile, narrates her own ordeal as a captive, hiding what she is from her abductors as she is carried far from everything she knows. Robin Hobb braids the intimate, a father's guilt, a friendship strained by years and injury, a child's resourcefulness in peril, into the larger machinery of prophecy and revenge that drives the trilogy toward its end. Tense, sorrowful, and rich in court intrigue, Fool's Quest sets Fitz on the path that will demand he decide just how far he will go to recover the daughter he failed to protect.
