In the sixteenth and final chapter of Cold Fire, Daja confronts Bennat Ladradun. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to read The Circle Opens.
Trigger Warning: For discussion of fire/pyrophobia, ableism and use of ableist slurs, capital punishment, death by fire.
How do these books keep getting more fucked up? HOW?
The Hospital
God, it’s just so upsetting, y’all. There’s no real happy ending here. Closure, yes, and Daja experiences a number of things that are important to her growth as a character. But there’s just so much tragedy left behind, which I suppose is the point. As Olennika tells Daja here, Daja cannot save everyone, no matter how badly she wants to. That’s something Daja has no choice but to accept, especially as Ben’s fire consumes more and more of the hospital.
And yet, Daja’s sense of altruism is tested in an unnerving way. I’m not gonna say that this is the best representation of mental illness I could imagine, since the language still others those with a mental disability. But I appreciate that Pierce has Daja react with reluctance, only to later have the text outright scold her for that same behavior:
She wrestled the bolts out of the locks, thinking bad thoughts about the workers who hadn’t tried to move these people. Then she felt guilty; she had hesitated at the thought of dealing with crazy people in a firestorm herself.
There are different degrees of illness here, and Pierce doesn’t write these few characters without some realism in how many of them would react to their imminent death, which includes them lashing out at Daja. But this line isn’t exactly helpful:
Common sense from a madman, Daja thought desperately. This day just gets worse by the minute.
There’s a clear stigma for mental illness within Emelan, enough that it’s easy for Pierce to write that most people in this society fear madness. So I get that it makes sense within this world for Daja to say something like this, but there’s little here to suggest that holding such an absurd opinion is actually harmful. Being mentally ill and possessing common sense are not mutually exclusive, you know?
Daja’s efforts are heroic, though, and if she had not gone after the people in this ward, all of them would have died. She manages to save six people before the roof caves in, killing everyone else left behind. And like that, Daja has to accept that she cannot be the hero to everyone.
But there was one thing she could do.
Debt
I’m very thankful that Pierce kept Daja so brilliantly in character while Daja pursued Bennat. Daja will always be a Trader, and that culture’s veneration of debt and payment is highly influential on her still. In this case, she refuses to let Bennat Ladradun escape without a final payment on his account:
Once more she was reminded of pijule fakol, the fearful Trader afterlife for those who did not pay what they owed. Ben probably deserved to spend an eternity in pijule fakol, but Daja could not help him escape what he owed in this life if it meant he would burn forever. If she did not stop him now, the Bookkeeper might also log the deaths Ben made with her creations to her account.
Daja knows Ben has to pay for his crimes, but she also is willing to openly acknowledge that he committed some of those crimes with her gloves. SO SHE CREATES A TUNNEL IN THE FIRE AND GIVES CHASE WITHIN A COLLAPSED BUILDING. I’m never going to be unimpressed with Daja’s firewalking, y’all. But even here, there’s a calmness and a purpose to her walk that’s scary because she’s so focused on one goal, so her power feels all the more immense to me:
Her path took her into the heart of the inferno. Beams fell all around her; walls caved in. She had to be careful not to get struck – a cracked head would kill her – but the fire itself warned her when a large object was about to fall.
And then she stands in the middle of a literal towering inferno so her living metal magic can find Ben. THERE IS NO POSSIBLE FUTURE WHERE THIS DOESN’T MAKE ME WANT TO PASS OUT FROM AWESOME. It is the most metal thing I’ve ever heard, I want power metal blaring behind her in the inevitable film adaptation of this novel. I don’t think I could ever forget the image of Daja, few clothes left unburned or without scorches, barefoot, following the thread of her living metal to the icy outside world of Namorn, all so she can confront Bennat Ladradun. She does so without fanfare or celebration. What is there to celebrate? Daja risks her life because she cannot allow Bennat to take another one using her creation.
In the end, Bennat is a coward. He cannot face what he’s done, even when he realizes that Daja has absolutely caught him. I found that striking because he was so sure of himself prior to being caught. His arrogance was an obvious and deep part of all of his crimes, you know? He more or less admits that when Daja shows up, claiming that he was such a superior being that all of these people needed to be taught a lesson by him.
That’s not the same man we see once Daja fuses the living metal gloves together, trapping him.
“Daja, please,” Ben said. He’d gone dead white, the shadows cast by the great fire rippling over his pale skin. “You can’t do this. You’re my friend.”
It’s such a horrible thing to say because at one point, Daja was tricked into being friends with this man. There’s no real friendship here, and I couldn’t take any pity on Ben. He murdered over a hundred people. He manipulated those around him. And then he tried to invoke friendship when he’d known nothing of the sensation himself.
“And I will be there, to pay off my account to you.”
Tamora Pierce does not make this easy. That’s the case for her characters and for us, as readers. While there are certainly plenty of disturbing things spread throughout the Tortall books, particularly the second half of them, there’s something relentlessly brutal within the Emelan books that’s often hard for me to define. I don’t want to lose scope of what the Tortall books were or what they’ve meant to me, but I already know that I like the Emelan series more. I get the sense that Pierce experiments with ideas in Tortall, and then she executes them viciously over here.
Betrayal is not new for Pierce’s writing, nor is death, capital punishment, or violence. And yet, Daja’s final big moment in Cold Fire involves something that does feel new, largely because of the way that Daja is forced to confront her own feelings of revenge and accountability. I was pleased that we got some of Ben’s trial, as brief as it was, since it helped to demonstrate to us that he was still a coward. I felt his execution was a necessary scene as well, at least because I expected it to provide an expected sense of closure. He’d be burned alive, as his victims died, and that would be the end of it. But unlike the abrupt courtroom scene (which lasted no more than a couple paragraphs), Pierce lingered in the details. We were shown every detail about his execution, from the priests leading him up to the platform to the first sparks of fire. It’s in the midst of this that a thought pops into Daja’s head, one she ultimately could not shake:
His image quivered as her eyes filled with tears. She suddenly remembered the Ben she had known at first, a rare non-mage who understood fire as she did, someone as eager and alive as any member of her foster-family.
Of course, everyone now knows that was a constructed image, at least in the sense that Ben was always hiding his true self from everyone. Yet it’s fair for Daja to remember the excitement that Ben brought to her life because he’d also brought so much terror and trauma to it, too. Does that mean she wanted to see him suffer in agony as he died on that stake? For Daja, the answer was no. She couldn’t watch the man suffer, even if he made others suffer. That doesn’t mean she was opposed to his death, since she ends up using her power to kill Ben quicker than he was going to. And I imagine that Jory, Frostpine, and Olennika all knew that Daja was hurt enough by this man, so much so that they helped her end Ben’s life in an instant. Hell, maybe they each refused to watch him suffer, too.
Regardless, it’s not an easy scene to read, nor is a moment that’s easy for Daja to cope with. But she does, moving past Bennat’s death to continue teaching Nia and Jory, enough that she can feel better about finally leaving them to return home. While the instruction element of Cold Fire was always there, I don’t feel like the ultimate point of this novel was about Daja teaching someone else. Daja had to learn how to deal with the kind of traumatic, crushing betrayal that most never have to experience. She learned what it was like to feel manipulated and controlled, to be tricked into doing something good, only for that very thing to be used for utter evil. The Daja we get at the end of this book is one who’s had to grow up even more than she already had. (Which is a LOT, given what she’s been through by age 14.) There’s some silliness here, most of it from Frostpine, but there’s no victory. There’s no sense of joy or excitement, and it works. Cold Fire was a sober book, one that dealt with some intense subjects, and SURPRISE, IT’S MY FAVORITE BOOK OF THE SERIES SO FAR. (No one is surprised, DAJA IS MY EVERYTHING.)
So, we’ll do some predictions for Shatterglass, and then reviews for that begin on Friday! EXCITE!
The original text contains use of the words “mad,” “crazy,” and “insanity.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2qX4-3RlTY
Mark Links Stuff
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