Inside the Skill Pillars? (Spoilers Farseer and Tawny Man trilogies)

[Farseer]

For whatever reason amazon uk have 2 and 3 for kindle but not 1! So I'm waiting delivery of a paperback of Ship of Magic!

Oh, no! I should have thought to mention this here somewhere. There were quite a few critical errors in the SoM UK Kindle version (the UK LST e-books were all only made available on Kindle in September last year). These errors were all discussed over in Robin's Newsgroup and correspondence following this discussion prompted the publishers to pull it out for corrections.

So, it's a pain in the short-term, in that you will have to purchase the pb when you would otherwise not have, but at least the e-book will be less horrible and thus far better reading material for all current and future Hobb fans.

As for the matter at hand, from their experience within the Skill Pillar en route to Others' Island, Dutiful felt that the presence was paternal whilst Fitz felt that it was maternal. I believe both (or at least Fitz) later just accepted that the presence filled their lack or need eg in that Dutiful mourned the loss of his father so he was attracted to a male presence while Fitz mourned the loss of his mother and so was attracted to a female presence. In this, I don't believe it was either Tintaglia or Icefyre. It's interesting to note that *MAJOR Liveship Traders Spoiler*

Spoiler

While defending himself to Fitz, Fool himself used this as a reasoning for his taking on the role of a female whilst in Bingtown. He took on the role of a female as he felt that he would then be better placed, and accepted by Bingtowners/Rain Wilders etc, to do what he needed to do as White Prophet.

As an aside, while caught in the Skill Pillar en route to Buckkeep from Aslevjal, Fitz first noticed the huge presence as 'a star'.

On stars, you may like to wander over to the The Skill and the Wit. Argh! I have a teleconference to get to ....

More soon!!