Wow. Robin Hobb did it again. Every third book in a series about Fitzcivalry Farseer and the Fool (and what series could be more about them than The Fitz and the Fool?) is just an absolute heart-render for me. There are a lot of books that I love deeply, but few move me as profoundly as the conclusion to each chapter of their saga has, and Assassin's Fate was no exception. Wow, just wow. I'll put more under spoiler tags, though I expect all that to be a rambling mess. 
 (view spoiler)[I think I just want to reflect a bit on, well, our assassin's fate, appropriately enough. First, Hobb appears to kill him in the bowels of Clerres, and gives us something like 40-odd pages after that in Bee's POV to come to terms with it--at least, as much as we could with everything else that was going on. And then the reveal: not dead! And he ends up covered in silver and I kind of thought he might make it back to Buckkeep after all. But then, that wouldn't have ripped out my heart the same way, would it? It wouldn't have been nearly bittersweet enough. 
 I was rather amazed to realize how early in this trilogy Fitz's end had been set up, with the deaths of the messengers from the parasites, and then the hints about worms. And, of course, it all goes back to the final volume of that first trilogy, as Fitz longs on some level to put himself into a dragon, to go with Verity. And the union of Fitz, the Fool, and Nighteyes, too, was set up in the final volume of The Tawny Man with the Fool's carved gift for Fitz, each of them on a face. And finally it came full circle. 
 I wonder if we will get more volumes in this world? Bee has, of course, been established as a POV character, so even with Fitz gone... and for that matter, how gone is Fitz REALLY? We have his final POV chapter before he joins with his carved wolf "dragon," and it's strange because it's so lucid in the way that he sees his own increasing "vagueness." So what's the meta-fictional element here? I mean, in past books we've had Fitz as a narrator who is explicitly the one writing things down, right? And in these volumes, it's similarly been conceivable that Bee and Fitz are writing down their memories of events. Are we to take this as Bee writing down what her father has narrated to her? But it doesn't really seem like that, does it? It seems like Fitz himself narrating directly. 
 Here was a theory I developed during the past few chapters: what if the stone dragons went to Kelsingra and drank Silver (or had it brought to them)? Much as the wizardwood Liveships became "real" dragons, could the stone dragons gain that same kind of life instead of the twilight half-life that they seem to have, sleeping so deeply (but, I suppose, alive in the Skill-current?)? Here's my further thought on the matter: first, yes, they could; and second, that might solve the Seven Duchies' problem with dragons feeding indiscriminately off their livestock, if dragons with the hearts of their coteries were protecting them. Of course, those dragons would have to eat too, I'm sure, but they would be far more human, far more attached to this land and its people, and therefore easier to reason with and come to some arrangement with. (hide spoiler)]