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wordle in 2: misleading. you may think that this is the highest achievement, but it suffers from the same disappointment of a lucky guess that wordle in 1 causes. your second guess is a strategic choice, but ending the game this early just isn't interesting

wordle in 3: the peak. your starting word gave you some information and then your second guess contextualized that information into a solvable position. your sharp intuition and restraint is what truly separates you as above average.

wordle in 4: statistically average, par for the course, the baseline against which all other wordles are compared.

wordle in 5: you're sweating. you made a mistake at some point, or your starting word was effectively useless, and it took an extra guess above average to close things out. wordle in 5 comes as a relief.

wordle in 6: crushing humiliation. you have technically succeeded but at what cost. your thirty square grid will stare back at you like barrels of a firing squad. a failure in all but name.

Fitz always discusses his love, admiration, and attraction to his queen, but couches it in a claim that it is somehow Verity's feelings he's feeling, even long after Verity is dead.

Kettricken immediately gets along with Fitz, even when actively trying to assassinate him. He is her first friend and confidante in Buckkeep, and he is just like her husband Verity- but younger, kinder, and more relatable to her. Verity if he didn't need to burn himself Skilling.

Fitz and Kettricken have so much in common. Both Witted, both Mountain born. Outcasts to Buckkeep. Poisoners. Young and passionate, willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Warriors. Scholars. They enjoy the natural world, equality among people, simplicity and austerity and practicality. And they both adore Nighteyes and he loves both of them.

Fitz courts Kettricken. He courts her for Verity, but a lot of Verity and Kettricken's foundational relationship moments happen by proxy. August is literally burned out of his mind when Verity touches minds with Kettricken (foreshadowing for how this dynamic destroys Fitz?). Fitz is the one who suggests the Queen's Garden be given to Kettricken, and is the one who forms the Queen's Guard. He is constantly reassuring Kettricken of her own husbands feelings for her, and eventually this proxy love dynamic culminates in Verity using Fitz's body to conceive a child.

There's one moment where Chade says something to the effect of "Chivalry and Kettricken, they would have been an incredible match". Fitz and Kettricken totally mirror Chivalry's relationships. Kettricken is Mountain woman, slender, pale, tall. We learn in the Fitz and the Fool trilogy that early in Chivalry's courtship of Patience, he sent her supplies for her solver working. Kettricken, too, has interest like silver working and gardening like Patience.

All of this and more to set these two up as an ideal match, I think, is to allude to a world in which Fitz almost becomes king. He almost becomes acknowledged, he almost becomes heir to Verity. He almost rules Buckkeep, he almost returns to Buck on a dragon. But the one critical point that could have changed everything, Chivalry abdicated, prevents a whole host of these other possibilities. If Chivalry didn't abdicate, and Fitz was made heir, could we reasonably assume Kettricken and Fitz would have been married? What would that have been like?

But Fitz can't let himself acknowledge those feelings any more than he can talk about his Mountain mother. And the situation of the country and Kettricken's philosophy of Sacrifice ruins any semblance of friendship or camaraderie they once had. So they are both so, so alone. And when Kettricken hears news of FitzChivalry's death, she immediately falls ill and has to take to bed.