In which Slade leaves his mother’s tent and follows the trail the day brings him.
This is one of my very favourite of the Liaden short stories. It never fails to give me, as the young people say these days, All The Feels.
Unfortunately, as I think we’ve established by now, I am not very eloquent when it comes to The Feels.
Reading a Liaden short story is sometimes like being a courier, the way it’s described in Mouse and Dragon, getting to see a slice of a person’s life and never after learning how things turned out for them. If I were ever to settle on a definitive Top 5 Liaden Universe Characters Whose Fates I Want to Know, several spaces on the list would be filled with names from this story.
Though the story itself does not carry a date, The Updated But Partial Liaden Universe Timeline sets it in SY 1177, around 50 years after “Naratha’s Shadow”, and around 150 years before the birth of Daav yos’Phelium, who will one day walk this world in his turn.
Glad to see in your comment the bit about Daav “who will one day walk this world in his turn.”
I have been reading the novels in their order, in order to catch up to the Agent of Change sequence, which I read first, so essentially things have not exactly fallen into place very easily.
In any case, when I started reading about Daav, who wore a twist of silver in one ear, put there by a grandmother of…wait, a grandmother of the Mun? who are they? I remembered a grandmother of the Sanilithe…my first thought was that Daav was Slade and the reason he was shown in Scout’s Progress to be longing for a child of his own, is that the child carried off the planet at the end of “Sweet Waters” had not survived, and that we eventually would be given the details.
I wonder if the idea for the short story was at first intended to be background for Daav before it was decided it should be a stand alone/?
I read Scout’s Progress before I got hold of the short stories, so I had the inverse experience: when I started reading “Sweet Waters”, I assumed that Slade was Daav until it became clear he wasn’t. It’s possible that at some point early in the story’s development, he might have been, but getting married and having a child doesn’t really fit with Daav’s backstory as we’ve come to know it. In any case, I think the story was intended as backstory for the planet, more than for Daav specifically.
I enjoyed this story just as much the second time through…maybe more. I agree with you Paul about a definitive Top 5 Liaden Universe Characters Whose Fates I Want to Know, several spaces on the list would be filled with names from this story. If I had to narrow it down to one of these, it would have to be Kisam: Does she survive? What does she do with her life? And (I feel like a norbear here) Who does she meet/know? How do they intersect with the rest of the characters we know?
getting married and having a child doesn’t really fit with Daav’s backstory as we’ve come to know it Yes, I see that now that I’ve read everything else, although I still think that the sorrow he seems to feel about not having a child could have been the grief of losing one in his past.
Is this story non canon ?
I know of no reason to think that the story is non-canon. I’ve never seen either of the authors say so anywhere, and they included it on the official Timeline.
Good. I saw it said non-canon somewhere, but it wasn’t cited and when someone asked where they got that idea, they did not answer. So I didn’t give it much credence. Unless author says so, it’s canon.
Btw,
Too bad about Lord of the Dance. There were some good moments in that story, even though dancing to pass a piloting test is odd. I think Sharon Lee must have been square dancing the night before. Lol.