Day 63
Standard Year 1118
Elthoria
In which Jethri proceeds with his lessons.
Jethri has been on Elthoria for 21 days, which is three of our weeks, slightly less than that in Standard weeks, and a bit under two Liaden weeks. During that time the ship has been in transit, but it is now approaching a destination.
Ship-days on Elthoria are 28 hours long, and divided into four shifts; if the hours are divided evenly, that makes each shift 7 hours. (The preceding sentence is here mainly in case it helps when we get to the time-keeping in Conflict of Honors.) Ship-days on Gobelyn’s Market are 24 hours, which is suggestive, but not conclusive when the Market‘s masters are ship-people who call no planet home.
One of the things I considered mentioning but ended up not, two chapters ago, was that Jethri, as reflected in the narrative voice, was still thinking of Pen Rel sig’Kethra as “Pen Rel” even after he’d been informed that he was properly “Arms Master sig’Kethra”. Which I thought was a nice detail: it was only a few hours at most after he’d received the new information, and he’d had several days to get into the habit of “Pen Rel”. The extension of the nice detail, and the reason I bring it up now, is that in this chapter the narrative voice has made the transition to “Arms Master sig’Kethra”.
Jethri seems to be settling in. And taking something of a shine to First Mate tel’Dorbit.
Gaenor tel’Dorbit’s idea of a language lesson sounds perfect — a good walk, with discussions of books, meeting with friends and colleagues, interspersed with gossip and any other topic that pleases them in the moment.
Paul, I didn’t mention last year about my appreciation for your comment about Jethri’s mental ID of Pen Rel versus Arms Master sig’Kethra. Nice observation, that I had not caught in my own reading (or re-rereading!)