In which Anne and Er Thom each separately look forward to life becoming more simple.
We’ve encountered Shan el’Thrassin before, briefly; Jethri reads about him in Balance of Trade.
There’s a nice bit of multiple-purpose exposition in this chapter, when Anne is reflecting on her childhood. It serves its overt purpose of elucidating how Anne handles her own child, but it also casually slips in the fact that she comes of a family that produces pilots, which will be important later.
In spite of all the hints, I didn’t quite put it all together my first time through, perhaps because I was reading too fast in my rush to catch up.
It’s a shame that Anne seems to have received her education on Liaden custom out of novels. As we can tell from the bit in the heading of this chapter, melodrama is the aim, not accuracy…kind of like taking Shakespeare’s history plays as eyewitness reporting.