In which Miri and Val Con come to the attention of the authorities.
Bringing Miri breakfast through a locked door, disconcerting as it understandably is for her, is I think basically a friendly gesture on Val Con’s part, and not just for the breakfast itself. The implicit message, that a locked door isn’t enough to keep him out, might be read as threatening, but he doesn’t need or want to threaten her at this point; if he meant her harm, he’d have done better to let her going on thinking that a locked door would keep her safe right up until it was time to prove her definitively wrong. As it is, it’s less a threat than a warning: he’s showing her what he can do, even though it means giving up a tactical advantage, because it’s something she needs to understand if they’re going to work together.
The mention of the Belansiums on Justin Hostro’s walls clears up a small mystery. The painter Belansium is featured in the short story “Phoenix”, set about a century before this; by the time I first read that story, I’d forgotten about the paintings in this chapter, so I’ve been wondering on and off since then how Bel first came to the attention of the authors. Now I know.
(Incidentally, it’s a nice bit of foreshadowing that Miri compares Justin Hostro’s interior decoration to Sire Baldwin’s.)
Good grief! How could you not leave any about of the Clutch perception of the knife gift…which unaccountably turns out was correct! For the first part of their conversation, I was with Miri. But I was intrigued at where the authors were going to go with it, because it was out of left field (as we in the US say) for me.
Again, I can only say that I’d read the story often enough that that part of it was become familiar, and my attention was more on the things I was thinking about for the first time.
There’s those mangled English words again. After reading the note, Miri starts swearing. She starts in Liaden, then switches to Terran, Aus-dialect and moved methodically through Yarkish, Russ, Chinest, and Spanol. It is interesting to speculate—in-universe—why these are the dialects that survived however many of thousands of years it has been since they began!
It is satisfying to see that Val Con and Handler, whose relationship began on a very tenuous footing in “To Cut an Edge,” are now seen to be on very easy terms with each other.