Jelaza Kazone
In which Rys returns.
There have been three described cats in these scenes of the Bedel in the Tree Court, and I’ve been trying to match them against Korval cats we already know.
There isn’t a match for any of the three descriptions in the list on the wiki of cats resident at Jelaza Kazone. However — and I’m almost sure this is just a coincidence — there is a match for all three among the cats that we know aren’t at Jelaza Kazone. Jen Sar’s household on Delgado included a black-and-white cat and an orange cat with amber eyes. We don’t have specifically a striped cat with a torn ear, but we have a couple of striped cats who might plausibly have torn ears: Pat Rin’s cat Silk, who lives down in the city, and the Pathfinders’ cat Grakow, who is currently very much farther away.
It’s interesting that, after all the times the tiles containing the back-up of Rys have been used to foreshadow his death and recovery, they don’t end up being actually involved in the process, and it’s his non-physical bond with his brothers and sisters that does the job. (So Val Con was closer with his comparison to his bond with Miri than I thought at the time.) I suppose it’s easier to have a character absent-mindedly touch a physical collection of tiles than a non-physical bond when a bit of foreshadowing is called for.
The physical tiles were used for foreshadowing, but they were also used to help the reader understand what was meant by the kompani dreaming themselves into tiles that could be delivered to the ship’s captain in lieu of their physical presence.
The narrator through Dori’s thoughts tells us it had not been an easy healing, and in fact had exhausted the group. Can we image that they had a device that allowed them to work on Rys’s pattern, like Edger and Shan had worked on Val Con’s back in I Dare? In a sense the Bedel should have had an easier time, since Rhys had had some attention of a Healer who recognized and understood his mental/spiritual links to the kompani and had not tried to interrupt them, thus they didn’t have to repair damage done by technicians who did not understand the lifemate bridge.
All honor to the authors, who led us to the final scene, in which Rhys awakes and recognizes Droi and Maysl. Droi was not the only one who “felt tears gather in her eyes.”