Dutiful Passage
Colemeno Orbit
In which the visitors prepare to be received.
I wonder if the cats had anything interesting to say in their nameday greetings, or if Jeeves just translated their message into human-polite.
I think we know the significance to Liadens of the age of twelve — that’s about the point where they stop being considered children and start being considered halflings — but thirty-five is a new one. It’s obviously not minimum drinking age, driving age, or marriage age; nor is it a minimum age to become delm, because Val Con took up the ring at the age of thirty-one and that was after dodging it for several years beforehand.
I suspect the invitation to Padi to join the other traders for a working meal was a case of Shan employing irony: given that it’s preceded by Padi noticing she’d let the time get away from her, the way I read it is that the meal was already on her schedule and the invitation was Shan tweaking her about being late.
Now that I’ve finished reading the novel, I’ve been catching up on author interviews, and in the very first one I listened to Sharon Lee mentions in passing that 35 Standard Years is the Liaden age of majority. But she doesn’t elaborate, at least not in that interview, and the fact remains that for all the things we associate with an age of majority there are examples of them being done by Liadens younger than 35.
Yes, much much younger.