Melepomine Court
Alpraise City
Dayan, in the Irrobi System

In which Lomar Fasholt makes her move.

This, also, I read a few months ago and have been putting off because I didn’t know what to say about it. Apart from, obviously: Hurray! It’s good to see Lomar Fasholt again after all this time.

Most of what came to mind immediately while reading this chapter is snarky comments about how the Temple, for all its professed disdain for material matters, seems proficient at profiting from the miseries of others. And I trust that that goes without saying.

Lomar asks the same question Lute did in Moon’s Honor, and in similar circumstances, though unlike him she’s wise enough to only ask it in her secret heart and not to throw it in the face of one of the Thrice-Blessed: Why does the Temple value loyalty to itself ahead of loyalty to the Goddess it purports to serve?

Another parallel is that this chapter, like “Moonphase”, the story about Priscilla leaving the Temple, features a glowing physical object representing its protagonist’s connection to her faith, and ends with a focus on that object. The difference is that Lomar’s chalice shatters and Priscilla’s statue continues unaffected, which I take to be because the statue represents Priscilla’s connection with the Goddess while the chalice merely represents Lomar’s connection with the Temple.

Speaking of the Temple: I noted, the first time we met Lomar, the similarity between the names of her planet “Dayan” and Moonhawk’s “Dyan Temple”. In this story it’s confirmed that the Temple to which Lomar is pledged is Dayan Temple, which I think confirms there’s a common root and it’s not just a coincidence.

Unless I missed one, we got mentions of seven of Lomar Fasholt’s eight husbands in this chapter: the eldest is named Terbus, and there are younger husbands named Aramis, Jeni, and Sleak, as well as the second-eldest husband, the fifth husband, and the youngest husband, whose names are not yet mentioned. (It may be less, if those two lists overlap: I’m not sure from the wording whether Jeni is a different person from the second husband, or Aramis from the fifth husband.)

(I see from my notes that this makes two characters in the Liaden Universe named Jeni, the other being Jeni yos’Phelium, Delm Korval, who helped establish the Scout Academy. That probably is just a coincidence.)