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Necessity’s Child – Chapter 18

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In which Kezzi goes to school.

We learn quite a bit about Pulka in this chapter, without him ever appearing, from Kezzi comparing Rys to him and Udari, and Rys comparing Pulka to himself.

I don’t think the flash of memory Rys has is really him, even though it uses his name: as he says, it’s from the still-unremembered latter portion of his life – the portion when he was in the grip of the Department and even his thoughts were not his own.

It occurs to me to wonder where Boss Conrad found Ms Taylor. She seems to have a local’s knowledge of Surebleak, but she also seems to be an experienced teacher, of a kind that I wouldn’t have expected Surebleak to be able to produce. Maybe there was one turf somewhere that did manage to keep proper schools going, and now it’s sharing its pool of experience.

Necessity’s Child – Chapter 7

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In which Syl Vor requests a change of schedule.

The Rule of Succession is, like all proverbs, something of an oversimplification. While it’s true that who wants power most may be someone who shouldn’t be trusted with it, it’s just as possible that who wants it least may do a great deal of damage by neglecting or avoiding the duty that comes along with.

There is a phenomenon called “shipping goggles”, which is a propensity to look at the interactions between two characters and see romantic subtext regardless of whether the storyteller intended any. I don’t have shipping goggles myself – I’ve been known to have trouble seeing romantic subtext that a storyteller definitely did intend – but there are moments when I suspect that, if I did, I would have an opinion about Nova and Michael Golden.

Kezzi’s protest that she shouldn’t be considered a child just because the kompani currently has no children younger suggests that she’s in a similar position to the one Nova was just diagnosing of Syl Vor, with nobody her own age to interact with, which kind of suggests where this story might be going.