Tag Archives: Alosha

Accepting the Lance – Chapter 83

The Bedel

In which the ship welcomes the kompani.

There’s a scene in Necessity’s Child where Alosha and Silain are talking about the ship being late and Alosha says specifically that one of the reasons he doesn’t think it’s going to come for them now is that Surebleak Port has started doing its job properly again and he doesn’t believe the ship will be able to come and go without being noticed. Perhaps that was just the discouragement talking, because now that the ship is actually coming nobody has any doubts on that score.
Continue reading

Accepting the Lance – Chapter 80

The Bedel

In which the kompani prepares for departure.

Udari defers to Droi as the luthia, which suggests she’s been accepted as the one who will serve that role for the kompani staying on Surebleak. It doesn’t appear that Udari has been chosen as the headman for the kompani; Droi tells him that a decision is the headman’s, not his. The way she says it suggests that the headman is somebody who has not yet had a chance to think and speak on the issue — which I rather think means that it’s Rys.

Accepting the Lance – Chapter 76

The Bedel

In which the ship is on its way.

Udari said earlier that he thought Pulka would choose to go when it came to it, but given his frame of mind at the beginning of this chapter the question may be still open.

We know it’s not going to happen this time, since some have already committed to leaving, but I wonder what would happen if all the kompani, aside from the two who have no choice, chose to stay.

Accepting the Lance – Chapter 54

Port Road
Yulie Shaper’s Place

In which Val Con receives news of his brother’s family.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen someone do the disappear-in-plain-sight trick. I wonder if there’s a reason we’re being reminded of it now.

Accepting the Lance – Chapter 46

Dudley Avenue and Farley Lane
Lady Kareen’s House

In which Kareen has a visit from her sister.

Well, that answers some of the questions I had.
Continue reading

Accepting the Lance – Chapter 27

The Bedel

In which Udari speaks.

I wonder which kompani Alosha and Silain will choose, if it comes down to it. Silain, as Droi mentions, has her own ties to the people of Surebleak, but she might feel that her duty takes her back to the ship. Alosha doesn’t appear conflicted and doesn’t have any particular ties that we know about.
Continue reading

Accepting the Lance – Chapter 9

The Bedel

In which the Bedel receive long-awaited news.

Back around the time Maysl first entered the story, I spent a while speculating about how she and her parents were going to manage when the ship came to pick up the kompani. It appears that Droi has been assuming that the question wouldn’t arise, that the ship which was already late would not appear in her lifetime.
Continue reading

Dragon in Exile – Chapter 36

Warehouse District
Surebleak

In which the Bedel are far from defenceless.

That’s a neat trick with the meteor shielding. (And probably implies something about how meteor shielding actually works in this universe, if you’re a reader who’s interested in that kind of technical thing.)

After all the ways they’ve been thwarted, the Syndicate are probably going to make one big serious attempt to make their presence felt before the end of the book. Which reminds me that we haven’t had the shooting match yet.

I wonder if the shooting match is the meeting of Bosses that Pat Rin’s asked Quin to represent him at. Even leaving aside the excuse that the Emerald needs his presence, which has the virtue of probably being true, sending his heir to shoot in his place is a neat way of supporting his consequence without giving away anything about just how good with a gun he personally is.

Dragon in Exile – Chapter 21

Riley’s Back Room
Fortunato’s Turf

In which Miri talks about the past, and Droi thinks about the future.

And one way in which things immediately become more interesting is that Rys’s role as leader of the freed Agents, with all its responsibilities and risks, has ceased to be merely hypothetical now that there is at least one freed Agent to lead.

It’s an interesting point about Droi perhaps not having a place on the ship of the Bedel when it returns. This chapter seems to be gesturing toward the possibility that she might by then discover that she has a place on Surebleak with Rys, which would not be quite the same as being left alone among gadje. The problem I see with this as a solution is that it revives the issue of the kompani needing to have a particular number of members at the end of chafurma, which was the necessity that drove Droi to start interacting with Rys in the first place: if both Rys and Droi leave, the kompani will be short, even if the kompani keeps their daughter, which I could see being a Balance demanded of them.

(Unless, it occurred to me as I composed the previous sentence, the newly freed Agents follow Rys’s path, and enough of them join the kompani to balance the loss. I’m suspicious of this idea, though: it seems a bit too neat, the kind of prediction that I’ve usually been wrong about before with Liaden novels.)

I was right about the nosy crews being connected; good to know my intuitions aren’t entirely off. Having some kind of underground-space-detecting technology explains how they knew where to look without necessarily knowing what was in the spaces they were looking for. The mention of an Insurance Committee suggests they might also be connected to the shakedowns Pat Rin has been dealing with. It says something about their ideas of neighbourliness (or at least of the behaviour of Bosses) that they assume they can nobble the Road Boss’s nearest neighbour without anybody noticing or caring.

It occurs to me that the kompani, who have been on Surebleak many generations “to learn what there was to know”, might well have learned things that would be relevant and useful to Kareen’s project, even if they weren’t interested in the social constructs of gadje particularly. Whether anybody in the story is likely to have this occur to them, and whether the Bedel would agree to share such knowledge, who knows?

Dragon in Exile – Chapter 18

The Bedel

In which Rys makes a discovery.

I’m not sure I have much to say about this chapter, since it speaks pretty well for itself.

One detail that’s left open for speculation is why the luthia gave Rys the task of seeing Kezzi off in the mornings at the same time as she began this course of education. Is it somehow part of the lesson, too? Did Silain foresee that it would be in the act of seeing Kezzi off that he’d come to his realisation about what is going on?