Dutiful Passage en route to Venture
Standard Year 1339

In which Er Thom yos’Galan shows his mettle.

Another jump forward of nearly 50 years, and a significant shift in the focus of the series: we are back with Korval, and there, with only occasional diversions, we shall henceforth remain.

So here is a story that shows us Er Thom and Daav as youngsters, part-formed, but already showing familiar traits. It’s also, if memory serves, the only story with an extensive depiction of Er Thom’s mother in her prime.

I’m never quite sure I’ve correctly untangled the interplay about Er Thom’s status in the family. He’s described as his mother’s heir both by his mother herself and by the narrator, and here he is on her ship, learning her trade; the implication is that when he tells the Juntavas boss that he is of no significance because he has a brother who’s the heir, he’s being flexible with the truth. And yet in Local Custom we hear that he does in fact have an elder brother who’s ahead of him in the line of inheritance.

(One could resolve the puzzle, of course, by guessing that after this story was written the authors found it necessary to discover an elder brother to make the plot of Local Custom work; one might even take a confident guess at which part of the plot was otherwise at risk. But one does prefer, where possible, to believe that the Liaden Universe possesses internal consistency.)

If the Master dea’Cort who is Daav’s instructor at the Academy is the same Scout who came to Bell’s aid in “Phoenix”, he must be getting on in years. (Although not, perhaps, as far on as a Terran of the same age; it’s mentioned in “Sweet Waters” that a Liaden in her fifties would be considered to be in her prime, with many productive years ahead of her.)