Tag Archives: Borril and ear-pulling

Prodigal Son

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In which Scout Commander yos’Phelium returns to the scene of the crime.

I haven’t read this story since a while before the first time I read Ghost Ship, and there’s quite a bit more to it than I remembered. I remembered the mirrored scenes with Miri at the beginning and end, and I remembered everything that happened at the Explorers Club, but the entire middle section I’d completely forgotten about. It’s a much better story with the middle in.

(I recognised the bits with Nelirikk that were included in Ghost Ship, of course, because I’ve just finished reading that, but I remember thinking both times I read Ghost Ship that those must have been new additions to the course of events.)

Speaking of the mirrored sections at the beginning and end, I noticed on this re-read that the opening scene is also reflected in the middle, with Hakan and Kem taking the places of Val Con and Miri, and the place of the rocking chair being taken by a different rocking chair.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 43

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Vandar
Springbreeze Farm

In which Miri and Val Con are reunited.

Ah, you can tell Val Con’s recovered: they’re bantering again. I love the banter in this series.

And after all this time we get an answer to the question of who gets which coloured napkin, though no indication of whether it’s a definite or a contingent answer. Is the blue napkin always for Val Con, or only under some circumstances, or does anybody get whichever colour they want?

This is a fairly significant chapter for the series, in that it contains the first-published detailed description of the lifemate’s bond or wizard’s match. (Which I still think is a consequence rather than a cause of people getting together, even though Val Con here recalls hearing stories about intended lifemates finding each other through their bond. Stories may be made up or distorted, especially so in a context that encourages a romantic spin on the material.)

Carpe Diem – Chapter 15

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Vandar
Springbreeze Farm

In which Miri gets the milk confused with the pickles.

Or maybe this would have been the best chapter to reiterate my inability to word good when it comes to the emotional stuff.

Miri mentions that the image on the obverse of the cantra coin is “linked stars”. That might be a non-specific allusion to interstellar navigation, or, depending on the pattern in which they’re linked and remembering that Cantra herself presumably had a hand in the design, be a specific allusion to Tor An’s lost home, the Ring Stars. (I wonder what the image on the reverse of the coin is.)

Personal story to pad out the word count: The closest I came to learning a second language was in high school; I did German for three years before I had to give it up for tertiary-entrance maths (very few people at my school wanted to do both, so the school scheduled them against one another). That meant I missed out on the senior year immersion trip, which might have given it a solid foundation, and I haven’t found myself using it much in the years since, so much of what I learned has slipped away. My usual joke is that I can remember enough to say hello, goodbye, yes, no, and “I’ll have a slice of the black forest cake, please”.

Carpe Diem – Chapter 11

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Vandar
Springbreeze Farm

In which Zhena Trelu has guests for dinner.

This seems like a good time to mention again that I do appreciate the emotional and character aspects of the Liaden stories, and in fact they’re a big part of why these are some of my favourite things to read, but I’m not very good at appreciating them verbally. So instead you get observations like these:

In the local calendar, the year is somewhat after 1475, which indicates that local civilization’s been going for a while. Whether it’s actually been going longer than the Standard Calendar, which is only up to Year 1392, depends on how long the years are.

The technique of illuminating a word’s pronunciation by describing the efforts of someone unfamiliar with it gets an extensive workout in this chapter, both for words new to our protagonists, like “Borril”, and words long familiar, like “Korval”. It’s largely thanks to this chapter that I got a strong grip on the correct pronunciation of “Korval” — but I’ve just realised on this re-reading that I’ve been mispronouncing “Borril” for years.