Tag Archives: Bre Din sig’Ranton

Dragon in Exile – Interlude 1

1 Reply

On Luminier Plain

In which Daav and Aelliana go through a different door.

This scene possibly suffers from extra-textual factors: it’s a big emotional moment for Daav, but for the reader (at least, if the reader is me) it’s an exercise in ticking off things we already knew from the last few books. Daav is dying, the door that speaks to him of home is the door to what the Bedel call the World Beyond, the force preventing him from entering it is the Uncle’s attempts to revive him, and the two glowing tunnels represent —

— something that, it occurs to me, I didn’t comment on at the time, because I thought it was obvious, but which should be said at some point. The Tree gave Daav two seed pods, one addressed to Aelliana, and that inspired the Uncle to prepare two rebirthing units. Two doors, as Aelliana says here, for two pilots. The implication is that the end of the process is not only the revivification of Daav, but also the revivification, in her own body, of Aelliana.

(Or will it be her own body? Daav’s a straightforward case, since he’s physically present, but unless there’s something to be got from the puzzle-ring after all these years the rebirthing unit has no physical template for Aelliana. Can it construct a body entirely from memories?)

I’m being somewhat unfair, I realise, and not every reader is going to have the same reaction as me. Not everybody who reads this novel will have just recently finished reading the previous books. For some readers, this is re-establishing details they haven’t thought about since Dragon Ship came out, three years ago. There are even likely to be readers, sooner or later, who picked this book up first, and for whom all of this needs to be explained for the first time.

I think it’s worth noting something that’s brought to mind by mentioning the Bedel’s idea of the World Beyond where a person is free from the injuries and troubles of life, and which the story itself has gestured to both in this chapter and in one of the chapters of the Uncle overseeing Daav’s resurrection: hauling Daav back to the land of the living serves necessity, but it may not be doing Daav a kindness.

Mouse and Dragon – Chapter 20

1 Reply

In which there is a price to be paid by those who don’t know better than to interfere in an alleyway brawl.

This chapter is the one in which Daav says that it is the fate of the courier to catch glimpses of other lives and never know how they turned out, which I mentioned in an earlier entry is how I feel about some of the Liaden short stories.

Aelliana’s knack for intercepting projectiles is going to come up again.

Food watch: it is not said what was in the stew, but the fact of it being sold at a greens market suggests it was probably vegetables again.

Mouse and Dragon – Chapter 19

1 Reply

In which courier pilot Aelliana Caylon makes her first interstellar delivery.

The other thing I wonder, speaking of the incident with Delm Hedrede in Scout’s Progress, is whether Dath jo’Bern is the same person as Delm Hedrede. We never got Hedrede’s personal name, nor any other personal details beyond “female” and “not young”; Dath jo’Bern is female, and if she’s a grandmother’s cha’leket she’s probably not young. If she is delm, one might have expected the fact to be mentioned, but I think that’s thinking like a Terran, and a Liaden might say that it’s an irrelevant detail when she’s acting in a personal capacity. (We’ve seen that several times with Daav and Delm Korval, as recently as when Aelliana told Mr dea’Gauss Daav yos’Phelium was going to be her co-pilot.) On the other hand, would Delm Hedrede choose to give business to one so closely associated with Korval, after that incident in Council?