Jelaza Kazone
Surebleak

In which there are conversations on the way to dinner.

Luken’s reassurance to Theo – “You are among kin, now, and the House will be vigilant for you” – has, I think a double meaning. On one level, it’s the same thing people have been saying ever since she was invited to guest, that the house has good security and she’ll be protected from physical danger; on another level, I think it’s a reminder that as her kin it’s within their melant’i to protect her from the less obvious dangers attendant on making a social error.

It belatedly occurs to me that Jeeves has lately been referred to only as the head of house security, and not as a butler; of course this makes sense, since Trealla Fantrol no longer has need of a butler and at Jelaza Kazone the job is already ably filled by Mr pel’Kana.

It’s said of Luken that he is “grandfather to no one in this room”, which is less definite than I thought I remembered, leaving open the possibility that he has grandchildren elsewhere. One thing we can say about them, if they exist, is that they’re not counted as children of Korval, or they’d have appeared on a roster by now or been mentioned somewhere in all the arrangements resulting from the declaration of Plan B; perhaps their parent, Luken’s child, married out of the clan.

The scene with Pat Rin and Penn at the end seems like a bit of abrupt shift after the rest of the chapter, but I notice a thing which ties the scenes together (apart from them presumably happening on the same evening): the one scene has Theo remembering to be polite among Liadens by not shaking hands, and the other scene has Pat Rin remembering to be polite among Terrans by shaking hands.