Tag Archives: Clawswitts

Trade Secret – Chapter 30

Gobelyn’s Market, Clawswitts

In which the Gobelyns receive news of kin.

So that’s why Jethri suddenly decided he needed to send a message to Freza.

Apart from the trade and economic factors, which I don’t feel qualified to judge, one useful effect of publishing the Envidaria that Jethri must have considered is that the Liadens will have to stop bugging his friends and family for a copy. (Whether they’ll believe, among themselves, that the published Envidaria is the real thing, is another matter – I suspect those Liadens inclined to believe in Terran trickery will consider this more of the same – but at least they’ll have to act in public as if they believe it.)

And it looks like I was wrong (again) about Ynsolt’i. I think, looking back, that I’ve been tending to get predictions wrong about this book by tending toward being too neat and tidy. Life don’t always go in for quick and tidy endings to things.

Speaking of things in life that aren’t neat and tidy, I’ve got some of my sympathy for Iza back. She’s a complicated woman, is Iza Gobelyn.

Trade Secret – Chapter 8

Flight Deck, Gobelyn’s Market, Local Day Graceful 23 on Kinaveral

In which the Gobelyns shake the dust of Kinaveral from their feet.

And we leave Jethri for now, to go and see how the rest of the Gobelyns are doing.

Jethri’s name still comes up a few times. Partly it’s that getting the ship flying again means people are returning to old routines, and noticing the spaces that Jethri used to fill; partly it’s other things. Apparently the two trades that earned Jethri his ten-year key were interesting enough that people are seeking the Market out in hopes of doing business with him. That can’t be doing Iza’s temper much good.

Speaking of Jethri, we also find out that back in the day Arin got the ship to actually run some of Jethri’s make-believe trade routes. We don’t find out yet what resulted, but I have a feeling that’s coming.

The refit has, after all, taken long enough that Grig and Seeli’s son has been born on the ground instead of in space. The bit about Grig and Seeli not being decided about which surname, and which set of associated connotations, to give him is interesting. So is the bit where Captain Iza decides for them: she’s not accepting any relative of Arin’s and Grig’s as a Gobelyn, no matter who his mother is.

By the end of the chapter, Khat has been made first mate, on the recommendation of Cris, who was first mate before the refit; the work Cris was doing while he waited out the refit has left him rusty on skills a first mate needs, while the work Khat was doing sharpened her up some, and anyhow Cris’s other skills are going to be needed for the various issues associated with the shakedown cruise.

(I kind of wonder if she’s going to go further by the time this book’s over; there are hints that some of the crew are beginning to doubt whether having Iza as captain serves the ship as well as once it did.)

The conversation about safe-runs is, in a way, a reply to the conversation last chapter about memorizing the coords of one’s homeworld. It appears that even spacers whose birth home is a ship, now and always, have an equivalent – another thing nobody bothered to teach Jethri.