In which Anne seeks the delm’s instruction.

And this chapter re-introduces some of the familiar faces from Local Custom, along with two new complications:

First, Daav is going to be married, an event he’s been putting off for years and would have continued to put off if he had his preference. (I wonder if it makes sense to say that the delm has put his foot down, when it’s Daav’s foot. One thing I’ve noticed about Daav: the flipside of him preferring not to invoke the Delm when some other way to handle the situation exists is that when the Delm does put in an appearance he tends to be extremely strict, and perhaps even more so with Daav than with anyone else.)

Second, Anne discovers what has been hinted a few times but not explicitly stated until now: that Korval considers itself still bound by the contract that made Cantra and her heirs responsible for the safety of the passengers they brought to Liad. I don’t think anything much comes of it in this novel, apart from it further underlining the gap between a certain impoverished scholar and the man who might loosely be described as “the king of the world”, but it will be important later.

Along with Anne’s discovery, this chapter gives us another vague estimate of how long it’s been since Liad was settled. Anne, this time with a more solid knowledge of Korval’s history under her belt, calls it a thousand years, which Daav says is “near enough”.