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Accepting the Lance – Chapter 27

The Bedel

In which Udari speaks.

I wonder which kompani Alosha and Silain will choose, if it comes down to it. Silain, as Droi mentions, has her own ties to the people of Surebleak, but she might feel that her duty takes her back to the ship. Alosha doesn’t appear conflicted and doesn’t have any particular ties that we know about.
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Dragon in Exile – Chapter 21

Riley’s Back Room
Fortunato’s Turf

In which Miri talks about the past, and Droi thinks about the future.

And one way in which things immediately become more interesting is that Rys’s role as leader of the freed Agents, with all its responsibilities and risks, has ceased to be merely hypothetical now that there is at least one freed Agent to lead.

It’s an interesting point about Droi perhaps not having a place on the ship of the Bedel when it returns. This chapter seems to be gesturing toward the possibility that she might by then discover that she has a place on Surebleak with Rys, which would not be quite the same as being left alone among gadje. The problem I see with this as a solution is that it revives the issue of the kompani needing to have a particular number of members at the end of chafurma, which was the necessity that drove Droi to start interacting with Rys in the first place: if both Rys and Droi leave, the kompani will be short, even if the kompani keeps their daughter, which I could see being a Balance demanded of them.

(Unless, it occurred to me as I composed the previous sentence, the newly freed Agents follow Rys’s path, and enough of them join the kompani to balance the loss. I’m suspicious of this idea, though: it seems a bit too neat, the kind of prediction that I’ve usually been wrong about before with Liaden novels.)

I was right about the nosy crews being connected; good to know my intuitions aren’t entirely off. Having some kind of underground-space-detecting technology explains how they knew where to look without necessarily knowing what was in the spaces they were looking for. The mention of an Insurance Committee suggests they might also be connected to the shakedowns Pat Rin has been dealing with. It says something about their ideas of neighbourliness (or at least of the behaviour of Bosses) that they assume they can nobble the Road Boss’s nearest neighbour without anybody noticing or caring.

It occurs to me that the kompani, who have been on Surebleak many generations “to learn what there was to know”, might well have learned things that would be relevant and useful to Kareen’s project, even if they weren’t interested in the social constructs of gadje particularly. Whether anybody in the story is likely to have this occur to them, and whether the Bedel would agree to share such knowledge, who knows?

Necessity’s Child – Chapter 37

In which the first day of school is an exciting time for everybody.

Rys says explicitly that he knew when Agent bar’Obin explained the mission that he wasn’t going to survive it, but it’s also implied that Agent bar’Obin, who is inside the building she’s about to blow up, doesn’t expect to survive either. The Department doesn’t care for the lives of its people.

I want to note that there are quite a few taxis in this chapter, with at least three and probably more simultaneously present outside the school at one point. I’ll have more to say on that subject in a couple of days.

Necessity’s Child – Chapter 34

In which lightning strikes.

I don’t think Ms ker’Eklis’s argument about time pressure really stands up. It’s true that a pilot may need to field an answer to a problem in less than thirty seconds, with lives hanging in the balance – but that’s one of the reasons why children Syl Vor’s age aren’t allowed to be fully-qualified pilots. At Syl Vor’s age, that kind of performance is a goal to work toward, not an ability to be expected.

(I wrote that sentence and then had to stop and think about why it sounded familiar. It’s because it echoes what Silain told Nova about one of the problems Kezzi has as the youngest sister with no near age-mates: people sometimes get impatient with her because they forget she’s not yet capable of whatever they want from her.)

I would also say that her example doesn’t actually fit the case she’s arguing, because when a pilot has to come up with a solution in a hurry, it’s the solution that matters, and Syl Vor got that; it’s not often necessary for a pilot to show his working in an emergency. In fact, it’s been made clear previously that a pilot in charge will generally get, and insist on if it’s not offered, authority to act first and explain later in emergencies, precisely because if you’ve got thirty seconds to implement a solution the last thing you need is to stop and give a detailed explanation.

Regarding the lesson that a person of melant’i responds to provokation by noting the circumstances so they may be Balanced in due time, a Terran might say that Liadens believe in revenge being a dish best served cold, but I think it’s more that for Liadens revenge is a dish best served with precision. If one gets angry and leaps to retaliate immediately, one may make a mess of things, and one may miss out on a better opportunity that would have come if one had waited.

The card Kezzi’s working on resembles the Tower card from the Tarot deck, both in the picture and the story it represents. The story of the card is another thing in this chapter that echoes: it’s the card Rys might have drawn if he’d drawn a card and if the cards really could see the future.

Necessity’s Child – Chapter 32

In which Kezzi’s mother meets Kezzi’s grandmother.

And now I’m thinking I may have been over-hasty in concluding that my younger self was wrong about which ship Kezzi was interested in; Silain’s reaction suggests that she, at least, is thinking of the Bedel ship. Of course, since Kezzi never actually said anything specific to identify the ship, everybody in the story as well as out is left to make their own conclusions. Perhaps Kezzi was thinking about the Bedel ship, but the Bedel subsequently put their heads together and find a less hazardous ship to be interested in.

It is interesting that the woman who is no friend of Rys was already settled in the bakery before the Bedel arrived: that suggests that she wasn’t merely following them hoping for a chance to speak to Udari, but somehow knew they would be there at that time. (I’m inclined to consider it unlikely that she just happened to be stopping for a bite to eat at that particular moment.) I’m also inclined to consider it unlikely that she has a source of information among the Bedel, or that she learned anything from Nova or from Mike Golden. Recalling who else knew about the meeting in time to be settled beforehand, I could believe that she has some way of finding out what the Patrol is up to, and learned of the meeting courtesy of Mike’s request for backup, but as far as I recall Mike didn’t tell the Patrol who the meeting would be with.

Necessity’s Child – Chapter 22

In which thought is given to the future.

Apparently we are not to discover just yet what has become of Rys.

Ms ker’Eklis seems to be in a bad mood; perhaps she resents her dinner being put back. As a Liaden, she ought to know about necessity, but perhaps she thinks a boy’s necessity is not as necessary as an adult math tutor’s. Or perhaps, to be fair, it’s only that she doubts this particular boy, since about half the mentions of Syl Vor’s tutors in the book so far have been because he’s running late for his lessons for one reason or another.

Necessity’s Child – Chapter 18

In which Kezzi goes to school.

We learn quite a bit about Pulka in this chapter, without him ever appearing, from Kezzi comparing Rys to him and Udari, and Rys comparing Pulka to himself.

I don’t think the flash of memory Rys has is really him, even though it uses his name: as he says, it’s from the still-unremembered latter portion of his life – the portion when he was in the grip of the Department and even his thoughts were not his own.

It occurs to me to wonder where Boss Conrad found Ms Taylor. She seems to have a local’s knowledge of Surebleak, but she also seems to be an experienced teacher, of a kind that I wouldn’t have expected Surebleak to be able to produce. Maybe there was one turf somewhere that did manage to keep proper schools going, and now it’s sharing its pool of experience.

Necessity’s Child – Chapter 17

In which Kezzi gets a lesson and Rys gets some assistance.

This being a re-read, I remember at least some of what is revealed later about the woman who is seeking something, and I wonder why she stopped to have her fortune read in the turn of a card; from what do I remember of her, it doesn’t seem like her to set store in such things.

Though perhaps there is something to the cards: after all, the card was right about her. Or perhaps that’s not the cards, but the person holding them, who sees things that others don’t. Or perhaps it’s just a coincidence; even if they operate only by random chance, the cards can’t be wrong all the time.

Necessity’s Child – Chapter 12

In which Rys awakens.

It seems that Silain’s guest is Rys Lin pen’Chala, agent of the Department of the Interior last seen heading for the warehouse district, where he apparently found something other than the safe hidey-hole he was looking for. He’s lost enough of his memory to be unsure where he is or how he got here, enough apparently to have lost the memory of working for the Department, but doesn’t seem to have lost all of his Department indoctrination with it – at least, assuming that his terror of Korval is an artifact of the Department and not part of either of the more peaceful-seeming life times he remembered as he woke. (And the irony is, it wasn’t Korval who left him broken-bodied on the doorstep of the Bedel; Korval would have tried to prevent it.)

Miri does Delm Korval really well for someone who’s come to it so recently and had little chance to practice. (Or is that true? It’s been nearly a year now since she and Val Con became delm, and they probably had to work it quite a bit during the Korval’s last few months on Liad.) In any case, we’ve seen people who’ve been delm longer than she’s been alive who don’t do it nearly so well.

I wonder what it says about me that I listen the story of Riva and what I think is: Okay, so horse twelve lost very thoroughly – but, just out of interest, how did horse seven do?

Necessity’s Child – Chapter 11

In which Syl Vor has a suggestion.

It occurs to me that, with all this talk of Syl Vor being old for his age, I’m not actually sure what his age is. He’s young enough to be considered a child, and, unlike his older cousins, not yet old enough to begin training for the duties of adulthood, but he’s not one of the characters for which we’ve been given anything like a specific birthdate.

It also occurs to me that his older cousins are each training to succeed their parents, so Syl Vor might be expected one day to succeed his mother — and if at that time she’s still stuck with this job, and Syl Vor will be asked in his turn to solve for the people of Surebleak, well, today’s work is not a bad start. (True, he was helped considerably by Mike Golden’s advice, but recognising good advice and knowing what to ask are both valuable skills in themselves.)