In which the bakery goes forward.
I had forgotten that we already knew of a character called “Our Lady of Benevolence” until I was re-reading the earlier bakery stories in preparation for this new one. (Well, actually, the authors’ foreword gave it away, but if not for that it would have been re-reading “Fortune’s Favors” that did it.)
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In which Petrella yos’Galan is diligent.
I had some things I was going to say about how I still didn’t understand why Chi is going to these lengths, but they’ve been rendered moot by the helpful person in the previous post’s comments who wished to spare me the trouble of waiting for the story to explain itself. So.
I like the discussion of the difference between offending nobody and offending everybody.
The thing Petrella thinks she remembers about Line pen’Uldra, which has not yet been revealed, is I suspect likely to be connected somehow with the fact of Fer Gun being the last of the Line.
In which Daav decides to go into a possibly-hostile port without accepting backup.
Had this book been other than it is, the previous chapter might easily have been the last, perhaps with an epilogue in which Daav finally gets to hold his son in his arms. It is, after all, what the main plot line was building up to for the last two volumes.
But this is a prequel, which knows if any form of literature does that Peter Beagle was right about endings, and getting married isn’t the end of the story; it just means that Daav and Aelliana now have attention to spare for what else is going on in their lives.
I see a parallel between Daav’s decision to go to the Low Port alone, declining backup, and Aelliana’s decision last novel to go to the house of Mizel alone, declining backup, though in this case I’m not sure the decision is wrong; Daav does have a point about the advantages of working alone and under the radar. Still, one can wish he could have gone better protected. (Perhaps another Scout might have worked, if there were another Scout he could trust with this business. It’s a pity that Clonak is not available to be suggested as a possibility.)
Daav’s deliberately exaggerated worst-case hypothesis of “ghosts who lure the unsuspecting into the mists and steal their self-will” is not, after all, so far from the truth as one might prefer.
In which Daav keeps himself busy with a day of consultations.
I’m not sure Daav’s explanation isn’t partly backward; he says that Mizel wouldn’t want to make an alliance with someone she blames for her son’s death, but I suspect on some level she’s chosen to forego an alliance with Korval so that she can blame Daav. There are other people who might be more fairly considered responsible for Ran Eld’s death, starting with Ran Eld himself, but they all have the disadvantage that Birin Caylon has to live with them every day; much more comforting to be able to blame someone who will shortly return to a distant orbit and remain out of sight and out of mind.
(“He was not the disrupter of the dance, but he was the only one of those new and uneasy things that they could dispose of without tearing still further the already riven fabric of their lives.”)
Incidentally, if Daav’s estimate of Mr dea’Gauss’s age is accurate, Mr dea’Gauss is about the same age as Lady Kareen and Luken bel’Tarda.
In which Daav yos’Phelium and Clarence O’Berin do not become friends.
This story follows close on the heels of “A Choice of Weapons”, with Daav still on the same leave of absence from the Scouts and still not convinced that he will have it in him to sit on Liad and be suitably delm-like when the time comes.
The legitimate front for the Juntavas on Liad is a company called Triplanetary Freight Forwarding; if the name is to be taken literally, I wonder which the other two planets are. (Come to think of it, I wonder if it’s a shout-out to “Doc” Smith.)
Something that struck me on this re-read, with this story coming so soon after several others relating one way and another to the Liaden rules about face-touching: at one point, the luck-for-hire at the casino places her hand on Daav’s face, and he thinks nothing of it except to observe the callouses on her hand. This seems a remarkably cool response after how firm Samay pin’Aker was on the subject of hand-to-face contact in Trade Secret. (This story was, of course, written some considerable time before that one; perhaps the full details of what Liadens could and could not do with their faces were yet unclear.)
Those callouses, though, are said to be the same as the callouses on Daav’s own hands, which suggests that Zara Chance is herself a Scout, or more likely a former Scout. I wonder if she’s working for the same people as that other seductive former Scout we encountered not so long ago.
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Tomorrow: Local Custom