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Balance of Trade – Chapter 3

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Day 33
Standard Year 1118

Ynsolt’i Port
Textile Hall

In which Jethri passes his first day of unsupervised trade.

Jethri makes three bargains this chapter, some to better effect than others.

I have read enough about the art of the con that I think the conversation with Sirge Milton would be setting off alarm bells even if I didn’t already know how it turns out. (Also, I reckon the flattering bartender is either a carefully selected prop or a confederate; she has a knack for saying just the right thing to keep the wheel turning.)

I do wonder a bit that an apprentice trader hasn’t been taught more about how to tell when somebody’s trying to fleece you, but perhaps that’s one of the things that’s slipped through the cracks with him being the youngest that people don’t always bother telling things to.

Balance of Trade – Chapter 2

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Day 32
Standard Year 1118

Gobelyn’s Market
Jethri’s Quarters

In which Jethri gets the bad news.

The downside of this being a re-read is that I’m mostly inspired to talk about the things that strike me new or different, so I don’t really have anything to say about the conversation between Jethri and his uncle, which hasn’t changed notably since last time I read it.

The sequence of Jethri and the calendar is a nice bit of characterization, both of Jethri the teenaged boy and Jethri the spacer who’s spent most of his life in a tin can and feels uncomfortable without a ceiling close over his head.

The calendar also offers a worldbuilding hook in itself, or perhaps I should say a worldbuilding bridge; the reader who is familiar with 21st-century Terran garage calendars will find things to recognise in certain aspects of it.

Speaking of which: The Gobelyn family are Terrans, a word which appears here for the first time this re-read.

Balance of Trade – Chapter 1

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Day 29
Standard Year 1118

Gobelyn’s Market
Opposite Shift

In which Jethri Gobelyn has one of those shifts.

In this chapter we’re introduced to the family-run trade ship Gobelyn’s Market and its crew, particularly young Jethri, who has some trouble fitting in, partly due to the usual issues of being the youngest, and partly on account of certain particular issues which will doubtless be revisited later.

We also hear our first about some actual Liadens, in both a lurid version and a more considered version which amounts to suggesting that the Liadens are more subtle than the lurid version indicates, but not necessarily any less dangerous. Presumably they’ve changed some from when we last heard about their ancestors, since that was a while ago (possibly even as much as 1118 years and 29 days).

It’s interesting that the first novel with Liadens, by chronological order, ended up being the one with the foreword laying out exactly how the Liaden currency and calendar work. Useful place to have it, if one happens to be reading by chronological order. I don’t know if that was something the authors had specifically in mind, though I’m pretty sure I remember them saying somewhere that this was deliberately set out to be a novel that would work as an introduction for people who hadn’t read any of the earlier-later novels yet.