In which there’s a new boy in the class.
Score one for Ms Taylor, declining to invite trouble by letting Pete and Luce sit close together.
There’s a large chunk of the middle of the novel that I don’t remember from the first time I read it, so I know only as much about Pete and Luce as Syl Vor does at this point, but I don’t like it any more than he does.
In which Rys’s brothers give him a hand.
We continue to get to know Syl Vor’s classmates as he does. Kaleb’s family seem to know a thing or two about medicine, though whether it’s professional interest or just practical experience isn’t clear yet. Several of them have grandmothers, which is reassuring considering some of the stories we’ve heard about life expectancy on Surebleak, or cats, or both. I like the way Syl Vor disarms Rudy’s attack.
Rys is worrying again about the missing part of his memory, and how the person he is without it might differ from the person he would be with it. He may be right to do so, considering that even when he thinks he’s got all his memories of yesterday back he’s still missing any memory of his conversation with the lady who recognised him. (And is that his memory sequestering the conversation because it relates to other stuff he’s not ready to face, or did she do it somehow?)
In which Syl Vor’s mother Sees Kezzi.
Hey, it’s been a while since I speculated about something and was proven wrong in the very next chapter. Nova sounds very much as if she did do something particular to get the truth out of Kezzi.
In context, the lady’s assertion that she had “learned elsewhere” of Rys’s misfortune has a bit of a sinister ring to it. One wonders after the health of her informant or informants (and of the agents of Rys’s misfortune, if that’s not saying the same thing two ways).
In which Kezzi sees Syl Vor’s mother.
Despite their differences, there are some points of similarity between the Bedel way and the Liaden way. “No Balance nor keeping of debts between kin” is one of them.
It’s been said that most of Korval’s children, if they’re not full Healers or wizards, have some small gift, a touch of telepathy or a persuasiveness that goes just a bit beyond force of personality. I’m trying to remember if Nova’s been said to have anything in that line, because it would explain why Kezzi actually answers when Nova asks for her real name.
No, it came back to me as I was typing: Nova’s gift is Remembering. But then again, it wasn’t her who instructed Kezzi to answer truthfully – maybe it’s Syl Vor‘s gift.
In which first impressions are subject to revision.
On the other hand, the location of the school, and considering that the bookkeeper is apparently on first-name terms with her, suggests another possible answer to the question of where Ms Taylor came from.
One of the things about all these geography lessons is that we’re getting a lot of names of Bosses and their turfs. So far it’s been a mix of new and old; as a case in point, in this chapter there’s Boss Cruthers, who appeared in I Dare, Boss Wentworth, whom we were introduced to at Syl Vor’s first geography lesson, and Boss Marriot, who’s entirely new (by the sound of it, his or her turf is some distance off from the area around the Road where the action has mainly been focussed).
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.
In which Syl Vor goes to school.
Personally, I always thought Syl Vor’s objection to the bracelet was worthy of consideration, and his question about whether the other students would be wearing similar was on point, though not perhaps in the way he meant it. He’s already going to stand out from the rest of the group as it is, just by who he is, without making things more difficult by adding another obvious point of difference.
And isn’t it interesting that when trouble does happen, it comes from amiable Pete, and not – say – the more overtly antagonistic Rudy? (Rudy, incidentally, does come from one of the turfs that initially resisted the opening of the Road, though it’s suggested in I Dare that the people there came around once they understood what they stood to gain.)
I don’t remember if the novel goes into this later, but Pete’s reading trouble is a well-recognised dyslexic symptom, and there are some fairly straightforward things that can be done to mitigate it that would be within the reach even of someone living on Surebleak – the trick, of course, being finding someone on Surebleak who might recognise the symptoms and know about the remedies.
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.)