In which Er Thom and Anne go shopping.
Things continue to be tense and unhappy.
After a nice bit of happenstance-tweaking by the authors, Er Thom now knows of Fil Tor Kinrae, at least by name, and Anne now knows of Jyl ven’Apon, at least by sight.
In which there is something missing from Scholar yo’Kera’s work space.
Er Thom is very carefully concealing from Anne the fact and extent of his disagreements with his mother. I can see how this is the course of action suggested by the principles of hospitality – the aim of ensuring the guest’s comfort might not be served if the guest were aware of the disruptions occasioned by her presence – but I’m not sure it’s the course of wisdom.
The bit about Jin Del yo’Kera’s youth abroad is interesting. A Liaden who had not spent time among Terrans might not have succeeded in finding the connection between Terran and Liaden, if it had even occurred to such a one to try.
(I have a certain fondness for the fact that his treasured memory is of an Aus sheep station. My own grandfather was the manager of an Australian sheep station, though he’d retired by the time I knew him. I don’t recall him ever expressing an opinion on the intelligence of sheep, but he mustn’t have found them too unbearable as company because even in retirement he kept a small flock.)
In which Er Thom has a proposal to make.
But of course nothing’s going to come of it yet; there are far too many chapters left in the book.
It’s interesting to watch Daav working his way around toward understanding where Er Thom is coming from.
In which Er Thom passes a major hurdle.
Anne appears to have an exaggerated view of the Liaden need to protect one’s melant’i. I suspect she’s not familiar with the anecdote about dessert that’s at the head of the chapter. Instead, she’s taking the tale of Shan el’Thrassin as her model of Liaden conduct, and in so doing she’s misleading herself in several important ways. In general, great literature can be an unreliable guide to how real people act, tending as it does toward dramatic instances. Not every hurt or insult must result in a great big debt-war. In specific, Er Thom is not Shan el’Thrassin, and, crucially, Anne is not Lyada ro’Menlin: Anne’s model is a story about two Liadens, with nothing to say about the possibility and ramifications of one party acting from a strong but alien Code. Anne looks at the story and sees that Shan el’Thrassin had no way out of harming his love to achieve Balance, but she doesn’t see that Er Thom has an out that Shan el’Thrassin didn’t have.
Unrelatedly, Shan yos’Galan is such a cute kid, isn’t he?
In which Anne and Er Thom each separately look forward to life becoming more simple.
We’ve encountered Shan el’Thrassin before, briefly; Jethri reads about him in Balance of Trade.
There’s a nice bit of multiple-purpose exposition in this chapter, when Anne is reflecting on her childhood. It serves its overt purpose of elucidating how Anne handles her own child, but it also casually slips in the fact that she comes of a family that produces pilots, which will be important later.