Dutiful Passage
In which Priscilla receives a history lesson.
Shan’s coaster that was a gift from Ambassador Valeking was introduced in Alliance of Equals and has appeared a couple of times, in that book and then in this one, during scenes where Padi has been meeting her father in his office.
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Jelaza Kazone
Surebleak
In which a team comes together.
I was wrong about why Val Con found Tocohl’s voice familiar, but at least I was inside the ball park.
It occurs to me that Val Con thinking about his plans for his daughter’s future actually fits in well in the midst of Rys and the free agents planning, because the potential for Talizea to have a future is one of the things they’re fighting for.
Whatever plan they decide on, there’s no chance now they’ll get it done before the end of the book, but that’s no surprise; The Decisive Attack on the Department was always the kind of thing that was going take a whole book to tell.
It’s interesting that the free agents apparently don’t know about Val Con. The Department knows, of course, but it makes sense that a particular agent wouldn’t have been told unless there was some reason they needed to know. After the attack on Solcintra Headquarters, it would have become general knowledge that Korval was acting in opposition to the Department, but perhaps not the details of how that came about.
I wonder if Claidyne, the former director, knows.
Dutiful Passage
In Orbit
In which Priscilla learns some history.
The dateline doesn’t say what Dutiful Passage is in orbit around. It might be Krisko, since that’s what they were in orbit around the last time their location was mentioned, and they were loading extra weapons then and they’re loading extra weapons now. There’s been the dramatic business with Shan going to speak to Val Con in between, but there’s no reason that couldn’t have happened in orbit around Krisko too; all things considered, it didn’t actually take very long.
If Shan was seventeen when he recruited Seth, then Seth has been with the ship around twenty years. The story of that recruitment has echoes of Shan’s rescue of Ren Zel dea’Judan (“That’s my man, sir”), and for that matter of his hiring of Priscilla (“Always need a good pilot”, even if there’s no vacancies).
I was going to say that I was surprised Shan didn’t pass his discovery on to Nova and save her some trouble, but then I remembered that Plan B is effect and he doesn’t know where Nova is now.
We don’t, I think, know any of the people involved in the last contract between Korval and Erob, when the child came to yos’Galan. The only yos’Galan child of that generation we know of is Petrella, Shan’s grandmother, but we know both her parents and neither was of Erob, so there must have been another yos’Galan who died untimely.
All this talk about the close ties between Korval and Erob has brought on the realisation that they have similar designs for their clan badges: each has a dangerous winged creature flying over something tall and enduring. I wonder if the founders of Erob did that deliberately.
In which equitable solutions are found for a number of problems.
It’s interesting that Syntebra el’Kemin is apparently not averse to Luken’s attentions. I mean, I totally understand that she might feel more comfortable with him than with his sharper-witted relatives — but if she thought Er Thom old, what does that make Luken?
A thing I like about this chapter is how much warmth and care there is between (at least some of) the members of Clan Korval; between Er Thom and Daav, and between Daav and Luken. (And between Luken and nearly everybody?) I particularly love that, although Luken doesn’t fit in the Korval mould, Daav genuinely appreciates and respects him for who he is.
In which we’re leaving together, but still it’s farewell.
This is the only chapter in the duology that doesn’t have a caption saying, however ambiguously, where it takes place.
I think the mention of Dancer, “singing sweet seduction to her makers”, must be where I got the idea that she was sent off to act as a decoy; whether that was Cantra’s intention, it’s what she’s doing. (And I love the image of the seedling adding its own insulting messages.)
Hands up, anyone who thinks the Iloheen’s being honest in its offer to promote Rool Tiazan’s lady if she comes quietly. Nobody? Didn’t think so.
I was right about Rool Tiazan’s bargain with the ambitious dramliza, it looks like. (Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are twelve kinds of twisty.)
The “vast and implacable greenness” is interesting. A last-ditch attempt by the ssussdriad? Or … something else? (Do they have Turtles in this universe?)
Quick Passage
In which the new clan gathers allies.
Yes, I thought that was where I remembered the gambler reappearing.
And I’m thinking that what we have gathered here is the beginnings of Korval’s ally, Clan Erob. Though I’m not sure if it’s all of them, or just the red-headed ones. 🙂
This chapter shows the flip side of Solcintra’s insularity. It neatly explained why the Liadens don’t have some of the things they don’t have, but it also means that another neat explanation is called for regarding why they do have some of the things they do have. Like, as the gambler points out here, healers, seers, and others with abilities resembling those of the dramliz.
The ink is hardly dry on Korval’s charter, and already they’re showing their form as a clan who won’t meekly wait on the Council’s decisions when the right course is plain.
Solcintra
In which certain negotiations take place.
The two Solcintran negotiators both have names that recur in the Liaden Universe – which is perhaps only to be expected. Some of Nalli Olanek’s descendants will find themselves in dispute with some of Tor An’s descendants in Conflict of Honors, and Clan Hedrede is mentioned a couple of times in Scout’s Progress and Mouse and Dragon, with a Dath jo’Bern of that clan being an incidental character in the latter. (With thanks to the Liaden Wiki – my memory for obscure details is not that good.)
The Enemy have taken out High Command in its withdrawn and reinforced position, without having to pass through any of the intervening space, which just shows how much good that did.
We see the origin of Cantra’s logbook, which will become a tradition upheld by her successors; that answers something I’d been wondering aloud a while back.
Another thing I’d been wondering, though it never quite got to aloud, was about Moonhawk and Lute’s colleagues in the Great Weaving. It’s pretty obvious that Moonhawk is the same Moonhawk who is Priscilla’s guiding spirit when she’s a priestess of the Goddess, and seems clear therefore that the other guiding spirits from Priscilla’s religion are this Moonhawk’s sisters in the Great Weaving (I don’t recall that any of their names are ever given, in either context). What I’d been wondering was whether, since they’re presumably all a dramliza pairing like Moonhawk and Lute, all the guiding spirits have masculine sidekicks like Lute and it was just that somehow we’d never heard about them. The scene in this chapter where Lute learns that Moonhawk has made an independent space for him in the Weaving suggests that no, it’s just Lute.
(I think where I went wrong was at “dramliza pairing like Moonhawk and Lute”; there’s probably no other dramliza pairing that’s quite like Moonhawk and Lute. One of the other things I’ve been realising on this re-read is that my understanding of the dramliz from the first time through had been weighted too much toward taking Rool Tiazan and Lute as typical of their station, when as two of the few – or even, for all it’s said, the only two – free zaliata to have accepted the yoke, they’re each blazingly unique.)
Solcintra
In which Cantra takes Tor An on an excursion, Rool Tiazan takes Liad dea’Syl on an excursion, and Arin takes himself on an excursion.
Two things in this chapter caused me to look up from the book and say “Oh!” in that tone of great enlightenment that means my backbrain has just done something clever, like figure out whodunnit before the detective. Neither of them are super-important; I think they struck me because I didn’t notice either of them the first time around (or if I did then, unlike most of the other revelations in this chapter, they didn’t stay with me).
Thing 1: During Master dea’Syl’s conversation with Rool Tiazan, he says the math predicts or prescribes that the new universe they’re planning to escape to will be constantly expanding – unlike the steady state of the universe they’re in now. This is, of course, one of the hints that this duology is not set in our universe, but the thing I realised this time is that it’s also the base explanation for the differences between how interstellar travel works in the duology compared to later. Long-distance navigation through space is bound to be different when space itself behaves differently.
Thing 2: According to the timing mentioned when Cantra is inspecting Salkithin, the ship she inherited from Jela, Salkithin is none other than the ship Commander Ro Gayda mentioned when she recruited Jela way back near the start of Crystal Soldier, the one he was to be made Captain of for its voyage to a then-unnamed place of storage, as the excuse for being detached and placed under Ro Gayda’s command.
And the maintenance crew of Salkithin, getting back to things I did notice the first time around, are – apart from being the crew that Jela commanded on that voyage – the founders of Jela’s Own Troop, of whom we will be hearing more much later. (And they’re not just X Strain; there’s a couple of Ms, a Y, and “Ilneri, who was, as far as Cantra could make it, a natural human”. I don’t know how much that’s going to affect the bodies of Jela’s Own Troop – as I’ve had occasion to comment before, we’ve never been told anything about how the Yxtrang go about making little Yxtrang – but it certainly explains a deal about the shape of the Troop’s minds.)
To finish the chapter off, the event we’ve been waiting for all this time heaves into view on the horizon, as what passes for the leadership of Solcintra at the moment turns to Wellik after their actual leaders do a runner. (It’s possibly my favourite of the Solcintra-as-it-really-was details that, for all the status jockeying and High House politics the Liadens get up to, there’s not a single Clan on Liad that was High House before the Great Migration, because the High Houses all had the resources and the lack of scruple to take off on their own.)
(I wonder what happened to them all.)
(Maybe they got eaten by a giant mutant star goat.)
Solcintra
In which Rool Tiazan comes visiting.
Rool Tiazan warns Cantra that her actions on Vanehald have attracted the Enemy’s attention, and that the fact that Spiral Dance obeyed her then doesn’t mean it’s free of the Enemy’s influence, only that the Enemy has not chosen to exert that influence – yet.
Cantra expresses some doubt to herself and to Rool Tiazan that humanity is either saveable or, perhaps, worth saving, but I think it says something that when his lady asks her if she wants to keep Jela’s child, she doesn’t hesitate to say yes.
(I also appreciate that the pregnancy needs a bit of dramliz-healer help to be confident of a good outcome. It underlines how much work the tree had to do to get it going at all.)
Tor An’s Aunt Jinsu, whose advice about being well-rested he starts to offer, has been mentioned before: she’s the aunt who used to travel with Scholar tay’Palin in her younger days.
Liad dea’Syl is an observant man, and I wonder how much he has observed about Rool Tiazan. (Apart from the fact that Lucky likes him, which would have been pretty hard to miss.)
Solcintra
In which Tor An reads Cantra such a scold as she hasn’t heard since nursery.
I think I’ve said already that one of the things that amuses me about the duology is getting to see Solcintra as it was, not as the Liadens fondly remember it being. Though there are bits that sound familiar – there’s already that obsession with High Family status and, as I also think I’ve said already, that us-and-them mentality. (Speaking of which, the fact that they count smartstrands as a them thing neatly explains why the Liadens don’t have them.)
Cantra’s observation that the ship Jela’s given her could carry “the keepings of a small planet” is a nice bit of ironic foreshadowing.
Tor An bailing Cantra out is another of the incidents that had previously appeared as a chapter-heading quote in Scout’s Progress. In the logbook quote, Cantra describes him as acting “all according to co-pilot’s duty”; what that brief excerpt from the logbook didn’t reveal is that this is the first time she’d accepted him as her co-pilot. (I don’t remember which chapter it was the heading of; I’m going to be interested, when we get up to Scout’s Progress, to see if there’s a reason why that particular chapter was matched with that quote/this incident.)