Tag Archives: roolyet

A Matter of Dreams

In which a pilot dreams of Moonhawk.

After the thought I had (and expressed rather incoherently, I fear) yesterday, about the magics of this setting perhaps having technological underpinnings, it’s interesting to follow up immediately with a story in which (I hadn’t remembered) the macguffin is part of the technological underpinning of the witches of Sintia.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen Sintia, and Moonhawk. Some things have changed: Sintia is now a technological society with its own spaceport and trade with other planets. (Fiona, our narrator, neglects to name the city that hosts the spaceport, presumably because as a Spacer she’s not much interested in local geography.) Some things are not as much changed as one might like: the representatives of the Temple are still, or again, having the same problem with their priorities that Lute called out Lady Rowan on in “Moon’s Honor”. The thing that they consider most important about the theft from the Temple is not the harm that might have been done, but the affront to the Temple’s self-importance.

There’s no Lute to call them out on it, however; this Moonhawk is still young, and does not appear to have met her Lute yet.

Nobody says it out loud — it would probably have been distinctly unwise to say it out loud — but I reckon that Cly Nelbern’s desire for an escort is less about physical protection than about entangling the pilots so that if she goes down, they go down too. And I reckon that Fiona has realised the same thing by the time she asks if Nelbern will be wanting an escort again to her second meeting.

The story is marked with the year 1375; on internal evidence, this has to be the year in which the main events of the story occurred, not the years-later time at which the narrator is telling the story. Fair enough, since that’s the same logic on which I’ve placed the story here in the chronological order.


Tomorrow: “Moonphase”