Tag Archives: Tandra Skilings

Fledgling – Chapter 40

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Vashtara
Mauve Level
Stateroom

In which Jen Sar attends a meeting.

I’ve said before that one of the things I’m enjoying about doing this re-read is being able to trace connections and find repeated names that I wouldn’t have noticed at the speed I normally read. In this chapter, the familiar name is Professor Skilings, revealed here as one of the conspirators, but already known to us from Chapter Sixteen as a high-ranking member of the faculty with a reputation for being a bad enemy to people who gain her enmity, and also incidentally the lady whose play for Jen Sar, though unrewarded, inspired Kamele to place her relationship with him on an official footing.

Sub-Chancellor Kylin’s name, on the other hand, doesn’t ring any bells.

It’s interesting that Jen Sar’s response to having a gun brandished at him is to hide behind the furniture. It’s possible that he’s playing it safe, since the years he’s spent living on a safe world might after all have dulled his edge to the point that he can’t be sure of being able to handle the situation, but don’t think I believe that, and I rather suspect he’s playing safe more because nobody on Delgado knows that he has experience being at the wrong end of a gun, and he’d prefer to keep it that way.

Kamele’s hand gestures, the ones which Theo finds reminiscent of hand-talk without being actual signs she recognises, might be Liaden gestures Kamele has picked up off Jen Sar. I seem to recall similar hand gestures being used by Liadens in conversation in past stories; the clearing-away gesture in particular sounds familiar.

Fledgling – Chapter 16

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Retrospection on an Introduction
Number Twelve Leafydale Place
Greensward-by-Efraim
Delgado

In which Kamele and Jen Sar took a step forward in their relationship.

The second of the full-chapter flashbacks, and it perhaps says something that I let the first one go by without remarking on how it fits into the idea of re-reading the series in chronological order. Which is, clearly, that a flashback chapter belongs where it’s been put by the author, because even if it’s describing chronologically-distant events, the remembering of those events is happening at this point in the story, and it matters to this story that it’s happening here. To have moved these chapters to before the beginning of the novel because that’s when the events-being-remembered happened would have been to do an injury to the story.

(If you were around for the planning stages of this re-read, you may recall that I lost sight of that at one point, when I was deep in the analytical “timeline-all-the-things” headspace that made a full-series chronological re-read possible. I want to take this opportunity to apologise for the mess that conversation was, and to express my gratitude for being talked down from doing anything then that I would have regretted when I found my way back to that other, wiser headspace which knows why a full-series re-read is worth doing.)

About Tra’sia, cha’leken!, the “expression of joy” that Jen Sar declined to translate: We have seen “tra’sia” before only as part of the phrase “tra’sia volecta”, a Liaden greeting for which we have not, to my recollection, ever been given a word-for-word translation. What we do know is that it’s Low Liaden, used for family and close friends; in High Liaden, one might instead say “Entranzia volecta”. We have not seen “cha’leken” before at all, though we have seen “cha’leket”, which is used to refer to a person for whom one feels a sibling’s affection; it might mean a person for whom one feels affection equally strong but of a different nature.

So, the full phrase might perhaps mean something approximately like, “Greetings, beloved!”, or perhaps, “This is a good thing, beloved” (if “tra’sia volecta” is something like “good morning” and “tra’sia” is more like “good” than “morning”). Another possibility is that it’s the Liaden equivalent of the “I see you, sister” that Priscilla gives Lina in Conflict of Honors.

And whatever it means, I have a strong suspicion that the reason Jen Sar was chagrined about it is that it was Aelliana who said it and not him.