Dutiful Passage
Millsap Orbit
In which Padi has a long day.
Shan has a plan: to visit the Redlands, which it turns out is not one country, or even one planet, but a system with three inhabited planets.
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Jelaza Kazone
In which the house is quiet.
A little demonstration of melant’i in Val Con’s conversation with the Healers: the person enquiring after the health of Anthora and Ren Zel is Lord yos’Phelium, their thodelm, but the person who would like to hear from Anthora when she has a moment is Val Con, her brother.
Lytaxin
Erob’s Clanhouse
In which nobody’s going anywhere just yet.
Jase’s initial failure to recognize Miri has several faces to it. One, explicitly identified, is that she’s wearing uncharacteristically high class clothes, placing her in a context Jase has never seen her in before. (So is Val Con, which presumably goes some way to explaining why Jase doesn’t recognise him either, though in his case it’s more understandable since Jase only met him the once.) Another is presumably that she’s carrying herself more like a Liaden, thanks to the studying she’s been doing to pass muster with Erob. (Though I suspect her body language would have shown at least a bit more Liaden anyway, after being stranded for months with Val Con.) And then there’s the family resemblance, which, added to the clothes and the body language, not only produces an impression of an unfamiliar person but suggests a specific incorrect direction for Jase to try and figure out how she knows him. (And confirms again, if it were needed, that Miri really is of Erob.)
Liad
Envolima City
In which Tyl Von sig’Alda seeks that which is lost.
The tour of the plot strands continues.
This is the only time I can recall Envolima City being mentioned. Most things that happen on Liad happen either in Solcintra or Chonselta.
The description of Korval as pursuing its own interests to the incidental benefit of Liad makes an interesting contrast to the Department of the Interior, which as will become apparent considers itself as working for the good of Liad but when it comes down to it defines “the good of Liad” as that which is good for the Department.
In which Val Con and Miri discuss their chances.
This chapter is mostly taken up with an explanation and demonstration of the capabilities and limitations of the Loop, the mental gadget Val Con has that estimates probabilities of success and survival for him. (It still has at least one trick up whatever mental gadgets have instead of sleeves, though, which we will learn about later.)
Miri is worried about Val Con because he’s just calculated and recited the odds of her dying at his hand without showing any emotion or personal investment. I don’t think she’s right about him not comprehending what he’s been saying, though; the narration notes that he had to make an effort to keep his voice emotionless. It would be interesting to know what the emotion was that he was trying not to show.
In which Miri and Val Con discuss family history.
One of the interesting things about Miri’s family tree is that, if Val Con’s calculation of the year named Amrasam is accurate, Miri’s grandmother was born within a year of Val Con’s father. Daav yos’Phelium waited until relatively late in life to marry and have a family, but Miri Tiazan, as we will be told later, had her daughter young, and her daughter seemingly did the same.
It may be that, in this, Daav is the odd one out. There’s a cultural imperative for every Liaden to have at least one descendant, and many Liadens who appear in the series are shown to have opted to do it early to get it out of the way. What the cultural imperative is on Surebleak I don’t know for sure, but a ghetto world with a short life expectancy would probably also tend toward young parenthood. Miri Tiazan didn’t live to see the age at which Daav yos’Phelium started seriously considering his posterity.
In which Val Con and Miri make some calls.
Miri and Val Con are clearly starting to relax into each other’s company: they’ve begun bantering.
Val Con speaks more truth than he realises when he promises Liz he will take the best care of Miri he can, for as long as he can.
Here’s an interesting exercise for a writer: the character has a small box containing everything most valuable to her in the world — what, specifically, is in it? To answer the question for a character who’s only been in the story for four chapters would require either a considerable knowledge of parts of her backstory that haven’t made it into the story yet, or a certain talent for improvisation together with a willingness to assume explanations will present themselves as needed. Or both, mixed in some proportion. (Explanations for some of Miri’s keepsakes will subsequently become apparent, but not all. Which is as it should be; a character whose past can be entirely told is likely a character lacking in depth.)
Signs that this novel was written in the 1980s: the primary medium for data storage and retrieval is tape.
Standard Year 1392
In which the man who is not Terrence O’Grady shows what he can do.
It’s a sign of how the Liaden Universe has grown over the decades that it’s taken the re-read a year and change to reach this, the sentence where it all started: The man who was not Terrence O’Grady had come quietly.
One thing that strikes me about this chapter, after all those prequels full of Terrans with almost-familiar names like Ristof and Jethri, is how normal the names seem here: Terry, Sam, Pete, Russ. The Terran homeworld is even called “Earth” instead of “Terra”. On reflection, though, I don’t think it’s just a case of the authors not yet having their name generators warmed up, because it serves an artistic purpose. These are people who are proudly, even aggressively, Terran, who keep close ties with Earth and don’t mix with the other cultures of the galaxy; their names, which seem normal to a reader of the 20th or 21st century, perhaps mark them in the novel’s future setting as old-fashioned, resistant to the changes that subsequent centuries have brought.
In which Daav plans his Balance against the enemy which took Aelliana.
I’m interested by the implication that the thoughtfulness of Daav’s Balance here owes something to his previous experience of loss and Balance, which taught him the limitations of the method of direct reprisal.
Using that Diary entry as the chapter heading also provides another more subtle bookend: the last time it was used was on the chapter in which Daav and Aelliana first met.
It’s a bit difficult to know how much to talk about what else happens in this chapter when it hasn’t been explicitly called out yet, even though as a re-reader I know — and, since this is a prequel, even on the first read I knew — what’s going on. I think I’ll save that for next time.
In which Daav grieves.
Daav’s grief is very effectively conveyed in this chapter, to the point where I feel obliged to remain respectfully quiet and not intrude with my chatter.