Vandar
Springbreeze Farm

In which Miri gets the milk confused with the pickles.

Or maybe this would have been the best chapter to reiterate my inability to word good when it comes to the emotional stuff.

Miri mentions that the image on the obverse of the cantra coin is “linked stars”. That might be a non-specific allusion to interstellar navigation, or, depending on the pattern in which they’re linked and remembering that Cantra herself presumably had a hand in the design, be a specific allusion to Tor An’s lost home, the Ring Stars. (I wonder what the image on the reverse of the coin is.)

Personal story to pad out the word count: The closest I came to learning a second language was in high school; I did German for three years before I had to give it up for tertiary-entrance maths (very few people at my school wanted to do both, so the school scheduled them against one another). That meant I missed out on the senior year immersion trip, which might have given it a solid foundation, and I haven’t found myself using it much in the years since, so much of what I learned has slipped away. My usual joke is that I can remember enough to say hello, goodbye, yes, no, and “I’ll have a slice of the black forest cake, please”.