More like 6 1\/2 days if my finger-counting’s right.\u00a0 It’s noon on Saturday, July 2.\u00a0\u00a0 Crossed the 35,000 frontier this morning.\u00a0 May or may not get to 36,000 by tonight.\u00a0 Yesterday didn’t make a lot of movement in wordage (some in the “notes”) because I drove into the city, bought some stuff at Dover, went over to pick up M- at the community college campus, and then drove home, and was somewhat wiped out by that (hot, “how to create a migraine from sun stabbing through dark glasses off the reflective parts of cars, especially those bulbous back windows).\u00a0 However.<\/p>\n
It’s about time you had a snippet.\u00a0 Here’s a little background.\u00a0 You recall that Pliuni, a city south along a trade route from Valdaire, situated between the Westmounts and the plateau of Andressat, is governed by “witwards.”\u00a0\u00a0 There are one hundred of them, at full strength, and as usual they are the moneyed folk.\u00a0 Membership is not strictly hereditary (because money tends to slither out of families at times)\u00a0 and despite the name “witward” implying that they have knowledge and judgment, they don’t always guard their own wits, which also vary a lot.\u00a0 Pliuni is more “buttoned up” than Valdaire;\u00a0 like many small cities’ societies, it can be extremely strict about extremely minor deviations from its rules.\u00a0 Clothes, foods, eating utensils, etc, etc, etc: all the forms, but less attention to the substance.\u00a0 Tedious nitpicking as a form of social intercourse.\u00a0 Long ago, it was an outlying settlement from Horngard, the point at which Horngard’s trade met the much larger trade N\/S from Valdaire down to the southern coastal cities and a few more inland (Cha and Sibili being prominent.)\u00a0 Now, with the mountain realm in disarray for years, it’s under the influence of Andressat–grateful in one way, but resentful in another, because Andressat’s assistance with keeping the trade route moving smoothly through comes at a price, and the witwards would prefer to be all-powerful in their small way.<\/p>\n
Aesil M’dierra, Golden Company’s commander, comes from a prominent (then) family in Pliuni; her father was a witward, killed in a previous war.\u00a0 Her great-uncle Ilanz Balentos (of “Mercenary’s Honor”)\u00a0 had his own merc company when she was very young; due to circumstances in a still-unfinished short piece, she served with him for some years before his death, and he left her his company and resources to start her own.\u00a0\u00a0 “Mercenary’s Honor” predates her entry into his company; the link there is via Kieri during his time as Aliam Halveric’s squire in Aarenis.\u00a0\u00a0 But I digress.\u00a0 Every prominent family has less prominent–even impecunious–relatives, and many have struggles over inheritance.\u00a0 The Balentos branch has never been as rich as the M’dierra branch, and though some of them shrugged and moved on, some of them were…resentful.\u00a0 Especially at seeing what they thought of as Balentos property going to a M’dierra.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Two of her Balentos cousins have tried for years to finagle a right to her inheritance; they are not-wildly-successful traders and not overly honest in trade (or good enough wheeler-dealers to prosper in their dishonesty) and once again Aesil has been summoned to a trial in the witwards’ court to determine if she’s *really* entitled to her inheritance.\u00a0 Not trusting the witwards to restore their claim, they then attempt to waylay her on the way to the trial, make her late, so her nonappearance will force the witwards to give judgment for them.\u00a0 In the process of this, by (once again) hiring on the cheap, they caused more problems.\u00a0 (If you’re going to hire bad guys, hire really competent<\/em> bad guys who perform their task to the…um…hilt and are absolutely positively under all circumstances going to keep their mouths shut.)<\/p>\n Thanks to certain plot points you’ll discover in future, in this snippet Aesil is present in the court square in Pliuni, in front of the almost full complement of witwards, accompanied by a somewhat mysterious mounted man on a very unusual horse.\u00a0 Aesil’s companion’s name is Camwyn (no surname) and he has no memory of his past.\u00a0 Yes, *that* Camwyn.\u00a0\u00a0 King Mikeli of Tsaia’s younger brother.\u00a0 Her cheapskate conniving cousins are also there, accompanied by their less-than-stellar bad guys.\u00a0And as everyone discovers, Dragon is also involved: he flies in and perches on the arch above the western gate of Pliuni. \u00a0 As anyone with a dragon in the conversation knows, trying to pull rank on a dragon is….not wise.<\/p>\n ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..<\/p>\n One of the cousins, the one in the dark blue robe over the brown tunic spoke up instead.\u00a0 He pointed at one of the men and said “That’s Jors, and that’s Retts–”<\/p>\n “Each will give his own name.”\u00a0 Dragon’s other forefoot closed around the stone it was on, and a piece as large as a human head cracked loose and fell, shattering on the pavement below.\u00a0 All the witwards flinched, and the men to his heart side all shifted farther away from the arch. “Their real<\/u> name,” Dragon added, spreading the toes of his forefeet showing claws a long as a man’s hand from wrist to fingertip.\u00a0 The scars from them, on the rocks, looked a fingerlength deep.<\/p>\n The “servants”, in mismatched tunics of blue with equally mismatched brown sashes, looked back and forth,\u00a0 and then, in a ragged cascade of panic, turned and ran.\u00a0\u00a0 Dragon opened that cave of fire, as Camwyn thought of it, and a white bolt of flame, roaring like forge-fire under the bellows, seared the running men, first to last.\u00a0 A little pale ash blew along the black fire-polished cobbles, then settled.<\/p>\n Silence.<\/p>\n …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" More like 6 1\/2 days if my finger-counting’s right.\u00a0 It’s noon on Saturday, July 2.\u00a0\u00a0 Crossed the 35,000 frontier this morning.\u00a0 May or may not get to 36,000 by tonight.\u00a0 Yesterday didn’t make a lot of movement in wordage (some in the “notes”) because I drove into the city, bought some stuff at Dover, went Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,32,28,10],"tags":[44,58,31,7],"class_list":["post-1312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-paksworld-stuff","category-progress","category-snippet","category-the-writing-life","tag-paksworld-stuff","tag-progress","tag-snippet","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1313,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions\/1313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}