The Slacktiverse

When we last left Kel, she and Third Company had finally caught up to the Grand Progress, despite Raoul doing his best to dig his heels in without actually outright disobeying a command from the king to come join them. Once they were there, Raoul tweaked the king about their placement and eventually entered the lists and got to knock more than a few knights off their horses, especially the ones that think Raoul made a mistake in taking Kel as his squire. The Yamani ladies invited Kel for a game of tossing a fan around, but it’s a fan of razor sharpness if you catch it the wrong way down. Neal put himself into the game and caught the fan, thankfully the right way, and then realized it was heavier than expected and then Yuki demonstrated the sharpness to him. Kel called him a meathead, because at that moment, he definitely was.

Thayet, on the other hand, wanted a razor fan of her very own.

Squire, Chapter 11: Content Notes:

This chapter opens up with Kel and Third Company being sent out to deliver invitations to certain fiefs telling them they get to host the progression and the royals for very expensive banquets.

The progress also gave the Crown a means to discipline noble houses that had proved troublesome in the past. Fiefs Tirragen, Malven, Eldorne, and Sinthhya all were invited to host the monarchs at extremely expensive banquets. Raoul, Kel, and two squads of Third Company got to carry those invitations to less-than-happy recipients.
On the road to Eldorne to deliver one such message, Kel asked, “Why do these fiefdoms have to pay? I thought the king’s careful not to burden the people he visits.”
“Except to create and example,” Raoul explained. “Gary—Gareth the Younger—calls it ‘obedience through poverty.’ See, Jon’s grandfather, King Jasson, started it when his wars doubled the realm’s size. He let most conquered nobles keep their lands. To make sure they would be good boys and girls, he went on progress and made them pay for everything. When he was done, they couldn’t afford handkerchiefs, let alone raise money to rebel. Jonathan is being restrained. He hopes that with just the knowledge of these four draining their treasuries to host us, others who might try the same thing will reconsider.” He glanced at Kel. “It isn’t just that a girl is a squire or that Joren got a fine for kidnapping for kidnapping a servant. We’re all part of a quiet war that’s taking place across the Eastern Lands.” To Lerant on his other side he said, “If your grandfather Eldorne waxes too outraged, tell him Barnesh in Maren is cancelling all of his nobles’ royal land grants. They have to petition him to retain their titles and estates, and they get to pay through the nose.”
Lerant winced.

That’s an interesting way of enforcing discipline, but I’d also like to know how Jon makes sure that he sucks up basically all of their treasuries so that they can’t consider further rebellion. Maybe it’s the secondary threat from Banesh about canceling all the land grants and then making them rebuy them at inflated and exorbitant costs that will make sure that there’s no further money for rebellion or for trying to aid other rebellions. I can’t understand how this might inspire loyalty from those places, but it might very well be that loyalty is a secondary concern compared to the more immediate one of making sure there’s no money to be spent on anything disloyal or to continue such actions.

When they get back to camp, seeing the preparations for another tournament, Raoul asks Kel when she wants to take part. Kel says there’s no reason for her to do so, since she hasn’t been able to knock Raoul out of his saddle despite having jousted at him for all this time. Raoul explains that Kel should not set her belief in her own skill based on him, because he’s not been thrown out of his horse in a decade. Kel realizes that Raoul is being nice to her by treating her as an equal, speaking honestly to her, and doing his best by her. He’s really a good match for her to squire to.

They settle in to the life of dinners and tournaments, with Kel getting weapons practice, glaive practice with the ladies, and handling her squiring duties on tournament days for her, while letting Lerant beat her in the race to tend the horse, without letting him know that she’s letting him win and that she appreciates the help with the horse. Raoul seems to enjoy knocking people off their horses and absorbing challenges that give him the opportunity to do so again.

At one of the social engagements, Kel is doing her usual routine of service and then stares into Alanna’s eyes and has a complete panic reaction to it.

“I’m sorry,” Raoul said wickedly as Kel mopped up the spill. “Should I have warned you?”
Kneeling on the ground, Kel saw Alanna kick Raoul in the shins. “Don’t tease,” the Champion ordered. “Yes, you should have warned her.” To Kel she added, her voice barely audible, “Relax. It’s the only way I can say hello without a hundred people saying I put a good-luck spell on you.”
[…Kel retreats to retrieve a new bowl and towel, having spilled the one she had at seeing Alanna. Oakbridge frets that she might have a fever or cold…]
“But surely you’ve met,” Oakbridge said, tugging her tunic until it was straight. Kel shook her head. “Well, she’s not demanding, so relax,” he ordered her. “At least no one can claim she’s magicking you to succeed, not with half the folk here being mages. Go. They’ll bring the first course up before you know it. Don’t forget you have four people to wait on
[…Kel resumes, apologizes, and has what is essentially a perfectly normal conversation with Alanna during the course of the service.…]
When Kel presented the last finger bowl and the Champion rinsed her hands, she smiled at Kel. “Once you’ve knighted, perhaps you could teach me to use this glaive,” she suggested. “It sounds like a good all-purpose weapon.”
Kel walked to the service hall glowing. The lady took it for granted that Kel would win her shield. She wants me to teach her! Kel thought, elated. She picked up a tray with cups and a pitcher of cordial. Me, teach the Lioness—who could have dreamed?
Alanna had gone when Kel returned. Now she say with the king, talking to young Lord Sinthya. “Was that so bad?” Raoul asked, pushing back from his chair.
“You could have warned me,” Kel said reproachfully.
“I should have,” he admitted, looking sheepish. “I’m just used to you taking whatever comes without a blink. It never occurred to me you might need a warning.”

And here’s another reason why Raoul is a good match for Kel, because he apologizes when he’s wrong or when he’s made a bad assumption about her and what she can handle.

Alanna’s getting herself into this formal situation is more of that subtle war being played out across the lands here, with Alanna getting the opportunity to talk to Kel without it being taken in the worst way, because there’s more than enough people there who would testify if any funny business were happening. Too many witnesses is at least a useful way of getting there from here. But then Alanna gives Kel a great compliment by talking to her as if she’s already a knight, and then suggesting that she could learn something useful from Kel as a knight.

Owen is miserable, because the only person who seems to have taken an interest in him is Myles of Olau, who needs a secretary, and Owen wants to get out there and fight, which would be the opposite of what Myles would be, but Owen is feeling desperate enough as an unattached squire that he’s willing to possibly take it on just to get away from Master Oakbridge. Cleon eventually says he has to make sure that his knight-master’s bowstring doesn’t snap on him in the archery competition tomorrow, and that leaves Kel with conflicted feelings again, because Cleon didn’t try to kiss her or do anything to try and stay behind after everyone left. Which she thinks is good, because it means she isn’t trying to explain to him that she’s not interested in someone until she becomes a knight. But she also thinks the kiss didn’t mean anything to him, and perhaps he’s got a girlfriend, a “proper girl to admire, someone pretty and small, with big eyes, and hands not at all clawed and scarred by an ungrateful immortal she dislikes.” Kel concludes that she didn’t like his flirting with her anyway, and really, really someone should explain this whole thing to her, or at least make the attempt, because Kel is floundering at this point, dealing with things she really doesn’t understand, and she needs a friend to talk to about all of it.

The talking will have to wait, however, because Kel has to deal with another situation in front of her.

“Yap all you like, dog.” That cold voice stopped Kel as she wound between rows of tents, returning from the ladies’ privy. “But a cur dog is all your house whelps. It’s only a matter of time before you turn on the hand that feeds you.”
“Lord Raoul doesn’t think so.” That was Lerant of Eldorne’s voice. Kel frowned.
“Goldenlake is a dolt without two thoughts in his head,” the cutting voice said. “He shames his blood, consorting with sand scuts”—the scornful name for the Bazhir—”and wenches and sprigs of traitorous trees like you.”
[…Kel gets closer and sees two knights and Joren tormenting Lerant…]
“As I said, our leaders are purblind, dazzled by female flesh and foreign wiles. They shelter traitors,” he pointed to Lerant, who wiped blood from his mouth, “and drag those of the noblest blood,” he bowed slightly to Joren, “before a magistrate like common highwaymen.” To Lerant he said, “Too bad you can’t demand satisfaction in the lists, Eldorne, but you’re the degenerate son of a degenerate line. Your sire knew you’d be chewed up and spit out by the Chamber of the Ordeal if you got there. Its power at least remains uncorrupted.”
Lerant tried to stand. The knight from Fief Groten shoved him down.
“We couldn’t afford a knight’s gear, that’s why I didn’t become a page,” Lerant growled. He spat blood onto Groten’s boot. “Why don’t we settle this with swords?”
“Because you’re neither knight nor squire,” Groten told Lerant. “You’re just something to wipe on.” He smeared his boot across Lerant’s tunic.
Kel stepped into the open. “You speak against our knight-master. You must be shown the error of your ways,” she said. “And Joren’s no highwayman, just a kidnapper.” She offered Lerant a hand without taking her eyes from his tormenter. “If it’s the lists you want, you shall have them. I am a squire, and I want satisfaction from you.” The time-honored phrases of the challenge came form her lips with a sense of strength that grew with each word. Do mages feel like this when they chant spells? wondered Kel.
“I can defend myself!” Lerant snapped, shoving her hand away.
“I’m not concerned about you,” Kel said. “For starters, he maligned Lord Raoul. If he weren’t a coward, he’d also name those he says are ‘dazzled by female flesh’—my flesh? Commander Tourakom’s? Or the Champion’s, or the queen’s do you suppose? Since he doesn’t want to pay for his words, he hides behind his shield. Except now he can’t. If he refuses to meet me in the lists, everyone will know what he is.”

Kel wonders where this newfound strength is coming from, as if she hasn’t been spending much of her page and squire career doing her best to make bullies pay for bullying, regardless of who they are, who their families are, and who the victims are. This is something in her wheelhouse, for once. She knows how to handle this, and there aren’t any overarching issues of politics that she has to deal with. Someone slandered her knight-master, and several other people as well, and that means someone needs to make him eat his words, preferably while flat on his back from having been rocked off his horse. For the honor of all the women who were also slandered, and possibly for the honor of the Bazhir as well, who the king has been doing his very best to keep as a loyal group instead of trying to turn them back into a rebellious group very close to the borders. This is a tailor-made situation for Kel, in her pocket, and the only thing that might give her pause is the possibility that she might lose, but she has several years of being beaten up as a page to shrug off that possibility, as the end of this sequence shows.

“I am Sir Ansil of Groten,” snapped the knight. He was a grim-faced man in his thirties with eyes like polished stones. “You will have your meeting, squire. When you lie in the dirt with my lance through your body, all will see what happens when men do the right thing. Tomorrow, at the individual matches. I will enter our names with the tournament clerk.”
He stalked away, Joren and the Tirrsmont knight trailing him. Joren looked back once to smirk at Kel.
“Don’t growl at me anymore,” Kel told Lerant. “That had to be done, and he wasn’t going to give you a chance.”
“He would if I slapped him,” Lerant retorted. “He’d have no choice, then.”
“All right—when I’m done, slap him and have your fight,” Kel said wearily. A whiff of fish rising from her belt pouch made her grimace. “I have to feed the griffin.” She headed for her tent.
Lerant followed her. “He says he’ll kill you.”
“If he does, then the gods don’t want women to be knights. Isn’t that how trial by combat works?” Did she have everything for a proper tilt? she wondered, reviewing her list of armor. Raoul had added pieces to it before they left the palace.
“My lord will be angry,” Lerant pointed out.
“Why? He said he wanted me to compete in the tournaments. Look.” Kel turned to face Lerant. They were of a height, Kel now five foot ten. She met his angry brown eyes. “I have things to do if I’m to fight him, so let me go do them.” She walked away.

She’s pretty cavalier about the prospect of getting killed by someone’s lance, probably because she’s sick of how many people seem to keep thinking that it’s an affront to the gods that she exists and is trying for what she’s trying for. Then again, she’s been tilting with Lord Raoul, and while she might not think she’s any good because of that, there’s a good chance that what he’s been teaching her will be enough to knock lesser men cleanly off their horses. If she can take the pounding that Raoul gives her and still keep coming back for more, she’s probably going to have not just all of his tricks, but all of her strength and ability to stay put when hit from being whammied by Raoul regularly. As Raoul said, he intends to win some money with her.

Cleon visits Kel after this sequence, because he’s just seen whose name has gone up on the board and wants to know if it’s true, that a second-year squire challenged a full knight. Kel tries to play it off as necessary because of the insult given to Raoul, but her proximity to Cleon is making her hormones go off the charts again.

Big hands tugged breastplate and cloth from her grip. Cleon put them aside and told Kel softly, “Was I wrong? I thought you liked it when I kissed you but you’ve avoided being alone with me ever since.”
She hung her head. “Midwinter was, it was, nice,” she said, cringing inside at her [foolish] reply. It was very warm in the tent. “People would talk if we—if they saw. They might not know it was friendly. They might get the wrong idea.”
“Here I am, hoping one person will get the right idea,” Cleon explained.
[…Kel protests that they shouldn’t be alone, but Cleon asks her to look at him…]
He was smiling. That was a dirty trick. It was impossible to remind him she was a fellow squire, sexless, when he smiled with so much liking that her insides melted. He lowered his head just a few inches to press his mouth to hers.
Oh, my, thought Kel.
[…the two of them kiss a few more times, without Raoul, the animals, or anything else interrupting. He gives her a hug, and then…]
A mocking voice sounded in her mind. It was Joren’s, from a talk they’d once had on the palace wall. “You’d make a fine wife for one of those big fellows—Cleon for instance. You could settle down and raise young giants.” Kel stiffened.
Cleon released her instantly. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You have to say if I push too hard. I’ve just been thinking about this for such a long time—”
“You have?” Kel asked shakily.
“Remember the night you took me to your room to give me a letter from Mindelan, since your brother and I were going that way?” Cleon grinned. “I wanted to kiss you then, but your maid and her friend were there.”
“Oh,” Kel whispered. I sound stupid, she thought, furious with herself for saying doltish things and for blinking at him like a thunderstruck deer. I had plenty to say to that Groten swine, she thought. Lerant, too.
Cleon kissed her again.

And then Raoul interrupts, to Kel’s immense relief. In Cleon’s favor, he’s not trying to push Kel harder than she wants to go, and when she has that moment of bad memory, he stops and asks her what’s wrong. Against him is that he’s still pushing on her, instead of respecting her and offering to see if she wants to go any further. They’re both young, so it makes sense that they haven’t developed a good sense of consent and what to ask each other. It’s hormones, probably, for both of them, and therefore they’re fumbling their way through, since there’s no real training to them about how to successfully prosecute love or lust or any other such things. I wonder if the people around them just think that it’s too early for that kind of thing. Lord Wyldon certainly didn’t, in his carefully-constructed misogyny, but if the expectation is that you’re not going to seriously pursue romance with anyone until you’ve been properly knighted, there’s probably a gap in the necessary education of both squires/pages and the people they might pursue. (Assuming, of course, that there aren’t knight-masters who take their squires down to the local sex worker’s place and have them instructed there.)

Kel explains to Raoul that she challenged someone because

“I had a philosophical discussion with Ansil of Groten. We couldn’t resolve our differences, so we decided to settle it with the lance.” Like a page’s excuse for having a black eye—”I fell down”—philosophical differences were always to blame for a quarrel settled in a joust.

and then, after Raoul tells her to see him when she has a moment, Cleon gives Kel a farewell kiss. When Kel goes to see Raoul, he’s going to finally be the first character to ask Kel about what’s going on with her and to talk to her about her hormones. He does this, however, in a perfectly Raoul of Goldenlake way.

“At last he said, “I hear this from women of the queen’s Riders, the ones who want to command. Men who join the Riders are able to fight alongside females, or they don’t last. But what the women say is that if they take Rider men as lovers, and it’s found out, they encounter trouble. Men who dislike their orders offer to work it out in bed. Jealousies spring up, particularly if the woman and the man are in the same Rider group. If the woman is in command and the man isn’t, they’re both mocked by other men, and the woman gets treated like a trollop.”
Kel looked down. “Sir—”
“Nobody makes men surrender private life when they take up arms, Kel,” Raoul said, filling their cups. “We only ask that such lives happen off duty. It’s more complicated for women. It’s not fair, but I think you already know the world isn’t.”
Kel nodded, sipping grape juice. How many knight-masters would have done this differently, even hurtfully? How many would have said nothing until Kel was so deeply in a mess that she would never get out of it? Only Raoul would treat it as another lesson in the intricacies of command.
“I understand, sir,” Kel told him. “I do know there could be problems.”
Raoul fiddled with his cup. “As for issues of the body—sex, pregnancy, and so on—perhaps you should discuss those with a woman.” He cleared his throat. “If you want to discuss them with me, it is my responsibility—”
“No, no!” Kel interrupted, alarmed. She didn’t know which of them would be more embarrassed. She didn’t want to find out. “I’ll ask Mama, truly I will!”
Raoul grinned at her, his cheeks redder than usual. “Oh, good. I’d probably make a botch of it. I’ve talked with young men, of course, but even that’s been rare. Usually by the time I get them they know where babies come from.
“Now, Ansil of Groten. He’s a hesitater. Right when he should set for his impact, he flinches. You can use that.”

And just as smoothly as he offered to do something that would mortify both of them, Raoul is able to steer the topic back onto more comfortable ground. That he does this lesson as one in how command can be trickier when you have men under the command of a woman, and that the problems are for both the woman in charge and the man as well, is great at telling her about what the complications of having a lover might be when you want to have a career for your life, too. (Lord Implacable does have his limits, however, and those limits are apparently around trying to explain the facts of life about sex and pregnancy to Kel.) It also says a lot about how much Tortall’s ingrained sexism and misogyny sucks for women who want to fight, to lead, and to also occasionally be a lady, too. We got a taste of it with Alanna, although she rarely ever had to command anyone, but it took George Cooper to be a compatible match, and earlier in the book, Kel says that Baron George gets pitied, looked down on, and otherwise not seen in much esteem because he married Alanna, the King’s Champion and a powerful mage in her own right.

Kel does, in fact, go to Ilane and talk to her about the whole affair and her hormones and everything else, and Ilane tells her that she’s in a “unique position,” because she’s not being used as a marriage chit, and therefore has the freedom to make choices for herself.

“Our families are so determined to keep their bloodlines pure that they insist their daughters remain virgins before marriage, poor things. You don’t see that nonsense in the middle and lower classes. They know a woman’s body belongs to herself and the Goddess, and that’s the end of it.”
Kel was trying to remember if she’d ever heard the matter put in quite this fashion. She hadn’t.
Ilane rested her chin on her hand. “I’ve often thought the nobility’s handling of sex and marriage in their girls is the same as that of horse breeders who try to keep their mares from being mounted by the wrong stallions.”
Kel sat bolt upright. “Mama!” Hearing such things in her mother’s deep, lovely voice made them even more shocking. She expected this kind of phrasing from her male friends, not her mother.
“You can’t say this to noblemen, of course.” Ilane got up and went to the small fire that burned in front of the tent. “Tea?”
Kel automatically stood to get the cups. Before she realized she didn’t know where they were, her mother had placed a small table between the chairs and was setting out all she would need. Kel sank into her chair. “Why can’t this be said to men?”
“The good ones are too romantic to like it, and the bad ones don’t care. My papa was the don’t-care sort. I overheard him once describing me to a potential suitor. Even though I had small breasts, he said, my hips were big enough that I should foal with ease. It would be easy to find a milk nurse once I dropped a healthy son.”
[—Ilane puts in the powdered matcha, adds the hot water, and whisks up two cups. Kel sips and enjoys it before Ilane continues…]
“Since you’ve decided against a noble marriage, you may bed whoever you like,” Ilane replied. “You can choose, Kel. If you and Cleon want to go to bed, you can.”
Goose bumps rolled down Kel’s arms. “But I don’t want to choose anything like that! I want my shield—I’ve given up everything for it. And—” She remembered how it had felt, knowing that she cared about Cleon. It had thrilled and frightened her. “I don’t want to be distracted,” she admitted, feeling small with guilt. It seemed selfish, put that way. “I don’t think I want to bed anyone, Mama. We were just kissing, that’s all.”
“Kissing may lead to more serious things, my darling,” Ilane said, cupping Kel’s cheek in one cool, long-fingered hand. “A girl may be carried away. It’s not always love. Lust may feel wonderful enough to be mistaken for love.”
“I just want my shield,” Kel whispered. “I’ll deal with the rest later. The—complications.”
“Perhaps you should see a healer,” Ilane suggested. “Get a charm to keep you from pregnancy, until you’re certain you’d like to be a mother. Then, if you do get carried away, you can surrender to your feelings.” Ilane grinned wickedly. “Goddess knows your father and I did.”
Kel gulped. She did not want to think of her parents getting carried away. “Well, I certainly don’t want babies,” she admitted when she could speak again. “But if you think I should get the charm, I will.”
Ilane shook her head. “Think about it for yourself. Then decide.”

And the remaining paragraphs of this chapter is Kel’s father returning, exclaiming about who Kel is jousting, to her mother’s alarm, and Kel being annoyed at having to give out more explanations to everyone about it.

Oh, finally. Both Raoul and Ilane have given Kel the talk and some context about her hormones and lusts. (Although I thought in an earlier book, Kel went to get a pregnancy charm from one of the palace healers, because of the thought that she might try to seduce others, or perhaps as a guard against one of the other pages or squires thinking that assault would be a good idea to try and get her to leave. I thought she already had one. But for all we know, Tortallan pregnancy charms work like long-acting birth control here and they need to be renewed every so often to remain effective.) Once she finally has some context to what’s going on, Kel can make better decisions for herself about what she does want and what she doesn’t, and also the possibility that her body might be asking her to make some decisions her brain might not want to follow through on. I do like that Ilane is able to be sufficiently frank that Kel has an entire “I did not need to hear any of this from my mother” moment about it, but it also works well at the change of status for Kel from a girl who has a mother shielding her from things to a girl of sufficient age that she can listen to the adults talk about adult things, and that her mother is still part of the company of adults and therefore has relevant experience, as weird as that sometimes is to have to admit and then reorder your perception of a parent with that information in mind.

Ilane also is completely right, that the obsession with pure bloodlines and trying to avoid bastardy is much more about the kinds of things that would produce good horses than good humans. (And is probably just as much about trying to make sure there are clean inheritances for the various families instead of contested ones that might result in raising armies against each other and needing the Crown to step in and stop the infighting.) And, sadly, she’s also probably right that you can’t get that idea through to men, because they’ll either think they’re doing it for noble reasons, like love, or because they’ll say “So?” and continue on the pathway anyway. The thought of Ilane’s virtues described basically as “she’ll give you kids easily, don’t worry about the small tits,” instead of anything that she might have or know or be able to do is certainly one way to try and get a suitor for your daughter, but it seems likely to attract the people who don’t actually care about her as more than just a brood mare. What we’ve seen so far of Kel’s cohort and others suggests that it’s only a few who would see women in such a way, but as the echo that Kel suffered while being in Cleon’s embrace reminded us, there’s definitely enough of them that have been part of Kel’s life and trying to make her suffer or feel bad about herself.

Now that we have Kel sorted a little bit better, or at least has had some kind of talk with important people about her hormones and what decisions might come of them, and whether she actually wants to pursue that particular pathway, I think things will go better for her from here on out. Next chapter, though, Kel heads to the tilting field.

Last time, after everyone ganged up on Jonathan to get the law that had turned Lalasa’s endangerment into a fine (even if it was a steep one) changed, Kel spent a fair amount of time at Midwinter with the other squires, doing service, and hatching a plot to make sure that Prince Roald and Princess Shinkokami had the opportunity to talk to each other and see that they had both common interests and that nobody would get weird if those interests were expressed. It also helped get Raoul and Buri away from the formalities and doing something they genuinely enjoyed, so we can definitely say that Kel has at least big flashes of command and tactical ability.

Also, Cleon kissed Kel and wished her Midwinter luck, suggesting that all of his poetry and flowery language around her indicated a real and serious interest in her. Or something that started as a thing to make fun of her with, but then seems to have morphed into serious interest. Kel, who mostly seems to look at her own libido and wonder what the hell is going on, has no script nor idea on how to react to someone showing interest in her.

The next time marker here is “Spring, in the 18th year of the reign of Jonathan IV and Thayet, his Queen, 457.”

Squire, Chapter 10: Content Notes:

This chapter is titled “The Great Progress Begins,” which means the first action that Third Company takes is to go in the complete opposite direction. Kel is still having concerns about the kiss from Cleon, and has no idea what to do about it.

She couldn’t decide if she wanted to see him or never to see him again. She didn’t know which would be worse, finding that he’d done it on a dare or that he’d done it because he’d wanted to. Either reason meant a rat’s nest of problems

The narrative doesn’t go into what the problems of “he’s serious” would be, even though we have a clue what the problems of “he did it on a dare” would be, mostly that Cleon would still be picking stone out of his teeth after Kel knocked him through a wall for that kind of cruelty.

Third Company escorts an ambassador to the Tyran border, then escorts the new ambassador back to Corus, then heads out with George Cooper to sweep the coast of pirates. Kel has opinions about George, and they’re mostly unflattering.

They were accompanied by Baron George Cooper of Pirate’s Swoop, a man people both pitied and looked down on for marrying Alanna the Lioness. Kel watched him intently. She wanted to know why the Lioness had married this man, who wasn’t even handsome, for all that he was well muscled for someone in his late forties. The only attractive thing about him was a pair of humorous hazel eyes. Nice eyes hardly seemed to Kel like grounds for marriage.

We know, of course, having read the previous series, that Alanna married George because he was willing to treat her as Alanna, and not as a trophy, a prize, or a woman. Those things won’t be obvious to Kel on the surface, but spending enough time with George would make those qualities surface a little bit better and help her understanding.

They find and capture the pirates, which leads to “another series of trials, another series of executions. More than once she wished there were a different way to handle murderers.” Which, yes, I would like Kel to continue to have this ambivalence about murder as restitution for crime, especially when there’s some amount of understanding that the crime sometimes comes from trying to survive and not being able to do so in a legal manner. After that, it’s off to the Bazhir, and they spend some time racing horses and losing badly. “Raoul gave her more jousting lessons, something that puzzled Bazhir men and amused Bazhir women. They would gather around Kel afterward to put balm on her bruises and tease her.” I wonder what stories of Alanna have been passed down among the Bazhir, through the shamans Alanna trained, or the men she fought, or the way that she was very much the Woman Who Rides Like A Man. Another woman who looks to be following in her footsteps seems like something that would be more of a subject of gossip than anything. Maybe the teasing is “Ah, you want to be Alanna, too, and you seem to have the same amount of foolhardiness and stubbornness that she did., You’ll probably have similar results.”

From there, it’s off to a river to help shore up flood walls against a River that’s expanding from snowmelt, then back to the Bazhir to oversee a celebration of the birth of twins and then, finally, back to the palace, with almost nobody around, since everyone else is off on the Great Progress. Raoul, of course, has engineered all of this additional work for Third Company so that he can avoid having to be on the Progress himself.

“Peace and quiet!” Raoul said as his company rode into their courtyard. “I revel in it!”
“But we will be catching up?” prodded Flyndan.
“When we’re rested,” said Raoul gravely. “I myself feel quite tired.”
“And every time you get the bit between your teeth and decide you don’t care what the king wants, you two end up butting heads. One day you won’t be able to charm your way out of a royal reprimand.” Flyn kept his voice low—only Kel heard him, though she pretended she didn’t.
“He wouldn’t butt heads with me if he didn’t keep using us like a garland of pearls to dress up his majesty,” Raoul said, keeping his own voice down. “We’re a comabat unit, not a dance troupe. We leave when we’re rested.”
Flyndan shook his head and dismounted.
They had two lazy weeks before a firm message arrived from the king. Third Company packed and rode slowly for six days.

They do eventually catch up, and through Kel’s spyglass she gets to see the procession, and the people out to see them, and spot that Yuki and Lady Haaname are in with the Queen’s ladies, which makes Kel feel happy. Dom tells her to share.

His nearness still did mad things to her emotions, though lately she kept thinking about Cleon, wondering what it would be like to kiss him back. Kel handed over the spyglass. “Try not to steam it up looking for pretty girls,” she ordered. The griffin cawed and flapped from his post on the placid Hoshi’s saddle horn, as if he echoed Kel.
“You just don’t understand a fellow’s interest in females,” Dom murmured, glued to the spyglass.
“How many fighters are with them?” asked Raoul.
“Four Rider Groups,” replied Dom. “The fourth—the Queen’s Rabbits. The…First. They don’t have a nickname,” Dom said when Kel made a questioning noise. “They’re just the First. The Fourtheenth, Gret’s Shadows, and the Seventeenth, Group Askew. There’s Commander Buri. Oh, splendid—Captain Glaisdan and First Company. He looks as sour as a pickled beet.”
“If he’s wearing his old-style armor, probably his face is the same color,” Flyndan said. “Why couldn’t that fusspot stay at the palace? First Company’s all wrong for this?”
[…Lerant asks for a turn at the spyglass, Kel assents…]
The royal courier who had twittered at Raoul’s elbow all the way from Corus said, “My lord Knight Commander, why do we hesitate? The king was quite firm—”
“So you’ve said. Often,” Raoul growled, black eyes smoldering. He raised his voice. “My dears, there’s no help for it. Let us join in the panoply.” He urged Amberfire into a careful walk.
Lerant handed the spyglass to Kel and hoisted the Knight Commander’s banner, setting his mount forward. Flyndan joined him, his doughy face as gloomy as Raoul’s.
“Not too fast,” called Raoul. “Let’s not scare anyone.”
“His majesty said with all deliberate speed!” chirped the courier. He flinched under Lerant’s glare.
“That’s how we’re doing it,” Raoul told him. “Deliberately.”

And, of course, Jonathan is not happy at how long they took to get there. He tells Raoul where he’s going to be lodged, with the specific idea of not being late to social events, and Raoul tweaks him by showing Kel and the griffin, which Jonathan is more than willing to solve by having Kel camp with everyone else, and Raoul, of course, exercises his privilege to have a squire near him to tweak Jonathan further for ordering him to be there.

“I’m to attend balls and banquets without my squire?” demanded Raoul, all innocence. “I can’t handle things like requesting water to shave with, or getting my clothes pressed. I need Kel.”
“You managed for twenty years,” growled the king, blue eys flashing with anger.
“This is different,” Raoul informed him.
Jonathan stared grimly ahead, drumming his fingers on his saddle horn. Finally he ordered, “Tell the Lord Seneschal to give you a place in the camp, then. And I expect you to be oin time for social events!”
“Sire,” Raoul said, bowing deeply in the saddle. He motioned to the side of the road with his head, and turned Amberfire out of the main parade. Kel followed, her face Yamani-straight.
The Lord Seneschal nearly screamed when he realized he needed to find a place in the camp for the Knight Commander. Drawing up these camps required tact, diplomacy, and quick thinking. Obviously enemies could not pitch their tents side by side, and the most important nobles would not take it well if they camped cheek by jowl with soldiers. For a moment Kel feared the Seneschal was going to have an apoplexy as his face turned a rich plum color.

He does find a plot for Raoul and Kel, though, and sends them on their way. Raoul is smug about getting his way, and Kel is sent to join in with the other squires to do the usual amount of feasting service. She meets back up with Cleon and Owen, who has passed his page examinations and joined the ranks of the squires, but has not managed to secure a knight-master of his own, and therefore is in palace service answering to Master Oakbridge, a situation Owen hates. Cleon, for his part, “made her feel odd, warm and shivery at the same time. She wasn’t sure that she liked it and welcomed the distraction of greeting the others.” So Kel’s still not telling anyone about her feelings, and nobody has taken her aside to explain things like these kinds of feelings to her, even if it’s from the perspective of dudes liek Dom. Like he said, she doesn’t understand, but also, nobody seems to be telling her anything.

Kel was edgy, as she always was when she had new social duties, but tucked it behind her Yamani mask. Raoul had no bland face to hide behind. With the pretty eighteen-year-old daughter of a local baron as his dinner partner, he turned into a block of wood. His companion, made nervous by his rank, age, and silence, chattered. Numair and Daine, seated with them, were too busy talking about books to rescue them.
Kel looked around to see who she could recognize. Buri was as wooden as Raoul. A local guilds-man was her partner; he had no trouble talking at the wordless K’mir. The king and queen looked as if they enjoyed talking with the Whitethorn governor and his lady, while the Yamani ladies kept those who shared their tables politely occupied.

It really is Buri and Raoul who are the people who have it the worst at making small talk, and each of them has a monarch intent on making sure they keep practicing at it until they succeed in some manner. Both of them don’t want anything to do with such things, because they’re much more comfortable fighting with swords instead of having to deal with words and politics. Soon enough, I suspect, Kel will be joining them in finding whatever excuses she can to be nowhere near Jonathan or the court. They’ll make a merry band of people clearing up all that they can and only occasionally popping back into the palace as needed.

Kel also gets to have her first look at what a tournament looks like, and the jousting that goes along with it.

“The Yamani’s don’t have them. They just beat each other half to death in training.”
“They sound like sensible people. Do they hold banquets?” Raoul asked wistfully.
“Better,” Kel told him. “They have parties where they view the moon in reflecting ponds, or fireflies in lanterns, or patterns of cherry tree blossoms against the sky, and they make up poetry about it.”
Raoul shuddered and changed the subject.

I can certainly imagine Raoul and Buri being utterly petrified at the prospect of such things, but I can also see his reticence giving him entirely unintentional mad skills at the haiku form. He probably instinctively gets the cutting words and the depths expressed in as few feet as he can get away with.

While Kel is getting Raoul into his armor, doing her traditional duty as his squire, Raoul is telling Kel about what he expects to see at the tournament.

“If it were Jerel alone, I’d stick to the padded stuff, not all this clank,” Raoul said as he raised his arms for the breastplate. “He knows exhibition rules, but Myles says a couple of charmers from Tusaine are threatening to give me a try. And one of the conservatives has put it about that he’ll bash my head in because I, oh, what was that phrase? Encouraged your pretensions, that’s it.”
“Then I should fight him, sir.” Kel tightened a buckle.
“Nonsense. I’ll ram some manners into him and tell the king I can’t attend the banquet because I pulled a muscle.” When Kel didn’t reply, Raoul gripped her shoulder and waited until she met his eyes. “Please don’t deny me my fun,” he said with a smile. “Conservatives haven’t found the, er, courage to joust against me in years. They think the gods will withdraw their favor from me because I picked you. Haven’t you ever noticed that people who win say it’s because the gods know they are in the right, but if they lose, it wasn’t the gods who declared them wrong? Their opponent cheated, or their equipment was bad.”
Kel grinned. She had heard something like that.
“And the money I win from them in penalties will buy armor for you. That’s rather fitting, don’t you think?”
It was fitting, put that way. Kel still shook her head at him. What could she say? He clearly loved to joust; just as clearly he hated the artificiality of the progress. Who was she to deny him some entertainment?

Smart decision, Kel. Raoul is getting a lot of good times in his future, and he’s going to enjoy all of it, since that’s the only thing about this entire enterprise that he does find enjoyable.

Kel reflects on the nature of the tournament, as martial practice, as a way of wealth distribution, as a way of settling scores, as a way of showcasing for the monarchs and for the marriageable, and so forth. It used to be thought of as ceremonial and old-fashioned, and then the return of the immortals had brought a resurgence of situations where having a lance and a horse and knowing how to use both became vital war skills again. “Kel wasn’t sure that she liked these contests with their possibilities for injury. At the same time she knew how important this practice was. She gave up trying to decide how she felt and simply prayed that no one got hurt.” And Raoul does not, nor do almost all of the opponents he has that he knocks out of the saddle. One suffers “a cracked skull” from being unhorsed, but that’s it.

Eventually, Kel gets invited to a game of fan toss, which is apparently a game played with a “shukusen,” a heavy, weighted fan with “steel ribs that were dull at the base, razor sharp on the ends.” After a few false starts, Kel gets back into the ehythm of it, and eventually it speeds up, flies higher, and then slows down in speed and comes back to low angles. And then Neal steps in without understanding.

“This is the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Kel heard Neal remark. “May I play?” He stepped among them to catch the fan. There was no time to stop him. The women gasped—and Neal caught the shukusen base down. He nearly dropped it, not expecting the weight of steel.
“What is this thing?” he demanded, staring at the fan with wide green eyes.
Yuki walked over to him. “There is a saying in the Islands,” she told him stiffly. “Beware the women of the warrior class, for all they touch is both decorative and deadly.” Taking the fan, she went to a pile of tent poles and picked one up. She carried it back to Neal, unfurled the fan with a snap, and slashed the open edge across the pole. A piece of wood dropped to the ground. She folded the fan with another snap and entered the princess’s tent.
Shinkokami and Lady Haname followed her, bowing politely to Neal as they passed, their eyes crinkled with hidden laughter. Neal still had not recovered from the sight of the pretty fan slicing the pole like sausage.
Kel patted his back. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Yuki cools off pretty quickly.”
Neal looked at her. “She’s angry?”
“I think you frightened her,” Kel replied. “You frightened me, Meathead.” She cuffed him lightly. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to grab things? You could have lost all your fingers. I doubt your father, good as he is, could put them back on.
“What was that?” Neal demanded.
“A shukusen—a lady fan,” Kel told him. “If a lady thinks she’s in danger, but doesn’t want to complicate things by openly carrying a weapon, she takes a shukusen.”
“I want one,” the queen said. Kel looked around. They had gathered an audience during their game. It included her majesty, Buri, some local ladies who looked appalled or fascinated, and a stocky female a head shorter than Kel. She wore a dark blue silk tunic over a white linen shirt, full blue silk trousers, and calf-high boots. A sword and dagger hung at her belt: they looked expensive and well used. Coppery heair brushed her shoulders; she regarded Kel with violet eyes.
Kel swallowed. Alanna the Lioness, King’s Champion, Baroness of Pirate’s Swoop and heir of Barony Olau, gave her the tiniest of nods, then walked into the crowd.
Kel took a breath, remembering Queen Thayet’s comments. “I’m sure the princess would be glad to have one made for you, your majesty.”
“I’m going to ask right now,” the queen said. She entered the princess’s tent.
“You could have said the Lioness was here!” Kel whispered to Neal.
“Well, I’m here, aren’t I? And I didn’t exactly have the chance,” he pointed out dryly. “We just rode in. Since when do you call me Meathead?”
“Since you act like one,” retorted Kel. “Let’s find something to drink, I’m parched.” She dragged him to the food vendors’ tents as the crowd broke up.

There’s something here in the way that Neal just inserts himself into something he believes he knows everything about, and then realizes just how lucky he was not to have been severely hurt, that resonates with how men in our timeline have similar beliefs, do similar actions, and, more often than not, end up getting injured, sometimes severely. Neal certainly earned every bit of that “Meathead” name by inserting himself like that, and I won’t be surprised if Alanna gives him an additional tongue-lashing after Kel is done with him for not understanding the situation he was in and making dangerous assumptions.

Although, now that I think a little more about it, a lot of the time, when a man who knows nothing inserts himself into a situation and gets hurt for it, it’s usually played for slapstick in our media than seriously. The fool gets knocked around for being foolish, but in the end, everything gets reset and we can look forward to the same thing happening again in the next episode, or something similar to that. Even for injuries that would otherwise be career-ending, life-threatening, or that would probably kill humans. The kind of stuff that gets the “don’t try this at home” warning, along with the insistence that the people who are doing the thing are trained stuntmen or are trained pranksters, or some other thing that says they know how to handle something safely, or are at least aware of the risks they are taking and have people on hand to mitigate or repair damage from those risks if things go wrong. Neal gets lucky that the weight of the fan is in the base of it, and therefore the fan, as it flew, was going to present the base to be caught on the way down, but Kel and Yuki are right that he could have seriously hurt himself or made himself much less capable as a squire by failing to catch the fan the right way.

Also, carrying a fighting fan on your person is a historically accurate tradition of Japan, often as the weapon of choice when swords and other obvious weapons are forbidden. Several of the samurai do so historically (and in stories), and some of them are reported to be quite good at using it to defend themselves from attacks. So I love that Thayet sees it, hears about its virtue, and immediately knows she wants one. Probably because it’s one of those things she can carry openly on her person, and use it for both the intended purpose as a fan and the intended purpose as a way of defending yourself against others. Considering how many times we’ve had nobles and others trying to start fights in the palace or attack Jon and/or Thayet, having something on hand that can be used as a weapon, even when it doesn’t look like one, has to be of obvious benefit to both Thayet and Jon. Plus, a we have seen, Thayet seems extremely interested in absorbing all that she can about new weapons to use and ways of defending herself and others that Shinkokami has brought with her and is willing to share. Fighting women is absolutely a top priority for Thayet, and it starts with her, and we love her for it and hope that it spreads. If for no other reason that the next girl to want to become a knight also has some significant amount of training and conditioning already done by the time she tries to enter the page ranks.

More of the Great Progression next week.

Last time, Kel and Raoul came back to the capital so that they could witness the trial of Joren of Stone Mountain, who was accused, and then confessed to, paying the people who kidnapped Lalasa and endangered her life (and Jump’s.) He did so knowing full well that the maximum punishment he would receive for it was a fine, and he used the opportunity to soapbox about how society was going to the women and that Kel’s success was because she was a girl and the royals very specifically have been leaning on everyone to make sure that Kel succeeds.

The magistrate tried to lay on as much additional penalty as he could, and was unmerciful about when he expected it delivered to the court and what the penalties would be for late delivery. He also told Joren that he was lucky that his statements could not be grounds for dueling, because that kind of insult to the courts and the examiners and himself would otherwise not go unavenged.

Recognizing the disparity, Kel asked politely if this really was all that would happen, and was told yes, and that if she needed a brush-up on the law, he’d send a clerk with the relevant pieces.

Kel was not happy about this, and asked Jonathan and Thayet for a word, which Raoul helped her successfully steer into asking for a private audience about the matter. That private audience begins here at the beginning of chapter 9.

Squire, Chapter 9: Content Notes: Murders in nightmares, current U.S. politics

Before we get into the audience with Jon and Thayet, I want to circle back to the grandstanding that Joren engaged with, because his attitude is rife in current U.S. administration and policy. I know that Kel is at least partially based on those who broke the gender barrier at the Citadel and the armed services, but in our current era, Joren sounds very much like someone crusading about how “DEI” is ruining the ability of the service to be ready. Joren doesn’t have the data currently available to our era about how effective women are in military service, but even if he did, I suspect his attitude would be the same as the people who are campaigning against diversity, equity, and inclusion everywhere, as they are convinced that only white men could possibly ever be good at anything and all attempts to make the workplace more reflective of community or to try and get the actually-best people in the job are really lowering standards and allowing “politics” to have greater influence on selection, hiring, and promotion, than “merit.”

You can see the obvious double standard here – if a nobleman becomes a knight, it’s because he has specifically been able to endure and succeed at the grueling program, and he deserves it on his merit. If a noblewoman succeeds at becoming a knight, it must be because she cheated with her magic (Alanna) or because standards have been lowered to allow her to succeed (Keladry) at royal command. Duke Turomot giving him the business should have also included a pointed request to the monarchs about whether they would like to take exception to Joren’s remarks, since the implication that Kel has had the standards lowered to ensure her passing said that either the King or the Queen or both are the ones doing the demanding. I doubt they would have taken up the offer, but this is the kind of thing where Joren should realize exactly how much he has slandered both the Duke and Their Majesties with his speech, and be advised that if he intends to insult the monarchs, then he should do a better job of disguising it.

As the residents of the United States are seeing at this time, the wholesale destruction and gutting of services and governmental functions and the demands that everyone in the country remove their diversity and inclusion efforts is an unmitigated disaster for anyone who needs government to work or function and isn’t planning on trying to pounce on the remains to privatize it and make it worse, even as they make it profitable. Lots of places have had competent people removed and replaced by complete incompetents who have been put there specifically because they are incompetents and will willingly assist in their own destruction because they have hardened their minds into the belief that government is unable to do anything, and needs to be reduced until it can be subsumed by the private sector, or they want to destroy things because those things have been participating in the forbidden “DEI” and so they must be punished by having their funding zeroed out, their staff laid off, and otherwise destroyed. And the people who are still here show their inability to do anything well or competently on a daily basis, even as they insist they are geniuses and the propaganda machines that are wedded to them try to make the rest of us believe that they are geniuses.

We know this kind of war about who is qualified and whether Kel is qualified or whether she’s had things made easier for her (since, y’know, those nobles don’t have the firsthand account of what’s been happening to her that we do) is being waged between the current monarchy and the conservative nobility, but that’s mostly been happening off-screen and in implications. In what we’re about to see, Jon brings it explicitly to the fore as explanation for some things. So, let’s get actually into the conversation itself. The chapter starts with solid advice from Raoul about how to handle your royals.

“Don’t confront monarchs in public, Kel,” Raoul murmured. “If you make them look bad in front of those who should fear and obey them, they get nasty. Jonathan’s a good enough sort as kings go, but that doesn’t go far.”
Kel nodded. Her heart thudded in her breast. She couldn’t let this pass. It’s all of a piece with this king, she thought. He doesn’t understand what “fair” means.
[…they go into the clerk’s office…]
“What may we do for you, Squire Keladry?” inquired the king, smiling. It was an attractive smile. The king himself was attractive, black-haired and -bearded, with sapphire-blue eyes, fair skin, and a good build for a man who spent his time indoors. His velvet tunic and silk hose matched his eyes, his black silk shirt, full in the sleeves and tight at the cuffs, was elegant.
He looks were wasted on Kel. Dom had prettier eyes and a warmer heart. She could not like Jonathan, though she would serve him and his queen. He had made her take a year of probation as a page when no male had to. He relied on charm to get his way. That summer Lalasa told her that Jonathan’s oldest daughter, Princess Kalasin, had wanted to be the first female page, until her father talked her out of it. Kel wasn’t surprised. She didn’t think much of the man, though she had to admit he was a good king. Maybe her father was right, and good kings weren’t always good men.

I am all for Kel reading Jonathan for filth here. She has the greatest reasons not to be swayed by his charm or intimidated by his royal self, and he’s personally responsible for a lot of the additional heartache, body ache, and aggravation that she’s suffered all through her page years. That we also find out that he discouraged Kalasin from becoming a page is another strike against Jon actually knowing where to put his foot down and make things happen. We don’t know what his concerns were about Kalasin joining the page corps were, but I’d bet most of them could be managed, even if they might take some additional work. If the concern is “she’ll be the only girl there,” then perhaps it’s on Jonathan to find some additional girls that would be wiling to have a go at the pagedom – after all, even the Yamani princess comes with some ladies of her own, rather than expecting Tortall to provide all the necessary servants. If Jon’s concern is “they’ll behave like the pages did when I (and Alanna) were pages,” then perhaps Jon has work to do in getting the culture of the pages changed so that he would feel safer having his daughter present in there. And possibly detailing Alanna to work with (and overrule) Wyldon to get the environment changed. If it’s the objections of the nobles that a girl would corrupt their noble processes, Jon can counter that with “princes of the line have been pages for years without issue. Why can’t princesses be the same – they’ll learn an awful lot of the skills they’ll need to manage the households of their husbands while being pages.” It’s a question of how much effort Jon was willing to put in to helping Kalasin, and the answer there seems to be “not much,” and therefore Jon should be rightly dragged for it.

“What just happened? It was wrong, sire,” she said firmly. “If Joren had kidnapped me instead of my maid, the legal penalties would have been much worse.”
“Because if a member of the old nobility kidnapped one of the new nobility, it would cause a civil war,” replied the king. “I like to discourage that kind of thing.”
“But by law it’s right that I be paid for the inconvenience of my maid being frightened to death? Not even that she gets the money, but I do? That’s not right. It’s like saying common folk are slaves. Their rights are measured in coin, not justice.” She stopped there, swallowing hard. She’d done her best to keep her voice calm.
For a very long moment the room was silent. Finally the king sighed and crossed his arms. “It’s not right,” he told Kel, to her profound shock. “Only a fool would say that it was. I am called many things,” he admitted with a crooked smile, “but ‘fool’ isn’t one. What do you want?”
Kel swallowed. She was in it this far; it would be silly to blink now. “Change the law, sire.”
“Change the law,” the king repeated. “Squire, what do you think her majesty and I have done ever since we took the thrones? No, don’t answer—I dread to think what you might have the courage to say. We have been trying to change laws—not this particular one, but many like it.” He smiled bitterly. “The problem is that monarchs who wish to live until their grandchildren are born do not hand down any law they like. We must treat with our nobles, who are equipped to go to war against us; we must compromise with them. We must treat and compromise with merchants, who give loans for pet projects such as dredging Port Legann’s harbor. We compromise and treat with farmers, who feed us, and street people, who can burn a city down. There are priests and priestesses, who tell people the gods have turned their faces from the Crown, so they need not obey us. And the mages—I’ll leave it to your imagination what mages will do when angered. Any law that Thayet and I propose offends someone. We must balance opposing forces. Our successes vary.”
Kel blinked. She had never guessed that even the lowliest could exact revenge against their betters, if they didn’t mind its cost. “My point is the same, Your Majesty,” she repeated. “This particular law is just plain bad.”

I like this moment here for Kel. She’s been a noble for all her life, and a lot of her time as a noble has been in Yaman, where the social expectations and situations are different than Tortall. Since Yaman is pretty clearly Tortallan Japan, there would be a much stronger cultural demand to conform and to obey and otherwise not to make waves. Or at least, not to make waves publicly. As Kel noted when Jump came to the door while she was talking with the princess, assassination attempts are much less common in Tortall than in Yaman. So, the Yamani still manage to get their voices out and be heard in some ways, even if it’s not in the ways that we would be used to in Tortall. Kel hasn’t had to deal with the possibility of other nobles waging war or the common folk revolting in a way that causes significant destruction and death, or the possibility of pissing off people who interpret the will of the gods and the people who control forces beyond the workings of nature. She hasn’t yet had enough education in the management of people and their attitudes to come to this realization under Raoul. I think her status as having been a person put-upon and discriminated against is making it easy for her to empathize with other people who are insecure, but harder for her to pick up the part that eventually she’s going to have to be a person making those kinds of decisions and weighing their consequences. Raoul thinks she’s got the stuff for it, and is going to try and bring it out of her, but Kel hasn’t had enough experience in having to weigh consequences and decisions yet to fully grasp how limited Jon and Thayet are in their ability to make sweeping changes. Or to notice when change happens, because I’m pretty sure that those changes happen very slowly over time.

“We could use the story of Lalasa’s kidnapping to sir up sentiment for a revision,” the king murmured. “My dear? Your opinion?”
“Keladry’s right,” replied Queen Thayet in her cool, direct manner. “This stinks of slavery. We could get the Mithrans’ support—just say we’re making it so the same law applies to all. The Goddess’s temples will see it as greater protection for female servants.”
“I’d hoped you’d want to spare us another battle with the nobility,” murmured her husband and co-ruler. “Raoul? Come on, old man, voice and opinion if you dare.”
“Now, Jon, you know I have opinions all the time,” said Kel’s knight-master. “I just don’t air them when you’ve got your ears closed. I’d as soon save my breath.”
“And?” the king demanded.
“I’m with Kel,” Raoul told him. “That scene we saw in there reeked. That piece of rat dung knew before he came that the worse he would get was a fine. He used that to make the courts and the Crown look stupid.”
The king winced. “Don’t soften your words to spare me,” he said dryly. “Just speak your mind.”
“Stone Mountain can pat fifty times that without a cramp,” Raoul said. “Old Turomot laid on all the extras he could, and it still didn’t faze Joren. I thought that adding Lalasa’s dressmaking to raise the fine was inspired, myself.”
“You think Turomot would look into changing the law?” Jonathan inquired. “Usually I have to wheedle and grant all kinds of concessions before he’ll so much as ask his clerks to look up precedents. He’s the stickiest of the conservatives.”
“Who just got told by a whelp that he’d given way to royal pressure,” Raoul pointed out. “I think right now old Turomot would love to rewrite this law, just in case Squire Joren tries a similar trick one day.”
“So there you have it, Squire Keladry,” said the king.
Kel blinked, startled to be addressed. She had been dazzled by the speedy discussion. If this was how kingdoms were ruled and people’s fates were decided, she wouldn’t be happy until she was in Peachblossom’s saddle and as far from the palace as she could manage. “Sire?” she asked politely.
“We cannot change the solution in Lalasa’s case. We can set the process of change in motion. It’s slow—”
“Painfully,” remarked the queen.
The king nodded. “But in the end the law will change.”
“That’s a start,” Kel agreed.

I also like here that Kel basically gets to see how the sausage is made in this particular regard, and she recoils in horror over it. I doubt, somehow, that Kel or her family ever really got close enough to the Emperor of Yaman to see how laws and edicts were made there. Kel very much believes in the rule of law, but also that unjust laws should be changed, especially after the situation just witnessed with Joren. The practical aspects of getting it done are things that Jon is trying to get her to understand, but he at least takes being outnumbered by the Squire, the Queen, and one of his close friends well enough to say that he’ll look into getting things changed, and he accepts the advice that his usual foe might be very much on his side for this one, because both court and Crown were made to look like fools by Joren and neither of them likes it. So, Kel’s assessment of Jon as a bad man but a good king still seems to hold up, and if Kel were older, she might hope that Jon always has excellent advisers around him to keep him on the path of righteousness.

Also, given how easily Raoul savaged Jon when his opinion was sought, I am thinking that Kel might be on the same pathway to become a similarly blunt-spoken and effective adviser to the King who intensely desires to be anywhere other than near him or near the palace. And quite possibly also a powerhouse in her own right in the same ways that Raoul already is. More and more, the selection of Kel by Raoul looks like the best decision that anyone could have made for a knight-squire team-up.

Now, of course, since there has been royal favor granted, even if it is mostly self-serving favor granted, there’s a price to be extracted from Kel for this favor.

“There’s a price, my dear,” King Jonathan said, capturing her eyes with his own. “In case you were going to challenge Squire Joren, as is your right under ancient custom…” He shook his head. “Unacceptable. This chat we’ve had is about how things must change from the rule of privilege to the rule of law for all. It means you must be content to have your quarrels settled by law, not by privilege.”
He was right, curse him, thought Kel. If the country were to be governed by one set of laws, there could be exceptions for no one. She would have to accept the law’s justice, even when she thought it unfair. Her intent to beat the tar out of Joren had to stay a happy fantasy.
“Very well, your majesty,” she said. “If you keep your word to change this particular law, I won’t challenge Joren.”
The king extended his hands. Kel wasn’t sure what he wanted until Raoul nudged her. Then she realized the king wanted her to swear.
She put her hands in his and knelt. “I, Keladry of Mindelan, will forego my privilege to challenge Joren of Stone Mountain, as long as work for a change in that law is made,” she said, meeting the king’s eyes.
“And I, Jonathan of Conté, do swear on my own behalf and that of Queen Thayet to do all in the Crown’s power to have that law changed,” replied the king solemnly. “Do you keep faith with me, and I will keep faith with you.”

Kel can forego direct retribution in favor of greater justice for all. Knowing Joren, he’ll also probably give Kel the opportunity to knock his head around on some other topic instead.

This entire sequence is an excellent critique of how places ruled by men and their whims are volatile and subject to the whims of those men, while places ruled by laws are generally more stable and consistent. It doesn’t necessarily mean that places ruled by men can’t be good, and places ruled by laws can’t have rotten laws, but I think we’re being led down the path that Kel is taking, that if the option were available, we should much rather hope to live in a place ruled by laws rather than ruled by men. (The United States is having a certain amount of trying to decide which one they want right now, despite having plenty of examples in recent world history where rule by men is turning out to suck terribly. And the current examples of this time where people who want to rule as strong men in their country are doing a terrible job of it.) Raoul and Kel will both decide they want to jaunt off to somewhere and do good things and not have to deal with other people and their political jockeying, just working with the laws and their enforcement, and trying to get unjust and bad laws changed to be better and more just.

After all of this entreating the royals, Jump, with some new wounds, leads Kel back to her room, where the griffin and the sparrows are having an all-out war with each other, which Kel has to calm down by throwing a heavy blanket over the griffin and letting the sparrow that the griffin had trapped escape, although they also need Daine to help heal the sparrow’s broken wing. For his actions, Kel grabs the griffin and “spanked the griffin as she would a puppy or a kitten, loudly rather than hard. She made sure he saw Arrow (the sparrow) so he would connect the sparrow with the punishment—she hoped.” All of the effort is too much for Kel, and she has some tears for it, which Kel blames on her period. After Daine has come by and healed the sparrow, Raoul drops by and offers to look after the griffin if it would help, but Kel refuses him and hopes that the griffin has learned his lesson about hunting sparrows.

Raoul is also here to debrief with Kel about her experience telling off the king and queen that one of their laws is unjust.

“I was curious about how you felt,” Raoul said in answer to Kel’s question. “Jon surprised you?”
“He did that,” Kel said grudgingly, picking up her comforter and shaking it. Griffin feathers and down stuffing drifted to the floor. As she fumbled with the heavy cover, trying to find the damage, Raoul took one side. He backed up until the comforter was stretched out, then turned it with Kel when she saw no damage on top. The rips were on the underside, five in all. She and Raoul laid the comforter flat on the bed, and Kel got her sewing kit.
“I don’t know what I expected, but that wasn’t it,” she admitted as she prepared needle and thread. “Offering to change the law, or try to, for me? Why? Why would the queen agree?”
“Because you were right. It’s a bad law. The middle classes are on the rise, Kel. Laws like that one will breed resentment, even bloodshed someday, if they aren’t corrected.” Raoul helped himself to her thread and needles and began to stitch one rip as Kel worked on another. “And maybe Jon thought this might get you on his side. He never does anything for just one reason.” He set tiny stitched and sewed quickly, his big fingers deft. Sparrows lined up on his shoulders and head to watch, fascinated. Jump picked a more comfortable seat on an undamaged part of the comforter.
Looking at her master, Kel thought, Will there ever be a time when he doesn’t surprise me? “I still don’t know what I think,” she admitted. “I owe him my duty, anyway.”
“Yes, but there’s a difference between someone who performs what’s required because it’s duty, and one who does what’s needed because he or she believes in the Crown. You should keep in mind that he probably wants you to be confused about him.” Raoul shook his head. “He wasn’t this complicated when we were pages. I guess you never know how people will grow up.”
“What was it like?” asked Kel. “You, Lady Alanna, the king—it’s hard to see you as pages or squires.”
Raoul grinned. “Like puppies in a basket,” he said. “All paws and tails.” He talked as they sewed, telling her stories of his past. Finishing a story about a bully who had beaten the page called Alan, until the day that the disguised Alanna had beaten him in turn, Raoul shook his head. “The only smart thing Ralon ever did was leave after that. He’d never have passed his Ordeal. I’m afraid Squire Joren won’t, either.”

Raoul, the multi-talented, although with as much time as Third Company spends in the field, I suspect an awful lot of the men of that company are more than adept with needle and thread, because they’re probably used to having to do their own field repairs. (Or they’ve worked out who to trade doing needlework with in exchange for their ability to hammer out dents in armor, or ot make field rations palatable, or whatever exchanges are needed to make sure everyone’s in form.)

Raoul again displays his sharp political acumen and command ability in explaining to Kel the difference between someone who obeys because it’s their duty and someone who obeys because they have a good commander. Jon seems to be in a position where he thinks the correct way to rule and to keep power and options available to him is to keep everyone off-balance in one way or another, which might be the right way to balance all the factions he perceives, but doesn’t do a great job of instilling in the people the idea that the king is someone they want to die for. Thayet might be the one who takes up that role, since she’s described as the direct one, and since she’s also the beauty of their pairing, she’s probably the one who most of the people of the realm are most personally loyal to.

Describing the story of Alan and Ralon, it’s interesting to see how little there’s been progress on making page culture better and more welcoming in the generation between them and Kel, but there’s probably also been a generation of fighting about whether Alanna used her magic to get through, and therefore nobody is yet ready to argue about what’s going to be made better. And it sounds like, with the way that Joren was talking, nobody’s going to be ready to argue about that when Kel gets through, either, because they’ll be too busy trying to prove that she, somehow, had an easier time of it and didn’t actually go through the “real” program that all the men had to.

The line about Squire Joren not passing his Ordeal has caught Kel’s attention, though. She knows that sometimes people don’t get all the way through the process, but this is the first time she (or any of us) have heard that it’s possible for people to be dissuaded from the path before they face the Chamber, even if they don’t have any major moral failings to them, proven or otherwise.

Raoul pointed to the longest tear. They had finished the others. “Race you to the middle of that,” he offered. As they hurried to thread their needles and start at opposite ends, he continued, “You need a certain amount of, oh, flexibility, to face the Chamber of the Ordeal. You have to know when to bend. If I were training master, I wouldn’t have let Joren get this far.”
Kel stared at him, mouth open, until she realized he’d already begun to sew and she was falling behind. As she dug her needle into the cloth, she protested, “But if you pass the exams and do the work, and don’t do anything really bad, the training master can’t stop you from being a squire and then taking the Ordeal.”
“Of course he can,” Raoul told her, amused. “There are ways to discourage someone who is unfit. And often you’re doing them a favor. The Chamber is…” He fell silent, shadows in his eyes, though he continued to stitch. “Hard,” he said at last. “It’s not that it’s merciless. To have mercy or lack it, you need humanity. The Chamber hasn’t got it. It would be like, oh, hating the griffin because he’s a thankless little bit of winged vermin. Yes, you,” he told the griffin, who flapped his wings. “Don’t let it go to your head, Kel, the griffin can’t change what he is, and the Chamber is unchangeable. Squires have broken themselves trying to defeat it.” He reached the middle of the tear and tied off his thread with a triumphant smile. “Amazing, the skills a fellow picks up in forty years of bachelordom, don’t you think?” he taunted Kel as he got to his feet.
She grinned at him, still finishing her part of the job. “You just did that because you can,” she retorted.
“Think about the king,” Raoul said. “If you’re wary, he won’t surprise you too often or too unpleasantly.”
She watched him go back to his rooms, then finished her repairs. Done, she inspected his work—it was better than hers.
Was he right about Joren? Raoul saw so much in people, more than anyone she’d ever known, even Neal or her parents. But Lord Wyldon would have seen any great flaws in Joren, surely, and corrected them.
Like Joren’s hiring criminals to kidnap someone? asked part of her that had spent too much time conversing with nasty, suspicious Neal. He questioned anything and everything. Worse, he now had some of Kel doing it too, and the rest of her never seemed to have any answers.

That would be because that suspicious part is correct, Kel, and has been proven correct multiple times throughout your interactions with Joren.

I think Kel is dealing with a lot of cognitive dissonance through this sequence of the trial, the confrontation, and the debrief. She’s been walloped repeatedly with the reality that things are more complicated than she wants them to be. The law is sometimes unjust, the king is human and persuadable, someone who is supposedly a squire engaged in action that should rightly have had him dismissed from squiredom, and her knight-master suggests that he should have been encouraged to wash out of the page program and find some other profession. (Not that anyone would, probably, because he’s from an old and monied family, and the amount of revenge they could bring to bear on someone who actually tried to hold Joren properly accountable would be immense. Wyldon could probably take it, honestly, but not many others could.) Kel still believes in doing justice and enforcing the laws fairly and empathetically, and in protecting the people who are being bullied, but she’s finding out that her zeal for the thing keeps running face-first into realpolitik. And that she needs a group to assist her for righting wrongs more permanently instead of being able to right wrongs herself and have them stay righted. Kel very much wants to be a fire-and-forget kind of person, and unfortunately for her, everyone around her realizes that she’s way too smart and competent to be wasted in such a simplistic way.

After all of this, it’s still Midwinter, and therefore we go into a sequence of parties, and Kel is very much just as awkward in this situation as Raoul is, even though she’s been dressed finely in the right colors by Lalasa. Kel wonders how Lalasa found time to make her clothes, because the shop was humming when she went to take Lalasa her allotment of the fine, and then Lalasa refused to take all of the fifty that Kel was apportioned, only taking twenty, and Kel decided to leave the busy shop rather than fight a battle she would lose with Lalasa about the matter. The party they’re at, however, is apparently boring to everyone, including the prince and princess, who are supposed to be getting to know each other better. Kel is about to act on trying to break their shyness with each other when Cleon arrives and gives her yet another flowery compliment, but one that could be taken awry. Cleon, however, is also interested in making things happen.

“You shimmer like a mirage of delight,” Cleon murmured as they met in the serving room. They turned in trays of empty cups and plates to take up full ones. “Your teeth call to mind wolfhounds romping in the snow.”
Kel smiled up at the redheaded squire. She had never noticed it before, but his eyes were an interesting, clear gray. “Wolfhounds are furry,” she pointed out. “I hope my teeth aren’t. And teeth aren’t cold enough to be snow. How is it you get sillier every time I talk to you?”
“The joy of our nearness cooks my lovestruck heart,” he explained with a soulful look.
“Or you’ve been looking at Scanrans longer than is good for you. Spend time with actual girls,” she informed him sternly. “You wouldn’t call me things like ‘pearl of my heart’ then.”
“No, it’s ‘mirage of delight’ today. ‘Pearl of my heart’ was when I was but a mere boy.” They stood in the door, looking at the party. “I hate to say it, my dear, but I think our prince is a fathead,” Cleon remarked. “There he sits with the most gorgeous creature in shoe leather, excepting your luminous self, of course—”
“Of course,” Kel replied, straight-faced.
“—without a word to say. Somebody should tell him the lady can converse, and sensibly, too.” Cleon straightened his shoulders. “If I don’t return by dawn, wear my handkerchief beside your heart forever.”

Then Kel gets talked to by Neal, who is here without Alanna, and then found by Buri. Kel compliments the Commander on her dress, and gets a response that she “feel[s] tormented.” Buri also tells Kel not to use her title, and wants to know where Raoul is. Kel points out that he’s still around, but not here, because there’s no “big lump hiding behind the hangings.” Buri agrees with Kel’s assessment, and then goes to say hello to Thayet, telling Kel that she, like Raoul, was ordered to appear at this party. Kel eventually finds Raoul in an adjacent room, and then Yuki stops her and also complains that the people who are supposed to have lots of interest in each other are not talking. The princess is apparently interested in the details of Kel’s campaign, and that’s the catalyst for a plan to come together. Kel dispatches the squires to find a good excuse to get Roald into the room where Raoul is, and Yuki will do her best to get the princess into the same space, so that they can talk about something interesting to both of them.

“If you lads—”
“I am a man, I’ll have you know,” Neal said loftily, putting a hand on his chest. “Five years older—”
Kel elbowed him, ruining his dignity. Yuki covered a dignity with her fan. “Hasn’t Lady Alanna taught you not to interrupt?” Kel asked. “Pay attention. Can you two”—she looked from him to Cleon—”get Roald interested? Otherwise he won’t come—he’ll think Shinko will be bored. And she won’t say anything to him. She’s worried he’ll believe she’s unmaidenly for wanting to hear about it.” Shinko had let a few interesting things slip during morning glaive practices. “If we get them together with Lord Raoul, though, and maybe Commander Buri, they’ll be so interesting that Roald and Shinko might relax.”
“Why would he think she’s unmaidenly?” protested Cleon. “His own mother bunts bandits.”
“Prince Eitaro told my lady that men with unconventional mothers want conventional wives,” Yuki said, her round cheeks red with vexation. “I don’t think it’s true—”
“Me neither,” chorused Roald’s three friends. They grinned at each other.
“This plan is good,” Yuki said, closing her fan with a decisive snap. She tapped Neal’s chest with it. “Signal me when you have Prince Roald’s interest,” she ordered him, and bustled off.
“Bossy little thing,” Neal said to no one in particular. “Let’s go hook Roald, Cleon.”

Neal should be used to getting bossed around as Alanna’s squire. Also, Kel, that bit where Raoul thinks you’re going to be an excellent commander? You’ve proved him right again. Kel notices the situation, knows what the desired result is, and uses what information she has available to her and the people around her to engineer a plan to get the prince and princess talking in a space where both of them can feel like they are relaxed and they can reveal to each other that they do, in fact, have commonalities, and that what they’ve been told by others is wrong. Extending this skill of Kel’s to commanding military units and people and keeping her appraised of the variables she needs to keep track of will hopefully be something Raoul does for her. She’s already a long way there.

The plan works beautifully, such that by the time that Kel, Neal, and Cleon can join them, the prince and princess are already deep in the conversation, ask questions of the people who were there, and in turn, “Shinko revealed a thorough grasp of strategy, supply problems, and tracking. Pressed by Raoul and Buri to tell what she knew, she described Yamani battles and tactics.” Eventually the party breaks up, but not after clear and obvious success from Kel’s plan. Even Cleon is surprised.

“Who would have thought?” murmured Cleon. “She looks like she’d break if you touched her too hard.”
Kel got to her feet. “Come to the training yard the queen’s ladies use some morning and see how fragile she is.” She covered a yawn. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m asleep on my feet.”
[…Cleon and Kel head back toward their chambers…]
“You see Lord Raoul at parties and balls, and he looks like a piece of wood,” Cleon said as they walked down the hall. “But he isn’t, is he?”
Kel shook her head. “He’s completely different with me and the men.” she smiled. “Something he said once—I guess a lot of mothers with daughters to marry off come after him at these things.”
Cleon’s smile was crooked. “There are a lot of them, and they can be persistent.”
They had reached the place where their paths separated. Kel looked up at Cleon. “I wouldn’t know,” she teased. “I don’t have to worry about matchmaking mothers.”
Cleon leaned down and pressed his lips gently to hers. “Midwinter luck, Kel,” he whispered. He turned crimson, and strode down the hall.
Kel stood there for some time, completely poleaxed. The next evening Cleon had duty at a different party from Kel. That’s a relief, she told herself as she offered sweetmeats to the heads of guilds and their wives. Of course it’s a relief, not to see him so soon. I need time to decide what to say to him, or what to do, when I see him. Particularly what I’ll do. Not that I plan to do anything.

In a bit not quoted earlier, when Neal arrives after Cleon, Neal teases Kel about whether she got a midwinter luck kiss from Cleon yet, so I guess it’s more apparent to Neal that Cleon’s clowning hasn’t actually been clowning, but an attempt at flirting with Kel. Or at least expressing an interest. Not that Kel has returned any of that affection for Cleon, but it’s likely that Kel didn’t have the first inkling that this was supposed to be anything other than clowning around. We are again in a situation where Kel has things regarding sex, romance, hormones, and the like happening either to her or around her and she doesn’t have the slightest idea about how it works or how to respond to it. That’s not a wrong thing, not at all, but I keep thinking that Ilane or someone would be giving Kel a little bit more talking-education about these kinds of things. Or it’s possible that Kel is somewhere on the ace spectrum, and even with the talking about the things, there would be at least some amount of “does not compute” where she wouldn’t be able to recognize it happening in the real world. That said, I am a bit surprised that Kel isn’t being sought after by “matchmaking mothers” herself, unless it’s supposed to have been Ilane who is matchmaking Kel, and was supposed to have done so long before Kel took up the cause of getting herself a shield.

There are Midwinter gifts, where Kel’s benefactor gives her a brass spyglass that Raoul threatens to steal, Raoul gives her armored gauntlets that are padded for warmth and “nearly as flexible as cloth gloves.” Kel gives Raoul the best of the griffin’s feather molts, and Raoul is very touched by it because those are very valuable things that Kel could have sold at great profit. Kel’s first salon turns into a series of them, with Buri and Raoul presiding, and an awful lot of cultural exchange happening between the Yamanis and the Tortallans, because they can freely ask questions of each other and nobody shames or embarrasses them for doing so.

The Ordeals happen, and ten go through without incident, and then, three days after that, Kel goes back to the Chamber and decides she’s going to have another go with it.

Something bound her from shoulders to feet, locking her arms against her sides and her legs together. The binding was tight, though she saw nothing but the clothes she wore. Another band lay over her mouth, gagging her.
She stood at one end of a long room. Next to her was a line of people who passed without looking her way. One at a time they advanced to a table nearly ten yards from Kel. She could smell them, it was so real: soap, damp wood, fear-sweat. She knew most of them: Lalasa’s friend Tian, Bermin from Owlshollow, the girl whose doll she’d found at Haresfield, the girl’s mother, Shinkokami, Jump, Peachblossom, Lerant.
Kel twisted frantically, trying to get free, with no luck. She could not move or utter a sound. Fighting to catch her breath, Kel stared at the table. Duke Turomot, the Lord Magistrate, consulted a long sheet oc parchment; Ebroin of Genlith, the steward for the lord of Stone Mountain, manipulated a large abacus as the duke spoke. They say behind the table. Joren of Stone Mountain leaned on it, beautiful in black velvet, his hair pale gold against the dense black. He smiled mockingly at the people in the line.
“Lalasa Isran,” Ebroin said clearly, taking up his abacus.
Kel wrenched hard at her bindings. A muscle pulled in her neck, sending a white-hot streak of pain into her skull.
“Dressmaker,” Turomot said, drumming his fingers on the table. Ebroin touched a bead on the abacus. “Breeding age, looks well when clean, strong enough for servant’s work, rarely ill.” For each comment, Ebroin flicked another bead on the abacus. “That is all of worth about her,” Turomot said.
Ebroin calculated a sum on the abacus and wrote it on the slate, which he passed to Joren. The young man looked at it.
“Not interested,” Joren said. “Cull her.”
The centaurs Greystreak and Iriseyes walked out of nowhere to grab Lalasa’s arms. They dragged her to one side. There another centaur clubbed her with a spiked mace. Lalasa fell into a pit into the floor.
“Shinkokami, Yamani princess,” Turomot said, reading from his parchment. “A good bride price, connections, and an alliance with the Yamani Islands. Embroiders, dances, knows the use of weapons.” Ebroin flicked abacus beads and wrote a new total on his slate.
Joren inspected it. “Fifty gold crowns. Not a copper more. It’s risky, taking a woman who uses weapons.”
Turomot nodded. Graystreak and Iriseyes took Shinko’s arms to lead her out.
Bernin stepped up. “Bernin of Owlshollow,” Turomot read from his parchment. “Trained shepherd, a guide—”
Joren raised a hand. “I have no need of shepherds or guides,” he said. “Cull him.”
Kell fought her bonds to stop this, whatever it was, without success. Joren kept Haname and Kel’s mother, sending them to some unknown place, then ordered that the Haresfield girl, Yuki, and Jump be culled. They were clubbed down as Kel fought to do something, anything. She was trying to scream to Peachblossom to run when she fell.
She was in the Chapel of the Ordeal, pouring sweat, her throat raw from smothered screams. Her body ached furiously.
Trembling, she staggered to her feet and stared at the Chamber door, fists clenched. You won’t beat me this way, she told it silently. You will never beat me.
She stalked out, letting the door slam behind her. Only when she reached her room did she allow herself to cry. The sight of those familiar bodies in a bloody heap would haunt her for weeks.

We also know that Kel does not back down from challenges, no matter what they might be issued by, even though the Chamber presumably has an infinite number of ways to get at Kel based on whatever fear is foremost in her mind, or whatever other terrifying experiences she has obtained since the last time she tried to beat the Chamber. She’s still giving it her all toward trying to beat her current, most important obstacle. Everything else seems to be going okay, but the Chamber seems to be able to scare the shit out of her any time it wants. Probably because it can reach into Kel’s mind and pluck out whatever would be the most frightening thing for her to experience and force her to live it out in perfect reality. That all the other knights have also experienced this kind of raw fear, fear based in their own actions and beliefs, makes it pretty clear as to why nobody talks about what they experienced in the Chamber. You don’t talk about those kinds of terrifying experiences with anyone, except maybe a trained therapist in a very private setting. Tortall doesn’t have therapists, and also probably doesn’t have the requisite privacy, either.

Things get closer to Kel’s real turn in the Chamber next week.

Our time marker in between chapters 7 and 8 is “December, in the 17th year of the reign of Jonathan IV and Thayet, his Queen, 456.” The timing on these stories is important enough to get those kinds of markers, rather than the system of using Kel’s birthday that we did in the last book. Possibly because being a page is pretty regimented and something like a birthday would be one of the important time markers in that situation, where being a squire means that Kel has a lot more movement and freedom going around for herself and she’s getting bounced around to a lot more places than she was as a page. Birthdays will still be important to her, I’m sure, but we’re using a different system of marking time here as well.

At the end of the last chapter, Kel and Raoul received word that the person responsible for kidnapping Lalasa had been found, and that they were requested to return to the capital for the trial.

Squire, Chapter 8: Content Notes: Injustice, smug rich boys, yet more sexism, contempt of court and Crown

The way back to Corus is miserable for Kel, her horses, the griffin, and everyone. It’s sufficiently miserable and wet for the griffin that when Kel places him inside her jerkin, the griffin simply closes the opening and stays put without trying to hurt Kel at all. (She did threaten to put him back in the insufficiently warm and dry pouch if he did, but the griffin wouldn’t have paid it any mind if it wanted to hurt Kel.)

We get the summary version of what happened at the end of the last book, where Lalasa was kidnapped to make Kel late for the exams and therefore make her repeat all her page years, and that when Kel did find Lalasa, she then also had to break herself of her fear of heights because the only way down from Balor’s Needle was down the rickety, rusty, outside stairs, buffeted by the wind and with nowhere to look that wouldn’t trigger Kel’s fear of heights. The narrative says that the ordeal made Kel lose her fear of heights, although earlier in this story, when Kel was fighting the centaur, and others, it felt and played in the narrative more like it was no longer a crippling fear, but that she still can be affected by it. Lalasa and Tian take a look at Kel and Raoul when they get in, and basically take over the important parts, sending for food, water, providing light, and beginning to get them both out of their clothing.

Only when they reached underclothes did Raoul recover enough to retreat to his own dressing room to await the arrival of his bath.
Kel watched, too exhausted to protest, as she settled the griffin on his platform and set it by her fire. Technically Lalasa was no longer her maid, and Tian had never been in her service, but it was so nice not to have to do anything but what she was told. At last Kel settled into a tub full of hot water to soak off the road’s grime.

Ah, so being turned into a businesswoman and buying her shop did get Lalasa out of service as well, which she probably had to buy her way out of from Kel, in one way or another. I don’t know if there’s a standard price for this, or whether it’s something set by the noble they’re in service to, but I can imagine that royal commissions and the continued use of Lalasa for her sewing skills made it easy enough for Lalasa to gather all of the necessary funds to set herself up and no longer be a servant. I would guess that some habits die harder, and also, Kel was a good person to be in service to, so Lalasa probably doesn’t mind doing things in her wheelhouse for Kel, even if there’s not any maid-noble relationship officially any more.

After being settled, soaked, and fed, Kel and Raoul get briefed on the progress of the trial. The kidnappers gave their evidence, and said who their employer was, because they followed him back on the suspicion that he might not pay them for their services. With that evidence, the man responsible is currently being held in “the waiting room for nobles.” Lalasa doesn’t understand what took so long, but Raoul suggests that it took so long because the noble was on their estate, and the Crown had to wait for them to come off the place where they were functionally immune before the arrest could happen. Tian wonders why someone would leave their immune grounds, but with who it turns out to be, it makes perfect sense.

“Unless he wanted to earn his knighthood,” Lalasa interrupted, her voice hard. She looked at Kel. “He has not been named, but servants talk. Sir Paxton of Nond has attended each day. So too has Ebroin of Genlith, who is the Corus steward and representative of Lord Burchard of Stone Mountain.”
When Kel saw who the noble culprit had to be, she almost laughed. Paxton of Nond was the knight-master of Joren of Stone Mountain, Kel’s old foe. Of course it would be Joren. He’d pretended he had changed as a squire. She had wondered if that were so. Now she knew.
“His father’s steward,” murmured Raoul, as much to himself as to the three young women. “Not his father?”
Tian coughed delicately. “I heard one of the Stone Mountain men-at-arms say the old lord refuses to treat this as if it means anything.”
“That sounds like the old stiff-rump,” said Raoul. “If arrogance were shoes, he’d never go bare-foot.” He looked at Kel. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“I’m angry,” Kel replied, her voice soft, one fist clenched. The others stared at her, startled. Kel rarely showed temperament of any kind. “Whatever was bad there, it was between me and him. He didn’t care about Lalasa or Jump. He didn’t care who got hurt, so long as he could fix me. And to put a smile on his face, and tell me how I might get a husband, when he was groping for a plan like this…!” She got to he feet, unable to sit any longer. “Lalasa, Tian, thank you. My lord? If you’ll excuse me, I need to think a bit.”
Roul nodded. “Kel…”
She bowed to him and retreated to her rooms, closing the door firmly behind her.
Joren, she thought, clenching her fists. This time he’s gone too far. He’ll pay for it. The Crown will see to it he does. Lalasa and Jump will have justice. And when it’s over? He can pay some blood to me, when all the legal chants and dances are done.

This is a good way of telling the reader who is new to the series with this book that while Kel doesn’t have many buttons that you can push, endangering others, and especially others who can’t defend themselves, is definitely one of them. That Kel doesn’t march off and wallop Joren or otherwise extract blood first suggests that she understands how bad that would look for her to do in the middle of the trial. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Kel is also remembering those comments that Joren made to her, things that couldn’t even necessarily be called backhanded compliments, because there wasn’t any actual compliment to them, just snark and the belief that Kel should quit now while she still might be considered pretty enough for someone to marry.

In the court itself, however, once Duke Turomot tells her to take any challenges she might have outside, and Jonathan and Thayet appear to observe the proceedings from their royal thrones, the trial continues. The two men who kidnapped Lalasa are brought in to testify, where their testimony will result in a sentence reduction.

“In exchange for their testimony, their fifteen-year sentences to the mines will be reduced to ten.
Kel clenched her hands. Reduced? They should be laboring in mines or sweating and freezing to clear roads, anything, for more than fifteen years, not less. They had no right to sit in this warm room with Lalasa! Her mind knew that few people lived more than eight years at hard labor, but her heart wanted them to bear each and every moment of punishment they had earned, with no reductions, even if they weren’t alive to serve the entire setnence.

And also, one might note that Kel gets really bloodthirsty when someone close to her gets her, or someone that she has responsibility for, gets hurt. And even more so when that person is brought into a conflict they had no need to be brought into. Someone who knew that about her might try to exploit that, but as Joren found out when Kel went up the Needle, you need to be damn sure that she’s going to break or rage out at you, instead of methodically picking you apart and making your death long and painful.

Also, if the average life expectancy in the mines is eight years, I wonder if it’s the same for the army, and therefore the people who we think might have escaped immediate execution have instead had it traded for slow execution at hard labor or being at the front lines of the many war fronts of the kingdom. Tortall has a lot more blood spilled inside than the narrative would have us believe, or Jonathan and Thayet would have us believe. If not the hangings and the executions, or the issues that pop up with rebellions or attacks, even the sentences for criminals tend toward the ones that will kill someone, even if it is slowly and gradually. Makes the fantasy kingdom fine if you’re a noble and on the side of the heroes, but everybody else is definitely not going to survive for long.

The trial proceeds, with the two men pointing out Joren as the man who paid them, and the advocate who had been hired by Stone Mountain calling into question the credibility of the men, suggesting that they were pointing at Joren because they needed to finger someone important to save their own skins. “Yatter on, you cake-mouthed money britches,” is the reply from the stand, even if it produces a couple blows from the guard for being rude ot the noble. I personally think it’s a pretty good insult that doesn’t have to do with anyone’s parentage or religious affiliations. The advocate continues, impugning the law court’s mages, before Joren stops the trial out of boredom.

“I object to the use of law court mages to determine the truth of Squire Joren’s testimony,” continued the Master Advocate. “They would not practice inquiry magic if they were fit to make a decent living—”
“Oh, stop this currish babble.” Joren’s cold, clear voice brought all eyes back to him. “Ebroin and Muirgen have talked at me for days. I’m weary of it.” He looked at Duke Turomot. “I paid those idiots to seal the wench and stash her on Balor’s Needle. I paid a—”
Muirgen and Ebroin darted to Joren. Kel glanced at Sir Paxton; the knight sat with his head in his hands.
“Squire, Master Joren, I beg you, not another word,” Ebroin said hurriedly. “Think of your family, the smirch to your honor. There are ways to handle—”
Joren shook off the steward’s restraining hand. “For a man who comes from a great family, you talk like a merchant. My honor?” His voice rang throughout the courtroom. “What honor has a nation when a female lives among men and pretend to their profession of arms? What honor is there in forcing a good, brave knight like Wyldon of Cavall, a hero of the realm, to accept this creature into training and to allow her to continue?” Kel, humiliated and infuriated, stared at the floor.
“I was not forced, Joren,” Lord Wyldon told him. “She earned her right to stay, as much as—more than—you lads. Against odds that might have broken one of you.”
“I understand you are honor bound to say no, my lord,” Joren said quietly. “The conclusions I draw are my own.”
You still don’t believe him, thought Kel. Though you know as well as I do that it would just about kill Lord Wyldon to lie. She raised her head to stare at Joren. She didn’t want him thinking she couldn’t face him.
He spat on the flagstones in front of her and faced Duke Turomot. “I had her coming and going. Either she failed in her duty to her servant—and I’d have made sure the world knew the wonderful Keladry had shirked her first obligation as a noble—or she’d be so late she’d have to repeat the whole four years. No one would do that.”
Except me, Kel thought, staring at that blond head. I would have done it, just to spite you.
“My lord Duke, you and the other examiners made allowance for her, because certain interests in this kingdom mean her to succeed. You allowed her to take the big examinations alone. Of course, she passed.” Joren crossed his arms over his chest. “So. I paid those men. I give you leave to sentence me under the law.”
Duke Turomot leaned forward. He looks like the griffin about to hiss, Kel thought. “You are fortunate that, by law, a magistrate may not challenge for insult, Joren of Stone Mountain. I submit you knew that much before you found the courage to say such things of me and my examiners. But Mithros waits in judgment, you arrogant puppy. You may twist our law to suit you, but he weighs your every act, and will find you wanting.” He sat back, gnarled fingers gripping the granite ball he used as a gavel. “With regard to your actions, the law is specific. According to The Laws of Tortall, section five, chapter twelve, paragraph two, in the matter of one noble’s interference with the body servant of another noble: the offending noble must pay recompense for the loss of that servant for that period of time, in addition to the time which other servants spend in attempting to help or find the servant thus interfered with; the expense of any care of the servant following the interference; all expenses incurred by the noble with regard to court prosecution; and those costs incurred to bring said noble to could. I therefore fine Stone Mountain one hundred gold crowns, fifty of which are to be paid to Squire Keladry of Mindelan, five to the woman Lalasa Isran, and forty-five of which will be paid to this court for its expenses and those of the Watch.”
“One hundred gold crowns!” gasped Ebroin of Genlith. “The wench was gone not even a full day!”
“Silence!” barked Duke Turomot, slamming the granite ball on the brass disk. “You lost your right to speak when your master confessed! The Isran woman earns commissions as a dressmaker for ladies, including, at the time of the interference, her royal majesty. I but include due concern for those delayed commissions.”
“Stop whining and get them their filthy money, Ebroin,” snapped Joren. “As far as I’m concerned, this country’s going to the sewer-mucking merchants.” He strode out the door by which he had entered.
For a moment Kel thought Duke Turoimot, rapidly turning purple, would send the Watch to drag him back. King Jonathan cleared his throat. It caught the magistrate’s attention; when he glanced at the thrones, the queen shook her head slightly.
Sir Paxton got to his feet. His face was gray. “Your majesties, your grace”—he looked at Kel&mmdash;
“Squire Keladry, I apologize for my squire’s behavior. I did not know about his crime. Had I know he would act in this fashion, I would have gagged him myself.”
Duke Turomot held up a bony hand that still shook with rage. “No noble is responsible for the utterances of other nobles at court, unless there is proof that they are cohorts in the endeavour under study. You are a knight of good repute and standing with the Crown, Paxton of Nond. It is known that you persuaded your squire to face this court. No one believes you had knowledge of Squire Joren’s behavior. I would suggest, however, that you use the time remaining of his service to school him in humility.”
Sir Paxton bowed and left through the main door.

I would have liked to see Duke Turomot hold Joren in contempt of the court and the Crown for his behavior and apply additional penalties for that contempt, as well as the insults delivered to the Duke and his examiners for the statement that they let Kel have a less difficult exam or let her through on a lower standard than they would have for any of the men. But I’m sure Thayet has a good reason for telling him not to do it.

That said, Joren using the opportunity to grandstand and deliver those insults not directly related to his confession probably also should have gotten himself held in contempt. And with that kind of conduct committed by a squire, I also would wonder whether it would be appropriate to declare that he has failed the necessary conduct for becoming a knight of the realm, and therefore is dismissed immediately and with prejudice from his attempt to do so. I’m sure there would be a lot of squawking about that, but he admitted in open court that he did it deliberately to prevent a page from becoming a squire, and that he sees no honor in a realm that allows women to become pages, squires, and possibly knight. (I’m also a little surprised Alanna didn’t roast him on the spot. She must be elsewhere, doing something important for Tortall at this particular moment, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it got back to her what he said, and that she arranged to make sure he should learn some humility before he goes mouthing off about women again.) If he doesn’t see it as an honorable path, then I see no reason to keep him on it, for fear that he will do even more dishonorable acts before he attempts his knight’s Ordeal. There’s probably more politics to it that we’re not seeing, but it certainly seems like the Duke is well within his rights to demand this kind of punishment, and then leave it to the Crown to overrule him on it.

As it is, the Duke is not having mercy on anyone else for this situation, including Kel, who’s not quite sure that what she witnessed is, in fact, what would be anywhere in the same stadium as justice.

Ebroin had been in heated discussion with the Master Advocate. He looked up. “If it please the court, I require three days to raise so great a sum.”
“You have until sunset on the first night of Midwinter,” barked Duke Turomot. “Each half-day you are late, a third of the sum will be added as penalty, subject to the same division as the original sum.”
“A third!” cried Ebbroin. He bowed his head as Duke turomot glared at him. “Very well, my lord Duke.”
Kel had boiled since she heard the sentence. Now she stood. “My lord, I would like a question answered, please.”
The magistrate looked at her. “Speak, squire Keladry of Mindelan.”
“Did I hear right?” Kel fought to say each word calmly. “Joren had Lalasa kidnapped, roped, gagged, blindfolded, and dragged here and there in the dark. Then she was left on an open platform where she could have rolled into the opening to the stair and fallen to her death, and all he gets is a fine? For the inconvenience?”
“That is the law,” said the duke. “A maidservant belongs to her mistress. Squire Joren deprived you of her services—I understand she worked at that time on a gown for her majesty”&mmdash;he looked at the queen, who inclined her head—”and caused disruption to her work later as a result of disordered nerves. I remind you the woman was also granted five gold crowns in my judgment.”
“Lady Kel, please, hush,” Lalasa begged, tugging on Kel’s arm. “The ones who did it are going to hard labor, that’s what matters.”
“They wouldn’t have touched you if he hadn’t paid them,” Kel told her. To the magistrate she said, “If he’d kidnapped me he’d have gotten prison or trial by combat.” She clenched her hands so tightly that two griffin wounds reopened. “But for her he tosses a few coins in our laps and goes on his way.”
“Your tone borders on the insubordinate,” Duke Turomot said, his eyes like ice. “My clerk will send you the law pertinent to cases in which nobles interfere with those of common blood under the protection of other nobles. These laws have been in our codes for centuries, squire, worked out by men far wiser than you. If you have no more questions…?”
Lalasa and Raoul tugged Kel back down on the bench. “Choose battleground and enemy when you have a chance to win,” Raoul whispered in Kel’s ear. “Mithros himself couldn’t get old Turomot to admit a law is unfair.”
“It’s like me giving you my wages,” Lalasa added softly. “I told you, most nobles keep nearly all of what their servants earn—it’s their right. Maybe you’re too full of ideals to do it, but other nobles aren’t. My lady, don’t make enemies here because of me!”

But Kel definitely is still on her horse, and so, when Jon and Thayet get down, Kel asks for a word. Wyldon tells her not to do it, but Raoul says to have her ask for a private word. Which she does, and the king and queen grant it to her, and the two monarchs, Kel, and Raoul retire to a law clerk’s office to have that word, and that’s the end of Chapter 8. Lalasa begs off from being part of the audience, and Kel belatedly realizes it’s because she doesn’t want to jeopardize her commissions with the queen if Kel is particularly rude to the monarchs.

Kel is definitely on the warpath for Lalasa, but also because she has just witnessed the chapter title, “The Price of a Maid,” and she does not like that someone’s life was endangered, and all that the law has to say about it is to give a fine for the inconvenience of it all. Because it’s a lady’s maid, someone of common blood, instead of a noble. This is plainly unjust, unfair, and Joren used his platform to denigrate Kel, Wyldon, the examiners, and to imply that the royal couple are interested in seeing Kel’s success to the point that they’re making everyone ignore how unfit and unsuitable Kel is to the business of knighthood. Speaking that implication aloud should have gotten Joren held in contempt, and quite possibly, gotten the disapproval of the Crown in some way that would indicate how far in the doghouse Joren is without it ever tipping into open hostilities about the matter. The kind of thing where if Kel decided she wanted to bloody Joren’s nose repeatedly, everyone else would look the other way because Joren deserved it, for however many times Kel decided he needed it. The Duke is acting within the boundaries of the law, of course, and is unlikely to stray outside of that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he were looking for whatever excuse he could use, within the law, to punish Joren for his actions. That late penalty definitely sounds like the court saying “if you even think about screwing around, we’re going to bankrupt you and you’re going to like it.”

So, next week, Kel gets her audience with the monarchs to express her frustration at the travesty she just witnessed, and the smug snake who just made a mockery of the courts and the law.