[Dragaera] Seventeen Maybe Different Jhegaala Spoilers

[Scott Schultz]

> *spoilers space that won't do you any good if you get the digest...*
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> Just guessing here, but I'd imagine that she was well acquainted with his 
> father's opinions about Witchcraft. They were Easterners living in a 
> ghetto and, by his father's lights, trying to be Dragaerans. Eastern lives 
> are short; in the ghetto of South Adrilankha I shouldn't be surprised if 
> many are very short. Additionally, it was a time of plague and sometimes 
> famine (the Interregnum and shortly thereafter) and everyone probably 
> feared that they might be struck down.

I should be a bit more specific here, since the Interregnum is ancient 
history from the viewpoint of any Easterner of Vlad's generation.  The Merss 
family and, presumably, the Taltos family migrated  to the Empire shortly 
after the Restoration. There was some kind of mass migration of Easterners 
around this time, presumably due to plague, that was a primary factor in the 
establishment of South Adrilankha as a ghetto given over to all of those 
smelly uncouth Easterners. We don't really know what that was - Vlad gets 
vague and is clearly talking about things he assumes, not facts he "knows', 
when he talks about the Interregnum and the years following it.

In any case, I'd say that she expected a short life and took at least this 
one step to help insure the safety of her son when he needed it. Probably 
just following an omen.