[Dragaera] [Orca spoiler] Rereading Taltos...

[Jon%20Lincicum]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Steve Rapaport" <steve at rapaport.com> 
To: dragaera at dragaera.info 
Sent: Friday, February 5, 2010 6:30:15 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific 
Subject: [Dragaera] [Orca spoiler] Rereading Taltos... 

>Hey, I just re-read Taltos and Jhereg. Steve is *not* just making this 
>stuff up as he goes along. 
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>Orca spoiler mentions here. 
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>I was amazed, especially in Taltos, at the number of clear hints at Kiera's 
>identity. Not only was Steve planning this from the start, he left clues 
>for us. Loiosh wonders if he's met Sethra before, Vlad notices that Kiera's 
>eyes are really old (twice), Kiera shows up in Ferenc's coincidentally 
>knowing stuff that only Sethra should know, (and Vlad later realizes that 
>her presence there was no coincidence, but doesn't follow through on why she 
>knows all that...) 
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>And Kiera's voice is described as low and velvety, just a couple pages 
>before Sethra's is described as low and silky. 

>Also, going through those two books again it becomes clearer in retrospect 
>just how much the young Vlad depends on Kiera, and how closely she's 
>watching and guiding him. She really is the mom he never had, not just a 
>friend who drops by a lot. Sethra is taking more than a passing interest 
>in this young soul, and she obviously knows who he has been, right from the 
>start. 
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>Sethra's later remark (in Issola, I think) about how what Vlad has been 
>"trained for" starts to make a lot more sense now too. What strikes me now 
>is that when I read Taltos and Jhereg the first time, I'd never had the 
>impression that Kiera was manipulating young Vlad's life. She just seems to 
>drop by once in a while. Rereading it now, she seems to be pretty much in 
>total control at the start. I expect Vlad goes through a similar 
>re-evaluation at some point, or will. 


All of this makes me wonder about a couple of things concerning Vlad's father. 

If Kiera was watching Vlad from an early age, why couldn't Sethra have cured Vlad's father with sorcery, rather than letting him die? 

It seems rather heartless to let the father of someone you're watching out for to die pointlessly when you have the power to save them. Even if her desire to keep her alter-ego identity secret would have created a conflict here, there's plenty of ways she could have worked around this if she'd wanted to. 

This raises further possibilities. If Sethra is willing to let Vlad's father die (perhaps seeing this event as necessary to Vlad's development), is it possible that she is, in fact, actually more directly responsible for his death? If the death of Vlad's father is seen as "necessary", then she could have actually engineered the situation. 

If this is the case, what does this say about Sethra? 

Majikjon