Character development in the Liaden Universe®

Alert auditors of this journal will have noted that I’ve been reading my own stuff again — notably Local Custom (our publisher made me do it, by way of sending along the proofs for an upcoming mass market re-issue), closely followed by Scout’s Progress and Mouse and Dragon (because I had been…surprised at how well Local Custom had aged and wanted to see if this was true of the other two).  Long story short:  All three books are lovely and I want to write like that when I grow up.

Yes, I’m a sad case.

The three titles together make a nice little trilogy, and a good lead-in to the Theo arc, starting with Fledgling.

It is in Local Custom that we meet Daav yos’Phelium’s elder sister, Kareen.  Let me be the first to inform you that the lady is a stone bitch.  She has very fixed ideas of proper and improper behavior, feels herself more suited to the leadership of Clan Korval than her volatile sibling, which — she may have a point, there, actually — and seems to have appointed herself his personal gadfly.  She is not unintelligent — except for the part where she apparently believes that, if only she harasses him long and hard enough, her brother will become more seemly (this by Kareen’s definition of seemly, which is — stringent) — and has done a good deal of very worthy work for Liaden society, including sitting on the board of the body that oversees modifications made to the voluminous Liaden Code of Proper Conduct, which strives to spell out proper behavior in all of life’s situations.

When we first meet Kareen she’s somewhere in her forties, and her brother, and his cha’leket (an extremely close relationship between two people, sometimes translated as “heart-kin”), Er Thom yos’Galan, in their mid-thirties.  She has known them all their lives, and she has been a fixture in theirs.

And yet, they are not friends.

There are a couple of reasons for that, notably that the boys exist by order of the delm (Kareen and Daav’s mother), the children of the delm and her twin sister (Er Thom’s mother).  The delm of Clan Korval must be a pilot, by the clan internal law — which Kareen is not, a source of some rancor — and the clan is very thin of people.  So — the boys, born as close together as could be managed and raised together — the delm-to-be and the extra.

The necessity of raising Korval’s future means that Kareen lost most of her mother’s attention by the time she was nine or ten, and there was no room for a third in the closed unit of Daav-and-Er-Thom, and Kareen was, besides, much older.

So, Kareen has reasons, perhaps, for achieving Stone Bitchhood.  She might have tried to be a better person, but we’re so often caught up in the day-to-day that we just go on as we have been, and by the time we meet the three of them — Kareen, Er Thom, Daav — they’ve been caught in their pattern for many years.

I, personally happen to think that things may have gotten a little worse for Kareen when she lost her single age-mate in the clan — Sae Zar yos’Galan.  Not that their relationship was as intense as the relationship between Er Thom and Daav, but they’d been…friends.

Then, right before Local Custom, Sae Zar yos’Galan and Chi yos’Phelium die off-world, by treachery.  All three siblings lose in one blow a mother and a kinsman, but the loses don’t pull them together.  Daav and Er Thom are still a closed unit, comforting and supporting each other — and Kareen mourns alone.

Very quickly, things become worse — the boys — the boys who have always had everything their way — in short order find mates.  And not merely mates, but lifemates — each rejoicing in a mystical connection with a lover, and that connection paradoxically only serves to strengthen the bond the boys have shared their whole lives.

Kareen has no lifemate.  She has a long-time lover, and friends, believe it or don’t, but the sharing of souls is not for her.

So, again — there are Reasons why Kareen is how and who she is.

Pardon me for a moment.

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FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT READ MOUSE AND DRAGON, AGENT OF CHANGE, OR CARPE DIEM

Time passes, things happen.

One of the things that happens is that Daav’s lifemate is murdered.  Kareen sees the effect this has on her brother before he leaves the homeworld, his position, his child, and his cha’leket to draw the enemies of the clans away.

Another thing, some years later — Er Thom’s lifemate dies in an “accident.”  Kareen watches for more than a year as Er Thom fades, before far more permanently leaving the world, his position, and his children.

Kareen is now left, the last of her generation in the Line Direct, with the boys’ grown children, with whom she has an uneasy relationship.  Her role as an elder demands that she try to impress the youth with a sense of proper behavior, and she pursues that duty, perhaps a thought too zealously. But recall that Kareen has taken mortal hits, too; it’s every bit as debilitating to lose an enemy as it is to lose a friend.

A little more time passes, and Kareen is one of two adults assigned to keep Korval’s Treasure — that would be the children of the boys’ children — safe from potent enemies, at Runig’s Rock.  She and Luken bel’Tarda are prepared, among other things, to die in order to allow the children time to board a ship and leave the Rock, should the enemy breach their defenses.  I can’t imagine how fraught that time was, not entirely, and I’m the one who put them there.

Moving forward — Clan Korval is thrown off of the homeworld, settles on a backworld, and sends for its treasures and their keepers.

At this point — Just as  the clan settles on Surebleak, it’s been noted by readers that the character of Kareen yos’Phelium changed.  She’s still a High Stickler, and she suffers fools not at all.  But her definition of what constitutes a fool has softened somewhat, she doesn’t needle Val Con — Daav’s son, now Korval’s delm — like she did his father, and does not presume to lesson him on proper behavior — or at least not very much.  She sets about to inform herself about the clan’s situation and the society they have inserted themselves into.  She accepts with a fair semblance of relish an assignment from the delm to create what will essentially be a Surebleak Code of Proper Behavior.  And, when her brother’s mistress arrives at the clanhouse, bent on performing a rescue, she befriends the scholar, and undertakes to teach her — the history of the clan, the Liaden language — and be taught in turn.

And, when her miscreant brother himself turns back up?  She greets him, mildly, and could even be said to be happy to see him.

Why this change?  Well, for one thing, Kareen has gotten older, and I can say from my own experience, that older people do mellow somewhat.  Also, she has had time to come to terms with her loses, and with her life, and if she wishes, now, to reach up and out and try to become that better person — well, who’s to mock her?

Everybody stay safe.