[Craft Sequence] in which I attempt to pull together details regarding Elayne Kevarian

[kaberett]

Three Parts Dead, sort-of thinking idly about her past but also partly a character-building tangent that's in narrator-voice:

Ms. Kevarian had taught herself how to tickle trout an age of the world ago, to hold her hand in the brook and entice with her fingers, to soothe with the light brush of skin against scale, and then, fluid and fast, to grip and lift. She had been five when she gained the knack. Her parents had noticed. Everyone noticed when the word got around, including a young scholar, a boy of nearly twelve whose family was passing through on horseback, bearing him away for study at the Academies, those faltering predecessors of the Hidden Schools. That young boy had asked her how she learned, and she said it seemed natural to her, and he said things that seemed natural seldom were.

Alexander.

Last First Snow, reflecting on her history in Dresediel Lex:

“You look like a Craftswoman.”

She remembered that tone of voice—an echo of the time before the Wars, before her Wars anyway, when she’d still been weak, when at age twelve she fled from men with torches and pitchforks and hid from them in a muddy pond, breathing through a reed while leeches gorged on her blood. Memories only, the past long past yet present. Since that night of torches and pitchforks and teeth, she’d learned the ways of power. She had nothing to fear from this broken-nosed child or from the crowd at his back. “My name is Elayne Kevarian. The King in Red has sent me to speak with your leaders.”

[...]

Planes and angles composed him, like always, like she remembered when they’d first met under flag of truce when she was seventeen and he was twenty [...]

In conversation with Temoc's wife:

“We didn’t like each other at first, either,” Elayne said. “Your father seems to have that effect on people.”

“You did save my life,” Temoc demurred.

“We met during Liberation. He worked with the old gods, and I was an attaché to the Liberating Forces.”

“You fought for the King in Red?”

She nodded. “When I was not much older than you. I joined at thirteen.”

“That young,” Mina said.

“It was a different time. The good people of my hometown tried to kill me when they learned I’d taught myself the basics of Craft; I didn’t even know that what I did had a name. Lots of Craftworkers my age have similar stories, women especially. I ran away to the Hidden Schools—but they were under threat so often back then, I’d just as well have joined an artillery battalion. Soon I entered the fight in earnest. When I met your father I was fresh from the Semioticists’ Rebellion in Southern Kath. Bad business. They sent me here for an easy assignment: help Kopil broker peace with your gods. It wasn’t so easy as we thought. Talks broke down. Peace failed.”

In conversation with the King in Red:

He bowed his head. Shadows lingered in the folds of his robes and the depressions of his skull. “Everything was clear in the old days. You walked the lines like the queen of Death.”

“I was seventeen,” she said. “More seems clear at seventeen than is. You were forty, still fleshy, still human, which imparts a likewise palsied perspective.”

More narrative backstory in the context of a conversation with the King in Red:

The skeleton grinned, of course. “Let’s hope this peace conference goes better than the last one, eh?”

The last one: the God Wars. The failed summit before the final assault on Dresediel Lex. Liberation forces approached the meeting scarred by years of war; Elayne herself had been seventeen and suffering nightmare visions of thorn-beings hunting her through deep jungle. They bore their losses with them to meet with gold-draped priest-kings of Dresediel Lex who deigned to grant them audience. The conference failed in the first minute, but days passed before anyone realized. “Let’s hope,” Elayne said.

I cannot quite work out how these things fit together, the "word spread [at some point between the ages of 5 and 12] and a merchant family picked me up and took me to the Hidden Schools" and "I fled the mob and ran away to the Hidden Schools when I was 12-13". I also can't quite convince myself it's different legs of the trousers of time, and the fan wiki is stunningly unhelpful. If we knew the relative ages of Elayne Kevarian and Alexander Denovo it might help, but I'm pretty certain we're not given those in canon.

Does this all fit together in an obvious way I'm missing? Has this question been answered elseweb? Is it Just A Gaffe? Answers on the back of a postcard, please!

Comments

[aldabra]

I don't see from the bits you quote that the boy's family took her to the Hidden Schools.

[ursula]

I agree: it sounds as if people had noticed she was unusually good at catching fish, but it took a while for the idea this might be a more general talent to percolate.

[kaberett]

Thank you! I am going to rummage around a bit more in the text and see if I can work out where that interpolation came from.

[kaberett]

Oh. Hmm. Thank you for that -- you're quite right. I will ferret some more through 3PD and see if I can work out if there was additional contextual etc that made me think this.

[vass]

You could interpret that first excerpt as saying that she left with Denovo's family, but (at least in that paragraph) it doesn't definitively state that, and "they first met then, when he was passing through, and reconnected later when she ran away at 12" is also a possible interpretation imo.

[kaberett]

Thank you <3 I am going to rummage around in the text some more and see if I can work out where I got that impression, because I definitely did.