On Lader and Gen's childhood

[hazelwillow.livejournal.com]

Spoilers spoilers spoilers! Beware!

I have been trawling through various books to figure this out...

Gen was no more than ten when he was forced to kill Lader, possibly younger than that.

Read on and weep with me...

“Sophos started to say, “Your mother, did she--” and then stopped when he realized what he was asking.
“Fall out of a window when I was ten? Yes, but not out of the Baron Eructhes’s villa. She’d been dancing on the roof of the palace and slipped coming back in.” (TT, 1998 edition, pg 215)

So, Gen was ten when his mother died.

We know he "did not wait" after her death to declare his intention to be the next Thief of Eddis to his father, and that they fought in front of the whole court:

“When his mother had died, Eugenides hadn’t waited to tell his father his intentions to be the next Thief of Eddis. His father, the loss of his wife still fresh, had been enraged. Eugenides and his father had fought, both of them exercising their grief in anger with each other, in front of the entire court.
The cousins, who idolized the minister of war, increased their attacks on Eugenides, and bad feelings grew until Eddis moved him out of the boys’ dormitory and into the only free room that she could think of, an anteroom to the rarely used palace library. (QoA boat edition, pg 55)

So he'd be ten still during this fight, presumably, since it happened very close after his mother's death.

It's hard to know how long he was in the dormitory before Eddis moved him out, but it sounds like the fighting with his father precipitated the increased hostilities with his cousins, which made Eddis move him into her library. So perhaps not too long, several months or a year??

"Earned his tattoos, Cleon?" Eddis had lost all patience. "He killed his man before he left the boys' house!
[...] Eddis had always known what precipitated the horrendous shouting match between Gen and his father when the minister of war had tried to force his enrollment as a soldier. She knew why he hated the business of killing so much." (RotT, pg 272)

Lader died before Gen left the boys dormitories.

Either Gen had two horrendous shouting matches with his father in front of the court, or the shouting match after his mother's death where he declared his intention to be the next Thief is the same famous shouting match where Gen tore up his enrollment papers to the army and declared "in front of an embarassing number of witnesses," to never take a sword by the handle unless his life was in danger. I understand that his mother being dead means not only that he was grieving, but that he was now eligeable to inherit the Thief title directly from his Grandfather. And as the Thief, he would have full control over who and when he must fight and kill (or so he expected). He says in TT that he became Thief to avoid the killing:

"I had become a thief, to avoid the killing. See where that had gotten me." (TT)
"It is like a sheepdog who suddenly turns on the sheep," he said. "It feels utterly right in the moment, never afterward. That's why I wouldn't let someone else send me into battle. I never wanted to fight until I believed it was neccessary."

So the fact that he had had this experience of killing someone already was what was behind his desire to become Thief, not soldier.

As the Thief, he'd have control over who and when he killed (or so he thought; obviously, as the fight in TT shows, it isn't always easy to defend yourself without causing death. This casts Gen's anguished reaction to that death in TT in a new light; it was not the experience of killing someone that was new, but the fact that as Thief, he'd been no safer from doing so and avoiding something he'd already given so much to never experience again. How awful. How painful the aftermath of killing Lader must have been.

It is possible that maybe there were two famous shouting matches, and that the killing happened sometime between the first shouting match and his moving out of the dormitories, but I think the evidence points more to it being an event that happened before or when he was ten, likely before his mothers death, and that it was why he wanted so badly to be Thief when inheriting that role was suddenly opened by her death. He would not have to fight at anyone else's instruction again.

It also explains why he empathized Attolia so well, seeing her having to do cruel things, and indeed why he is so able to understand people and show compassion to them.

Comments

[whataliethatwas.livejournal.com]

You said this better - I agree