Teres

GoldFeather, may I suggest you take your daughter on one of these trips and 'suffer' a 'tragic accident'? You'll be better off for it.

Indeed she will... True, she and her daughter do get (relatively) happy endings, but they can hardly know that at the moment. Given the stuff going on with the Prophecy, trying to cross the northern tundra or the Widowmaker Sea might as well be better.

'Quern' or 'quernstones' is just the type of handmill they're using. 'Flat' suggests that they're rubbing the top and bottom stones back-and-forth instead of round-and-round. So if you know what a quern is it's descriptive enough.

That is if you know, which I did not at all! Thank you for teaching me and I will correct that immediately. And done!

Looks at what I just wrote They don't need to settle down to farm, and I'd expect the ones which did farm would outnumber the others. (You do need to farm to settle down though, since otherwise they'd run out of food.)

Exactly... At the least there should be a sizeable group that does, simply because cultures do have variation. I can certainly understand why some Avar would not want to farm (presumably in part to distinguish themselves from "Plains Dwellers"), but it is just so ridiculous that all the Avar are supposed to do so!

(And, of course, the Avar should be quite effective at farming, given their "growing skills". With a lot of Banes devoting themselves to that and some more sensible Bane-making practices, villages should be absolutely possible.)

So, where's the commemoration of the dying of the Earth? Or is that too much of a harvest festival?

I suppose that would be too Avari; they really do get little to do compared with the Icarii.

It's because celebrating Beltane (which Beltide is clearly based on) with sex was very, very common.

That is perfectly fine, of course, but it does bug me that Avar/Icarii sex is apparently not allowed, or at least strongly frowned upon outside of Beltide. If it is because of Gorgrael, which is the most reasonable explanation, I hardly see how a night of revelry is much good for that, even if it is followed with abortions. (Come to think of it, this could be circumvented quite easily if there were a social norm about not engaging in (possibly) reproductive sex during Beltide.)

Hang on, Pease just asked about Azhure's erotic dreams. That's incredibly personal! She shouldn't ask about that!

Yes, it really is quite invasive... and I will note that next part. It actually feels to me like Douglass put that in so Azhure could be put in an embarrassing situation, for the Drama.

The Sentinels are as bad as the Riders when it comes to information control.

Oh, there is no doubt about that. I cannot even say for sure that the Riders are worse in the end... since the Sentinels's refusal to think about anything but the Prophecy has worse consequences eventually.