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Belated Yuletide reveal post!

Patience, Tenacity, Luck: Some months after Penric's Fox, Thala investigates the disappearance of a trainee shaman. (5,075 words, written for [archiveofourown.org profile] DesertVixen)

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I signed up to write for Lois McMaster Bujold's Chalion series on something of a whim, so naturally that was the only one of my recipient's fandoms I recognized. Such is the way of Yuletide! Anyway, her other fandoms seemed to lean toward female detectives and/or amateur sleuths, which the details of her Chalion prompt corroborated, so I wrote a case!fic centered on Thala, the junior locator of the Father's order we meet in Penric's Fox (and then, alas, see no more since the Penric novellas do a significant time- and location-jump immediately thereafter).

I flatter myself that these days my attempts at whodunnits are somewhat less dire than they were when I was twelve years old, but mysteries have never been my personal cup of tea (nothing against them; they just don't grab me) and they're annoying to construct on a technical level. But it's a good kind of annoying -- the sort of finicky logistical challenge that makes you say "HA!" and throw your hands up in glee when you get the last stubborn piece to click into place. :)

I did initially want this to be a longer story, with Thala accompanying the pursuit and then talking with Kereneth and Adallyr about the challenges women face in male-dominated and/or socially prestigious professions on the way back to Easthome, but my time management skills have not appreciably grown less dire over the years. So I picked a logistically and thematically reasonable endpoint and called it a year. *wry*

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Elizabeth Culmer

December 2025

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