I've just completed a reread of BROKEDOWN PALACE, and it's got me thinking about wizardry, witchcraft, Easterners, and Fenarians. The more I think about it, the less sure I am that Fenarian and Easterner are the same thing. Here's some of the reasons. The map in BP shows Fenario as a roughly triangular area bounded by marshes on the south, and mountain ranges at ENE and WNW respectively. Beyond the WNW mountains lies Faerie (Dragaera), beyone the ENE is the Eastern Plains. In the prologue, Fenarr is said to possibly be from the North Sea. It is described in typical Arctic terms. But the North Sea appears nowhere on the map. From this I assume the Fenario is well to the south of it. Thus north of the map there is likely an unseen area where the Eastern Plains and Faerie border each other without Fenario between them. It's stated plainly that Fenarr is not from Fenario, and more currently, neither is the castle cook Alfredo. As Vlad travels in ATHYRA and ORCA, he encounters an awful lot of easterners whose names don't follow Fenarian pronunciation rules. Lake Fenarr is the Fenarian gateway to Faerie. If we're to take the descriptions in BP and PG with any degree of accuracy, Fenarr leads to the Pepperfields. All in all, Fenarian is *not* synonymous with Easterner. Thus when Verra snaps at Vlad and calls him Fenarian, she is both giving us a clue about Vlads ancestry and about her knowledge of it. I don't really know what all of this means, but it's something to chew over. Also in BP is are several discussions of 'wizardry'. I put the word in quotes because I don't think the Fenarian use of the word matches the Dragaera. Consider: Miklos, Sandor, and Brigetta all learned wizardry in Faerie. All are non-Dragaerans. None seem to have any link to the orb. So whatever power they've obtained, it's not what the Dragaerans would call sorcery. It doesn't look anything like what Vlad would call witchcraft, either. People using it can almost fly (Miklos reports this), extend their lives greatly (Sandor), build magical weapons which can be carried by others and discharged (Sandor, for Vilmos), and so forth. All three learned it in Faerie, and nobody else we've seen has the power. So where in Dragaera are these Fenarians winding up such that they learn these powers? When the young Morrolan was sent East for protection, did he learn witchcraft? Or did he learn these Fenarian skills? Just more stuff to chew over.... -- `The skills needed for dealing with a computer are not simply irrelevant to those needed for dealing with people; they are actually a negative. You cannot reboot, reinstall, or power cycle a human being no matter how desperately they need it.' -- me, in forthcoming article