Warning: There Be Spoilers Ahead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . >Raoul, the Vicomte de Bragelone loves Louise de la Valliere. This love is, >at least at first, returned. But after she joins the royal court, she is >successfully wooed by the king, and becomes his mistress, thus breaking >Raoul's heart. >The parallel is not close, but definitely seems present, at least to me. Throughout these books Brust has paralleled Dumas, sometimes directly but often in more subtle ways. For example, Adron's disaster (and our heroes failed attempts to stop it) is the mirror for the death of King Charles I of England (and the Musketeers failed attempts to stop it). I think that the Raoul/Louise/King Louis XIV parallel is simply that a forbidden love has caused Piro to set himself against the throne. >Well, Brust is not trying to parallel Dumas' Three Musketeers series >exactly. That would be boring (in my opinion). He's got just enough in there >that the parallels amuse & surprise the reader, rather than making the >Khaavren romances predictable to those who have read Dumas. The divergence from Dumas that shocked me was Pel putting friendship above ambition and switching sides to fight for Zerika. As a Dumas fan, this totally blindsided me. OTOH, the gods make a comment at the end that do leave Pel's true motives a bit up in the air. I do wonder how many of these characters he's going to kill off in the next book, but my gut instinct is that it will be fewer than many people here have hypothesized. For one thing, Brust the author might want to keep them around to use in future Vlad novels. After all, if he's going to be writing another 10 Vlad books, he might want to mix things up a bit (it may be coincidence, but there's a textev in an early book to Vlad once dating an elf named Ibronka). Another thing to think about is that there are a whole mess of non-canonical Musketeer books that Brust could continue to draw from (some allegedly written by Dumas, although probably written by his workshop, and others written years later by other authors entirely). One of the "by Dumas" books deals with Aramis in his later days and the unknown son that Porthos had and another "non-Dumas" book is Aramis' memoirs. To reset that in the Vlad world, is there any textev about wether or not Zerika has a current Discreet? A book dealing with the Duke of Galstan and the politics of Zerika's court today would be great. My wild (and unsupported by textev) theory is that Piro will now end up as the Demon of the Jhereg. It's hard to reconcile with some of the things Vlad has said about the Demon, but not impossible, and it would certainly make a good dramatic set up for a future Vlad book. BTW, more details about the Dumas and non-Dumas Musketeer books can be found at: http://www.hoboes.com/html/FireBlade/Dumas/ Charley Sumner charles_sumner at harvard.edu "That's brilliant! They've hid the information in plain sight by disguising it as a web page."