> anyway, what I've been wondering about is why people > like Aliera and Morrolan and Sethra choose to be > Vlad's friend. Sometimes Morrolan will give Vlad a > "look of disgust" and sometimes it seems like Aliera > can't see past the fact that he's an Easterner. Yet > when Vlad gets in a jamb, they are there to help him. > It's like the friendship is all about duty with > nothing about affection for a friend. > > any insight on that? > I'm guessing that you haven't read all of the Vladiad yet. Your opinions on the subject may change as a result. As it is, this question is one that Vlad himself deals with every so often in his attempts to figure out who he is and where he fits in an alien Empire. (Alien in the cultural sense, rather than in the Bug-Eyed-Monster sense.) Of course, the ultimate irony is that Vlad still hasn't truly understood that the Empire is HIS Empire as much as it is Morollan's and Aliera's. If he ever came to that understanding and thought of it as "home" instead of seeing himself as an outsider then he might actually come to an understanding of what Cawti and her band of social engineers are trying to accomplish. It will be interesting to see what happens to Vlad once he learns about Vlad Norathar, as seems likely to happen in the upcoming novel. All that to say that Morollan and Aliera DO view Vlad as a friend as well as an Easterner. The Vlad stories flit around in time so you get different views of how these friendships develop. In one book, you'll find Vlad and Morollan defending each other to the death while the next, in publication order, finds them insulting each other and nearly coming to blows over their respective social standings because the later story takes place at an earlier chronological time. Morollan and Aliera are Dragons, which means that you're never going to find Morollan getting drunk, hugging Vlad and saying "I LOVE you, man!" There's a level of formality that goes with being a Dragonlord and Morollan and Aliera will always be subject to that formality no matter how casual the relationship might be. Not to mention that baiting each other is a game that Vlad, Morollan, and Aliera all enjoy in spite of, or because of, their friendship. To the left, though, these people are concerned about each other's welfare above and beyond whatever "professional" considerations exist, and they spend time together socially beyond what would be required for "duty". Morollan and Aliera have both put their lives on the line for Vlad, just as he has done for them. They persist in associating with him despite the damage to their reputations that undoubtedly comes from being regularly seen with an not only an Easterner but a Jhereg to boot. They look out for Cawti also, and are obviously keeping tabs on Vlad's family BECAUSE he's not there to keep tabs on them himself (as of the end of _Phoenix_). I think the quintissential example of the actual friendship between these people occurs near the end of _Dragon_. Vlad gets in touch with Morolloan psychically and without preamble. (The difficulty of psychic communication is in direct proportion to how well you know someone. Fentnor, for instance, requires Vlad to concentrate for several seconds in order to get through to him.) Morollan doesn't even question why Vlad would want him there immediately, he just comes. In the aftermath, as Morollan and Aliera argue over whether she might or might not have been able to fight against a Great Weapon, Aliera notes "Besides, Cawti was going to put a knife in her [Sethra the Younger's] back." Cawti curtsie's amusedly in response and Vlad makes a sardonic note about how he's surprised that Aliera noticed. The atmosphere here is not that of employer to employee or noble to noble. It's that of friends who know each other well and understand their positions in relation to each other. It's noteworthy that Cawti is also included in the circle of friends, something that wouldn't neccesarily be true if it was strictly about duty between Morollan and Vlad. (Aliera actually has no "duty" relationship to Vlad at all, though her feelings for him being a "soul-brother" do influence her to some extent.) Ultimately, the question is one that Vlad himself has to wrestle with because it illustrates one of the central contradictions of his life. He's an Easterner, an outcast, yet he's also a member of the nobility. He's an alien in an Empire that he hates for the brutality and scorn that he grew up with and that is inflicted daily upon his fellow Easterners, yet all of his closest friends and associates are not only Dragaerans but also some of the pillars that help uphold the Empire that has so mistreated him that he became an assassin because it gave him an excuse to make money killing Dragaerans. Vlad's entire identity is a contradiction, which is no better illustrated by the fact that he has devoted friends who will risk everything for him personally, yet who will calmly talk about making war on his ancestral homeland as if it shouldn't bother him that they're doing so. What Vlad doesn't yet understand (and this goes back to the beginning of this rather wordy post, making it a Cycle in and of itself, *heh*) is that Morollan and Aliera don't think of Vlad as "an Easterner". They think of him as "A Dragaeran (culturally, not racially) who happens to have Easterner ancestors." Vlad has spent so much of his life building an identity around NOT being a Dragaeran that I almost think it would break him if he ever truly accepted the idea that he himself is a part of the Empire and that being "Dragaeran" may mean something other than being an "elf" or a "dwarf". Maybe that's something that would be a theme in _Vallista_ if the series ever gets that far.