#and stripedroseandsketchpads for having wonderfully intriguing thoughts about these two

[thecrenellations]

I have realized perhaps the least meaningful thing they have in common, which is that their youth is exaggerated notably - to me - often. Marthe’s in her late twenties in Pawn in Frankincense, and all of her companions, including her younger brother and a 15-16 year old, constantly refer to her as “the girl Marthe.” Güzel refers to her as “the girl Marthe”!

Of course, most of these people don’t know her age at that point, and this isn’t a quirk of the characters as much as it’s gender dynamics/sexism shaping how she’s seen. Oonagh, significantly older than Marthe, is still a girl. Women in my own culture and time and daily life are often still girls. But sometimes I think about the beautiful catharsis of the Volos scenes and then laugh just a tiny bit at Francis reciting “I have a young sister” to his older sister.*

And then we have “the boy Will Scott,” from everyone’s perspective, in The Game of Kings, which … is fair!! He’s young! He’s learning! No matter what he intends, this is a coming of age story for him! But then you learn that the man who calls him “infant” in chapter 1 is (probably?) about two years older than him and absolutely has that information, and, actually, Richard Crawford has never been more sensible and in touch with human relationships than when he asks his brother if he’s told Will his age.

He then graduates from boyhood in the two months before The Disorderly Knights,** but in Checkmate we get the joy of Philippa, only slightly older than he was in the first book, remembering “a boy called Will Scott.”*** When you’re forever a boy to someone who knew you best when she was about 13 and you were a married man with multiple children … now that’s a legacy. *it’s true, he won’t know for a few years! But still… **ohoho, what happened in those two months? ***Philippa has many other interesting thoughts in this scene, including listing Jerott, who she and Francis just had dinner with, as another of her husband’s admirers with the qualifier “perhaps, long ago,” and later coming to the conclusion that Francis is forever in love, not just with someone else (this one is on him, too), but with her mother. What a night!

I’ve gotta appreciate the range of the Lymond Chronicles, which manifests in many ways … and one of them is that my favorite characters in the series (besides the guy himself) can be Will Scott and Marthe, two opposite people who, if they met, would probably hate each other, at first and possibly forever. And I love them both so much.