#beka cooper

do they have one of the Conté crest rings? maybe there's a page of Beka's journal alongside recreations of pieces of evidence from reports, in a display with a plaque explaining different "dog" slang terms and a preserved piece of a tattered old dog uniform, complete with dirty white puppy trim and the hint of a bloodstain

a leather scrap described as the stirrup from the saddle of the Lioness's first mount, Moonlight. in the hall of wartime events, there's a rusty old piece of scrap metal that resembles a jointed finger ending in a knife, and a drawing of the killing devices copied from a soldier's letter home

a Stormwing feather, a Bazhir burnoose, a to-scale tilting field with a broken lance in a display, a knife made by Raven Armory, a shukusen carried by the Yamani ladies in waiting who attended Queen Shinkokami...

How often do you remember that a major premise of the Beka Cooper books was that their society was slowly falling back into patriarchal and traditional roles of womanhood? And that it took like 200 years after that for them to get back to women in leadership positions?

Tear down a whole palace for him.

Kill her attackers and leave them in a fountain.

You know.

(Not using any names to keep this post spoiler-free for folks just going through the tag!)

Personally for me I think I was so mad about the twist that I wrote off the entire book, which is a shame because I think Mastiff actually kind of... justifies the other two books in the series? It takes otherwise standalone stories and places them into a larger Tortallan context, and it does its best to fill in some lore gaps as well (the Sight, the Ysandir, the existence of wild magic prior to Daine). It's a good book, and I'm a little embarrassed that I judged it so hard based on the final few chapters for so long. (In fairness to me, I was 16 at the time and not very inclined towards nuanced critiques.)