Spoilers for Starpilot's Grave and book-destroying ones for A Working of Stars.
Those dead bodies on Night's-Beautiful-Daughter, the ones with their throats cut. How did they get that way?
In Starpilot's Grave, Llannat sees the throat-cutting in a first-person-point-of-view vision; she thinks she's seeing it through the Professor's eyes. However, the factual details of her vision are entirely inconsistent with A Working of Stars, in which Llannat does the throat-cutting herself, so it's not just a point-of-view problem, like Llannat's differing visions of the first Mage she fought.
It's possible that this explains why Llannat had to come back in time after all, which I just didn't understanding upon reading A Working of Stars: since Arekhon turned out to not be on Night's-Beautiful-Daughter after the events of Working, then someone had to leave that message, otherwise the great working isn't complete. I imagine Arekhon left the vision for Llannat, not wanting to mess with causality or dump too much information on her before she was ready for it. It will be interesting to see how he learns what happened to Ty and Narin, and also any further encounters with Kief down the years. And I still want to know what brought about the First Magewar . . . It's a rich universe for stories.
The authors comment.
James Macdonald writes:
And the visions of Llannat compared with the reality on Night's Beautiful Daughter ... when one is seeing a vision, it's filtered through what you know and what you understand at the time you have the vision. As useful as anonymous picture postcubes, as Llannat has cause to say elsewhere.
If I may be so bold, we wrote the scene in A Working of Stars with a copy of Starpilot's Grave in one hand. My only excuse is that it worked for me, as the way I understand visions to work. (I have a wonderful example from the Ghost Dance religion, which I will forbear from repeating.)
Debra Doyle writes:
What more can I say? Except that as a renegade philologist I derive a certain amount of amusement from the thought that at no point was the message left aboard Night's-Beautiful-Daughter either composed or translated by a native speaker of the language it was written in, and that in fact we provide three different translations of it over the course of the various books.
I, obviously, am just too literal. => I plead the excuse of extropolating too much from the other differing viewpoint visions (Llannat's of the Mage she dueled), where the facts seemed to be consistent across visions, but the interpretations differed. (Though I did notice, and was amused by, the differing translations.) Anyway, thanks for stopping by; I appreciate the information.