Tania asked Ann Leckie:

How old is Mercy of Kalr?

Ann Leckie Hmm. To be honest, I'm not a hundred percent certain. That's the kind of thing I only know if it comes up in the course of the story. Offhand I'd say, though, that Mercy of Kalr is younger than Justice of Toren, by a few centuries perhaps.

Editing to add--so, it turns out I actually said how old MoK was, in AS. And the answer is "a bit less than a thousand years" at the time of those events. Sheesh. My excuse is, that scene, in that form, was actually added/revised pretty late in the process. Also, I wrote it more than a year ago. Sorry about that.

The moral of this story, though, is that not infrequently readers have a much more detailed memory of a text. The writer has seen every single version, including the ones that were just idly considered. And it will have taken months, if not a year or more, between turning the ms in and readers reading it. So some details can be fuzzy, in a way that might seem odd to readers. Well, it seemed odd to me with texts I knew really well when a sequel made a glaring continuity error. "But...but...how could you forget that Bren already had his own apartment?????" I understand exactly how that could happen, now.

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