I hope this first paragraph isn’t too overly-poetic for you. I have a tendency to dabble in writing poetic language, and can veer into sections of prose that are a bit over-written. But, my editor didn’t strike this down, so I assume it’s all right.
The things Vin talks about in this first scene are, essentially, the things that will come to form the plot of the entire series. In the original drafts of the novel, she worried about these issues much earlier in the book. However, I backed off on them to let the siege take form first.
It’s not that these worries about the Deepness and the past aren’t important—they’re VERY important. And, they’ll play a big part in this book. The armies and politics, however, are the established plot of the novel. This book—book two—isn’t about the deepness. It’s about the “What Next?” So the characters overthrew the empire. What’s next? In my opinion, what they’re doing now–struggling to keep something going, rather than tear it down—is far more difficult than anything they did in the first book.
This grueling process is going to have a powerful influence on their characters, and make from them the people they need to become in order to deal with the events of the final book. In a way, that makes this the most important—and most interesting—book of the trilogy. It’s the one which is about character over plot.
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