The team may not go by the name “Peacemakers” any more, but they still have that impulse, especially when they’re celebrating the end of war for the foreseeable future. “Hey, none of us (except Syr’Nj) had a problem with Bandit…shouldn’t we go buy her a drink or something?”

Not going on this trip are Byron and Syr’Nj (whose presence would’ve been like a waving red flag to a bull, even if Syr’Nj could come to Bandit with love and forgiveness), Best (who never met her), Sundar (who saw her to the hospital after their team-up), and Fr’Nj. Fr’Nj, as the most peacemakery of all, seems like an odd exception, but I think she’d intuit that any ‘Nj would be too close to Syr’Nj for Bandit’s comfort.

And she may’ve intuited how this would go anyway. Readers loved to debate this one, but I think the main issue’s pretty simple: Bandit is against Byron being alive, and she does not want the friendship of those who feel differently. (She only got along with Sundar because he didn’t think to mention it.) That’s a hard line for her to take, but after she got murdered by one of his berserks and lost a whole town to another, I can’t find it in my heart to blame her for it. Scipio, like Fr’Nj before him, gets a small “saying-what-needs-to-be-said” role in the story just as it needs him for that. Sorry, guys, there’s no way past this one.

FB: You know how it is: just when you think you might be able to get through the reunion, somebody brings up berserker resurrection.