I realized as I sat down to write some fic that I needed a real timeline for this series. I haven’t been involved in the online fandom for very long, so it’s quite possible others have one this before, but I love picking through things like this, so I made my own. I’m posting it on tumblr in case anyone else would be interested!
The Thief is the only book that’s tightly plotted to the point where I can actually name almost every day in the book; for the others I’m using significant events +the next day or +two days later or what have you. If a day is given with a + it means I have concrete proof of when the next thing happens, either because the narration or a character says something like “the next morning” or “two weeks later.” If there’s a ~ it means I’m guessing, and I give reasons for my estimate. A lot of the travel in Queen of Attolia and A Conspiracy of Kings is estimated, but it is very consistent.
In cases where large chunks of time pass with only a few scenes described in detail (like the timeline of battles in the war, or Sounis’s time as a slave), I’ve focused more of my attention on the bigger-picture stuff and skipped over the smaller scenes.
As an aside: in the course of compiling this, I may have unsnarled some of the things that bugged me about the timing of Costis/Ornon’s arrival(s) in the Mede Empire. It might be pure speculation, but if it’s not, then the timing and the textual clues are actually extremely clever and I am left, once again, marveling at MWT’s foreshadowing. Everything that initially made me think “that seems weird” or “this is just being handwaved/forgotten about” in KoA, CoA, and the first part of TaT would turn out to have been either foreshadowing or the neat conclusion of a previous book’s political intrigue.
The Queen’s Thief Timeline
Published
DarkestElemental616 