[45] My poor Surma.

Hmmm... Surma's best friend has a symbolic necklace, and Annie has a symbolic necklace (noticed by Rey).

Possibly Annie and Anja's necklaces are more significant that just jewelry and Surma would only pass her's on upon her death.

Anthony would have sent the telegram to Anja and set up all the details. Did Surma not want Annie to go to school here? She never even mentioned it to Annie... or at least never mentioned she'd worked here.

Anthony set her up then disappeared.

Something like that, yeah... I suspect that we'll find out later on that for some unknown (as yet) reason, Annie and Surma literally could not be apart. When explaining why she lived in Good Hope, Annie said that she and her mother "couldn't bear to be apart", and I think it runs deeper than emotionally.

So then, finding out that Annie was at the school (and thus apart from Surma) would mean that Surma -had- to be dead.

Interestingly, that would also mean that Reynardine knows what Surma's condition was that had her in the hospital, and he's not telling Annie.

Check out page 592. Reynardine says "you have a fire in you child, a fire that belonged to your mother". Of course this could just mean she's inherited her mother's fiery personality. But could it mean that Annie actually took something from Surma?

Do you think this means Surma left the court because she was pregnant or because she was sick or for some other reason?

Maybe too few readers follow the goings-on in this forum.

I think it's mostly that some people want their own theories to be true even when the author has explicitly stated that they aren't.

I always thought that Annie had a disease or something when she was born, and Surma gave up her life by switching the disease to herself or something among those lines. Either way it was Surma's life for Annie's.

So, somehow Rey knew Annie would not be there if Surma was alive.

If Surma was alive, Annie would not be there... therefore... what?

• Surma didn't want Annie there?
  
• Surma couldn't survive with Annie away from her?
  

Any more?

This means Surma was ill before leaving the court since Rey knew about it.

Dunno how much bearing this has on other hospitals, but when my aunt was in ICU at MD Anderson it seemed like we had a death every two or five days, just in our little section of about eight rooms. Surma's room didn't look like like the rooms there, though (they had glass doors and a window for the nurses to look through). Could Antimony have been wandering around other floors, or did Muut perhaps come through Surma's floor on his way to the ICU or the hospice floor?

It's very easy to misconstrue even direct statements. For example:

Tom stated directly that Anthony Carver is Annie's father, but he left off the "biological" qualifier. The statement leaves room for him to be an adoptive father (which would not make him any less her father).

Personally, I want to believe that Carver is Annie's father in every sense of the word. That girl just doesn't need the drama of finding out that someone she associates with or is even close to is really her biological father.

Maybe she had a spinal injury? Do we ever see her up and walking around, other than when Annie was guiding her spirit to the afterlife?

HEY, JUST FOR FUN, HOW ABOUT A BASELESSLY-EXTRAPOLATED AND EXTREMELY UNLIKELY POSSIBLE EXAMPLE?

Surma was caught up in the conflict between the Court and the Forest when Reynardine was captured. She never got over the guilt stemming from her involvement in the incident, and secretly allied herself with Coyote in hopes of finding a way to rescue Reynardine from his captivity.

Just after the birth of her first child, while she was still bedridden, some planning emergency arose and she attempted to secretly cross the Annan Waters in her etheric form to get to the Forest, but met with Jeanne along the way. In the ensuing etheric scuffle, her 'spine' was severed by the ghost, crippling her both etherically and physically, for upon barely managing to return to her body she found herself unable to walk.

There was no acceptable explanation for why she would have been astrally projecting into the Forest at such a time without telling anyone. Unwilling to confess her plans and incriminate herself and her new family as traitors, she kept mum about the reason for her injury and claimed to have fallen mysteriously ill. She and Anthony left the Court for Good Hope on some convincing excuse, to forestall any investigation or examination of her wound by Court specialists, but since this would rob the Court of its Medium, they left under the condition that Surma would teach her own daughter for as long as she was able, then either return with her to the Court when she was fully trained or send her to the Court to complete her training should Surma's mysterious illness prove fatal. This suited Surma perfectly well - if Antimony was a fully-trained medium when they returned to the Court together, then she would be able to defend herself against any retaliation attempt if the truth came out, and if she returned after Surma's death, there would be no way to interrogate/examine Surma and discover her etheric injury and thereby her crime.

Although Anthony spent the next twelve years searching for a cure for her etheric injury, it refused to heal, much like Antimony's face cut, and Surma's life force gradually drained away. It was a slow and gentle but inevitable way to die. She did her best to train her daughter, and kept the secret of her injury from her so that she could not incriminate her family if the worst happened.

Finally, she passed away quietly in her bed. The strange cause of her death left her outside the jurisdiction of any psychopomp, leaving her own daughter to complete the first stage of her training by guiding her to the next life. It was the first and last time since her injury that the once-barefoot, laughing Surma had ever walked on her own two feet.

And when her friends saw that her young daughter was indeed coming to the Court, untrained and alone, they knew what must have happened.

THE ABOVE IS TOTAL NONSENSE, A MERE EXERCISE IN CREATIVE WRITING WILDLY EMBROIDERED ON WHAT LITTLE WE CURRENTLY KNOW. PLEASE DON'T TAKE IT SERIOUSLY.

...I do genuinely wonder if it was a spinal injury, though. :3