I was working on a post about characters from Way of Kings and noticed something a bit confusing. I'm not saying it's a "typo" or something but I thought it could be worth raising.
In the Prologue we have the quote:
Likely in a way that ended with people in all countries—from distant Thaylenah to towering Jah Keved—speaking Alethi to their children.
This says that Jah Keved is a "country".
In chapter 3, we have:
Shallan nodded gratefully, still clutching her drawing pad. Out in the city, there were people everywhere. Some wore familiar clothing—trousers and shirts that laced up the front for the men, skirts and colorful blouses for the women. Those could have been from her homeland, Jah Keved. But Kharbranth was a free city. A small, politically fragile city-state, it held little territory but had docks open to all ships that passed, and it asked no questions about nationality or status. People flowed to it.
I'd normally take "homeland" to mean country, but it can also refer to smaller regions. Anyway, this against suggests that Jah Keved is a country, or some region within a country.
Later in chapter 3:
She stepped off the gangplank into the furious activity of the docks, messengers running this way and that, women
in red coats tracking cargos on ledgers. Kharbranth was a Vorin city, like Alethkar and like Shallan's own Jah Keved.
Which implies that Jah Keved is a city. Alethkar certainly seems to be the capital city of the Alethi kingdom.
Later in chapter 3:
Shallan grinned—she hadn't expected being out on her own to be so liberating. Her brothers had worried that she'd be frightened. They saw her as timid because she didn't like to argue and remained quiet when large groups were talking. And perhaps she was timid—being away from Vedenar was daunting. But it was also wonderful. She'd filled three sketchbooks with pictures of the creatures and people she'd seen, and while her worry over her house's finances was a perpetual cloud, it was balanced by the sheer delight of experience.
And:
She raised her freehand in a sign of need, and sure enough, a masterservant in a crisp white shirt and black trousers hurried over to her. “Brightness?” he asked, speaking her native Veden, likely because of the color of her hair.
So Veden is her language and she can also be described as being from Vedenar. So what's the relationship between Jah Keved and Vedenar...? It doesn't seem likely that Vedenar is part of Jah Keved - rather the opposite, that Jah Keved is a city in Vedenar, whatever that is.
It's a bit confusing. Given the world setup, having many city-states of various kinds, like Monaco in France for example, doesn't seem so unlikely. I can imagine a bunch of isolated cities, some loosely grouped into countries. So is Jah Keved a city that is also a country, with estates around the city? Is Vedenar a continent, or some similarly large region, with a shared language and tendency for red hair (also seen in chapter 2), with many separate countries one of which is Jah Keved? This mixing of Shallan being from both Vedenar and Jah Keved is a bit confusing at this stage in the book.
