The problem with Tara Abernathy's timeline
Something is wrong with Tara Abernathy’s timeline… but is it a purposeful point, or author error? I’m still not sure, but let’s take a look at the problem and *theorise*.
This is one of those way-too-deep-dives about something that is ultimately probably a typo rather than a grand conspiracy, so if that’s your jam then strap in.
Warning: when I told my friend about this her response was “lol I love your brain” so take that as you wish.
What do we know about Tara’s age throughout the series?
“He did not ask where she had been for the last eight years, or what happened there, or how she earned her scars.
When Tara left home at sixteen, she signed on with a traveling merchant, from whom she learned the fundamentals of Craft.”
As covered in the unofficial timeline article here, we have a few details about Tara’s age at different points in the series. In Three Parts Dead we are told she left home eight years ago at sixteen, making her twenty-four at the start of the book. This is quite definitive, as seen in the quote above. We can approximate her age throughout the different books based on this starting point and inferences about how many years are between each book. You can read the full justification of the timeline here, but for simplicity’s sake, here’s her approximate age in each of the books in which she features:
Three Parts Dead – 24
Four Roads Cross – 25
Ruin of Angels – 28
Dead Country – 30
Wicked Problems – 30
All of Tara’s books (so far) take place over quite short timeframes; Two Serpents Rise is absolutely ages, maybe almsot a year, and Full Fathom Five is a few months at least, so these may skew ages one way or another, but above is all we have for sure. And, anyway, her timeline issues come before the series starts.
A Hidden Schools education
So far we know Tara’s age at the point she left Edgemont, and how old she was when she returned. In Three Parts Dead, Tara tells us she “took a job on the next merchant’s caravan that came through town, and wandered with them for a few years”, which is an unhelpfully vague unit of measurement, but we’ll keep it for now.
We also don’t have confirmation about how long it takes to complete a degree at the Hidden Schools, but Tara and Daphne mention junior year so one can presume a standard degree is four years long as in the American college system.
“My last clear memory’s junior year spring break. My junior year, not yours, when we went to the Fangs.”
Daphne was already at the Hidden Schools when Tara joined, so I take from this that Tara was a sophomore at this point rather than being a senior, but with no other information we can’t be sure.
The timeframe between Daphne’s last clear memory and Tara being thrown from the Hidden Schools is unclear. We know from later books that the period in which Tara was under Denovo’s spell was at least months long, and that she “woke up” seeing Daphne in pain (DC 181), but not how long that time had been. Tara graduated early, but given the fact that Tara doesn’t appear to have missed all that much in her education, I believe she was likely near the end of a four year degree when she torched Denovo’s office and was thrown from the Schools at the start of Three Parts Dead.
However, I am aware that Americans can also take loads of extra credits earlier in their degree and thus finish degrees early in a way that isn’t possible in the system I’m used to - if that’s right, Tara could have been in an earlier year but have studied so hard that she had most of the knowledge she would expect to gain in four years. AND YET, the Hidden Schools is more like a US law degree even though there doesn’t seem to be a pre-Hidden Schools undergraduate option, and I’m pretty certain you can’t crush a law degree into less time.
It seems likely that she was at the Hidden Schools when she was 21 based on a conversation with Abelard.
“Where did you learn to climb?” she asked after she recovered her breath and patted her hair back into place.
“The boiler room,” he said with a nostalgic smile. “Thousands of pipes, all shapes and sizes, and ladder after ladder. There’s no better place than the Sanctum of Kos to be eleven years old. Though maybe there are better places to be sixteen,” he conceded.
“The Hidden Schools are not a good place to be either eleven or sixteen. Fine place to be twenty-one, though, if twenty-one is something you wanted to be.”
So far, so good. If Tara’s 24 and nearing the end of a four year degree, she probably got to the Hidden Schools at 20 or 21 depending on when in the year she a) got there, and b) has her birthday. That means from 16-20/21ish she was wandering with caravans, meaning four or five years.
All that to say - we have no idea how long she spent in the Hidden Schools, but I’m going to guess at 3-4 years. That means there’s a maximum of five years left for her to be wandering the desert in her eight years between leaving home and coming back.
So what’s the problem with the timeline?
When we reach Four Roads Cross and it all goes wrong.
“She came from a podunk farm town near the Badlands and worked caravans studying with hedge witches for seven years before she reached the Hidden Schools.”
Seven years!
That would mean she only spent one year at the Hidden Schools, which makes no sense.
Sure, this quote comes from Madeline Ramp not Tara herself and thus could be wrong, but this is the woman who revived Tara’s best friend, put a demon inside her, and turned her to Ramp’s own cause purely to try to freak Tara out and make her doubt herself.
You’re telling me Ramp doesn’t have an accurate account of Tara’s life thus far? It would hardly be difficult to find, particularly with said best friend on your side.
And yes, that’s the only reference of specifically seven years but you don’t understand. This has weighed on my mind for the past four years. It is, as I said in the intro, most likely a typo, but it has been driving me round the bend so here is an article about it.
I never said I made good decisions.
Do later books say anything about Tara’s timeline?
Short answer: eh, not really.
For the long answer, read on.
Although Tara plays a major role in Ruin of Angels, we get very little from her perspective and hear almost nothing from her about timeline - there are, of course, rather more important things at play in Agdel Lex at this point. She mentions the events of Four Roads Cross being “a couple of years back” (RoA 244)
We get a lot more in Dead Country, but Gladstone is rather more circumspect with years. We see ‘all these years’, ‘years since’, and similar phrases used quite often, but there are a handful of precise years and ages mentioned.
“I didn’t reach the Hidden Schools until I was about your age.” Two years younger, but there was no point telling Dawn that.”
As outlined in the Dawn article, we don’t actually have a precise age for Dawn. Tara guesses 17 at one point, but we know for a fact that Tara was still at home at 15 so she certainly hadn’t reached the Hidden Schools then. If Dawn is in her early twenties, this could work quite well.
We hear that Tara killed a cornfield when she was 12 (DC 33), that she left Alikand two years before (DC 120), and that “twenty years ago she’d lain in this graveyard, looked up, and asked the moon to take her anywhere but here.” (DC 235).
So far so good.
But then we get some weird years.
“People Tara hadn’t seen in five years thanked her for her speech. ”
“She’d seen this man before. He’d been ten years younger then, and not dying.”
Tara should not have been in Edgemont either five or ten years ago. Sure, she could be rounding the years, but Tara is a Craftswoman, and Craftsfolk are specific. Five years ago brings us roughly to the end of Four Roads Cross, assuming this timeline is correct, whereas Tara was last in Edgemont six years ago, so I can forgive this one. But ten years? Ten years ago Tara was in the middle of her Hidden Schools education, or potentially still wandering with caravans - decidedly not near Edgemont. The man she recognises is from Blake’s Rest rather than Edgemont itself, but Tara made a point of not coming near her home for eight years so I highly doubt she got close enough to see someone she would recognise a decade later.
This can be handwaved, sure. We could say she went to Blake’s Rest and no further. But I don’t like it.
And that’s before all the fifteen years nonsense in Wicked Problems that I shan’t relitigate here. If the fifteen years between Two Serpents Rise and Wicked Problems is accurate then we can indeed have Tara wandering the desert for seven years then doing a full degree but I ALSO don’t like that because it doesn’t make sense.
Other than said fifteen years nonsense, Wicked Problems again tends to talk about ‘many years’ and ‘all these years’, so we don’t get anything else specific about Tara.
In conclusion
This is something nobody but me would likely notice, it is probably a typo or an in-character error, but it has ANNOYED me for YEARS and so now I feel better having written an article about it. If you scrolled without reading, the tl;dr is:
Tara had eight years between leaving home at sixteen and returning back at the start of Three Parts Dead.
We have specific year dates AND an official timeline to figure out how much time takes place after that. The official timeline confirms that Tara starts Three Parts Dead age 24. Ruin of Angels is five years later. We don’t get Craft Wars dates, unfortunately.
The seven years mentioned by Madeline Ramp is likely an error, either in-world by Ramp herself or out-world by Gladstone.
The five and ten years mentioned in Dead Country are likely rounding errors.
I still don’t like the fifteen years references in Wicked Problems.
Is there actually an issue with Tara’s timeline? Probably not - see third bullet point. Has this driven me crazy for the past four years? Absolutely. Do I feel better now?
…yes.
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