Leisure and Games
Two days a week and five festival days a year belong to the people who have them, and nearly everything they do with that time is done in company.
The weekend
Mwyn and Stil are the week's rest and most trades work neither. Not everyone gets them: household staff, ship's crews, Roedhaven keepers, physicians, and anyone keeping animals work on days that do not stop and rest in other ways. Mwyn is the day things get done — the washing dried, the mending, the visit across the city, the market at its fullest. Stil is the day nothing gets done, and that is the whole of its purpose.
Games
Three games are played everywhere in the world, and a person who cannot play at least one of them has led a sheltered life: Presluc, the dice; Redrym, the tiles; and Galbrae, the board. See Gambling for what is bet on them.
Evenings
An ordinary evening is the Therplae, somebody's kitchen, or one's own table. A Therplae regular's evening is Redrym, an argument, a complaint about the week, and somebody's son found work; cards and dice go on until the house closes. A city has more for anyone who wants it: musicians in halls, performances, an Animei house, a lecture in Shining Reach that will run long and end in an argument. Forgegate's guild halls hold their own evenings. Eldershore's harbor quarter has music in the street most nights of the year, and the northern cities have never got over it.
Music
Most households make their own: somebody has an instrument and plays it badly, somebody else sings, and on a festival night the whole street can hear it. Stormharbor sings, which the rest of the world notices immediately. A Baner is a record and a Hilae is the machine that plays one; the wealthy own both and everybody else rents from a Raitbach — a record by the week, a player by the week or the month — and a working family that could never own a player rents one for a festival week. Cinema houses show Animei, drawn frame by frame and advanced by clockwork, the finest carrying sound on a record driven by the same mechanism. Eldershore presses most of the records in the world and exports both. See The Trades#The trades by kind.
What the wealthy do
Money buys privacy, which is the scarcest thing in the world. A private concert is musicians engaged for a room of guests, and the room is the point. The salons of Shining Reach are where a great deal of the republic is actually decided. Collecting is the great wealthy pastime — records, coins, catalogs, instruments, Vessa varieties — and breeding animals is the other, Vaelith lines above all. What almost nobody does is hunt: a hunting party is an expedition with outriders and a reason, and the Roeva on a wealthy table was bought from somebody who took that risk for a living.