silver

(but also, fortunately for him, missing out on the terrible toddler years?)

Very true! There were definitely parts of the 0-4 timeframe that I would've been OK missing out on, haha.

I believe there are probably Easterners there, too (and I'm sure Morrolan would enforce politeness towards Easterners via swordpoint if necessary) since Morrolan has that circle of witches. I assume those are predominantly all Easterners if not all.

I think there's got to be, for those reasons, yeah -- he has a Circle of Witches, who are probably all Easterners, since I don't think we ever hear of another non-Easterner witch other than Morrolan himself.

I was discussing this with another friend, and we both wonder why these other Easterners never seem to cross Vlad's path. Does Vlad just never talk about them because he likes feeling like he's Morrolan's primary Easterner/Witch Friend? Is Morrolan keeping his other witches/Easterners away from Vlad because Vlad's Jhereg ways would be a bad influence?

(My personal favorite hypothesis, as a Vlad/Morrolan shipper, is that Morrolan is doing the equivalent of a nerdy girl pretending to be bad at math so she can get tutored by the hot guy in her algebra class, keeping all his witches away from Vlad so he can have plausible deniability to ask Vlad for witchcraft tips (which he certainly does a bunch, at least according to Vlad). And, like, Vlad is for sure an extraordinary witch -- the spell in Taltos certainly is proof of that. But if Paarfi is to be believed, and I do think he is reasonably trustworthy on this particular score, Morrolan does know at least one other extraordinary witch, and for way longer than he's known Vlad.)

And given usual mob dynamics, I can't imagine one can simply 'walk away' that easily.

Yeah... We do get some interesting insights in this later book, so I will definitely be curious to see what you think when you get to it.