Sea of Time brings Jame to the southern city of Kothifir. It's as colorful and madcap and fey as Tai-Tastigon was back in book one, though in utterly different ways. Jame, too, seems to be getting back to her roots; she even pulls out the thief-weeds for some second-story work. But she is not the same Jame. She's got claws. She's got a mature rathorn ("horse-rhino!", my friend said, looking at the cover art). She's got a coterie, if not a power-base, among the Kencyrath.
I am coming to think that Hodgell has never been good at book-scale story flow. (Eventually I will go back to the early books to check this.) She does wonderful incidents and set-pieces, and terrific characters, and they all get thrown into a bag and shaken until a book falls out. This is not a bad thing. As I said, I think it's what we've always gotten. You go with the ride and ignore the bumps.
The ride, in this case, is excellent. We get a little more about the arrival of the Kencyrath on Rathillien. (Which we already knew was a disaster for all concerned, right?) We get more of Torisen's early life. (Also a disaster, and he's going to have to deal with it someday.) We get plenty of the fluid mad logic that underlies Hodgell's writing at its best. A lot of people fall down stairs, or fall off towers, or both. Sometimes it hurts. I forgot that, even when Hodgell is being gentle and funny, she's also bloodthirsty as heck.