OK, help me out, code-sniffers. If Elery gets Harrowed, I don’t see any way of getting through Ch 1 without el_here being set to false. It either happens immediately following the text describing her Harrowing, or if you’ve tried and failed to stop the Harrowing (so the others die while you’re unconscious), the flag is set when you wake up in the Keriatou jail.
I think every appearance of Elery in bandits.txt is conditional on el_here being true, either directly or through a different flag being set (celery, telery, el_almule) which can only be set if el_here.
So whence the Ghost Elerys?
She was mentioned in another option of the choice you just made: “Joana, naturally.” The aging helot who maintains my family’s groves is very dear to me, if not to my father. I treat the choices as part of the story, including the ones we only read and don’t pick.
Yebben: a decent chance, limited only by my desire to not impossibly over-complicate things. (Which, believe me, is being reinforced by our current debugging experience.) Ganelon is currently zero.
Beasts of burden are some of the most valuable assets there are in a rural pre-industrial society. And remember, you’re getting the fence’s price for the luxury goods you give her/him – not the market price you’d get in an urban center.
So many thanks for all the continuing feedback. 
We’re getting there!