Beguilement

Lois McMaster Bujold 2006 Buy from Amazon.com

The first few chapters of this story begin with rather unusual and confronting events. Fawn Bluefield is traveling to the town of Glassforge, hoping to find work and start a new life away from her overbearing family. She tries to avoid trouble by hiding from a patrol of Lakewalkers, only to find herself kidnapped further down the road by two bandits. One of the bandits though is not human.

Lakewalkers hunt Malices, also known as Blight Boggles, and are surrounded by rumours of dark magic and mysterious rituals. Dag is a Lakewalker who has lost his left hand, and he wears a series of tools attached to an arm holster over the stump. He rescues Fawn from attempted rape and together they destroy the Malice, but not before it kills Fawn’s unborn child and she miscarries. They spend the next few days together at an empty farmhouse, and he cares for her while she recovers.

Some of the Lakewalker abilities are quite interesting, not least their ‘ground sense’. Apparently this is the ability to sense a kind of energy that all things have and living creatures have stronger ground. This allows Lakewalkers to sense where things are, influence animals and insects to a minor degree, and sense emotions. It even allows them to tell whether a woman is currently fertile or not. Dag calls Fawn Spark for the brightness of her ground.

They also have certain customs related to the weapons used to kill Malices. A sharing knife is one that has been made from the thighbone of one Lakewalker, and has been used in the death of another. If a Lakewalker has chosen to, the knife is slipped into their heart when they are dying, which makes it ‘primed’ and ready to be used to destroy a Malice. There is a problem now with one of Dag’s sharing knives. It wasn’t primed before he and Fawn destroyed the Malice, but now it is. They decide to take it to Dag’s community to show the Makers and try to discover what has happened.

However, the problems really begin when Dag and Fawn fall in love. Lakewalkers do not accept people who aren’t Lakewalkers, who they call ‘farmers’. Every other time that a farmer has fallen in love with a Lakewalker, it has ended badly, and the Lakewalker community has driven them away. Much of this novel is a love story, and Dag and Fawn try to overcome the difficulties caused by their relationship, which also include their age differences.

Although this has strong fantasy elements, so far it has more romance than fantasy adventure. That doesn’t make it any less enjoyable, and the human relations between all the characters are interesting and insightful. I’ll be interested to see what the next novel reveals.

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