Troubled young Fawn Bluefield seeks a life beyond her family?s farm. But en route to the city, she encounters a patrol of Lakewalkers, nomadic soldier?sorcerers from the northern woodlands. Feared necromancers armed with mysterious knives made of human bone, they wage a secret, ongoing war against the scourge of the "malices," immortal entities that draw the life out of their victims, enslaving human and animal alike.
It is Dag—a Lakewalker patroller weighed down by past sorrows and onerous present responsibilities—who must come to Fawn?s aid when she is taken captive by a malice. They prevail at a devastating cost—unexpectedly binding their fates as they embark upon a remarkable journey into danger and delight, prejudice and partnership . . . and perhaps even love.
The Sharing Knife, Volume one, Beguilement (2006) 361 pages by Lois McMaster Bujold.
I love Bujold's writing, and judging from the number of Hugos that she's won, I don't think I'm the only one. With her books it's not read 40 pages and pick it up again tomorrow. It's I'll read one more chapter, man I'm sleepy, but just one more chapter, and pretty soon I've finished the book. I read "The Mountains of Mourning" in Analog (May '89) and "Weatherman" (Feb '90) which convinced me to buy one vorKosigan novel after another. After about the second or third one she became and has stayed my favorite author. Right through the Chalion series and now this one.
In The Sharing Knife, Bujold creates a rustic world with lakewalkers and farmers. Farmers includes all of the ordinary, non-magical, human population. Lakewalkers are what we would consider magical, though to themselves, groundsense is as natural as sight or hearing. Their world has random outbreak of malice (what the farmers call blight bogle). The lakewalkers spend most of their energy into patrolling for and destroying the malices.
Fawn, a young farmer girl, has run away from home, thinking of going a village or two away from her home and getting a job there. Dag and his lakewalker patrol are called in to fight bandits outside of Fawn's destination, Glassforge. The bandits are actually part of a malice. Fairly quickly we have Fawn getting captured and rescued a couple of times, the second time helping with the rescue and saving Dag's life as well. Then the story takes a romantic turn. The two of them being thrown together, by themselves, much of the time.
In exploring this romance, Bujold is showing us the two cultures. Usually the farmers and patrollers keep there distance from each other. We get to see the stereotypes, prejudices, fears, and misconceptions that the farmers have about the lakewalkers and vice versa.
Dag and Fawn go back to Fawn's home, not returning Fawn to her home, but just letting her kin know that she is OK. And so volume one finishes with Dag, Fawn and her family.
I'm really trying not to give away too much plot, because I think this is a great story. Really easy reading. It may be quite a lot like a romance novel (I've never read anything from the romance shelf, just SF and mysteries, and maybe a couple classics), but it's got the great SF/Fantasy element of the groundsense/malice, it's got humor, and the characters are well constructed.
I finished this one Friday and I've already finished volume two, and have started on volume three.
