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language: English
country: USA
year: 1999
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Nightrunner, #3
dates read: 5.4.26-7.4.26
Lynn Flewelling’s Traitor’s Moon picks up a few years after the end of Stalking Darkness, in the middle of a war: the good queendom of Skala and its neighbor and ally Mycena are being invaded by the evil Plenimarans and their necromancers. with the Good Queen™ Idrilain mortally wounded, the uncertain prospect of succession looms, as does Skala’s rapidly dwindling resource stockpile. Idrilain sends her youngest daughter, Klia — already an able soldier and diplomat, of course — to negotiate a treaty with the long-lived, magical, and extremely insular Aurënfaie.
here we are reunited with our old friends Alec and Seregil, who are enlisted to accompany Klia back to Aurënen, from which Seregil was exiled forty years before. joining them, as well, is Beka, the daughter of one of Seregil’s long-time fellow spies, now a promising young officer in Skala’s army. together they enter what turns out to be a maze of a political thriller, dealing with the labyrinthine politics of Aurënen and the demands of the new, militaristic queen who is turning Skala away from its links with the Aurënfaie and from magic, believing she can defeat Plenimar’s necromancers with force of arms alone.
the editing in this book is noticeably sloppier than the first two books. the writing itself is still serviceable overall, though, with the engaging characters remaining the series’s primary strength; there are just also a bunch of small errors scattered through it: misplaced quotation marks, missing or unnecessary words, and malapropisms, enough that I registered them consistently.
I noticed these partly just because they contrast with how engaging the book is. this is the best-plotted book so far — Flewelling does an impressive job guiding the reader through Aurënfaie politics without either getting bogged down in world-building details or (with some small caveats) sacrificing the narrative’s tension, even as she gives the character’s plenty of space to breathe and have small moments together. I genuinely wasn’t sure where the book would end until the end happened, even as (most of) the mystery had been revealed.
the small caveats have to do with the management of information. while not all the details of the mystery were resolved until the end (there are actually a few still unresolved, but since they went un-commented-on I’m not sure they’ll be picked up again), there were — as happened in the first two books — several interlude chapters that revealed more information to the reader than the characters would have for, in some cases, several hundred more pages. this was a little bit frustrating, I must say! if things had been revealed promptly, it would have been one thing, but as it was I think some of these interludes were things that would have been better off told rather than shown, not least because it jars a bit to be suddenly dislodged from the perspective of the detectives and shown exactly what happened only to then immediately be sent back to the detectives.
more generally, while this book thankfully moves away from some of the things that bugged me ideologically about the first two books, it also introduces some new things that bug me. one of these is the explicit affirmation that sometimes agents of the state need to break the law in order to Do Good. down that road lie cops summarily executing criminals — no thanks! this book is also a little weird about the fact that Aurënen is not a monarchy but an oligarchy, with the leaders of the eleven major Aurënfaie “clans” instead forming a governing council. to some extent this weirdness is in-character, with Skalans perplexed and annoyed by the lack of single leader, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that some of it was authorial.
speaking of “clans”, one thing that pleasantly surprised me here is the extent to which the Aurënfaie deviate, aesthetically, from the R/romantic Celtic-Germanic stereotypes that typically undergird fantasy (not-)elves. while the structure of individual “clans” and the emphasis on a code of honor doe show the influence of fantasy Celticism (with shades also of Orientalist ideas about Japan), other things do not. I was particularly struck by the descriptions of Aurënfaie clothing: the first Aurënfaie the Skalan delegation meet, for example, are a coastal village whose inhabitants wear kilts and only kilts, regardless of gender; meanwhile, the primary signifier of Aurënfaie identity is a headwrap whose style and pattern vary according to clan and region. there’s obviously an alement of tartanism here, but broadly I would say the visual signifiers invoked for the Aurënfaie felt, if anything, more in line with West African and Sahelian fashion, to me (though, of course, they’re light-skinned).
that their seat of government is an ancient, haunted city that had already been long-abandoned by the time the Aurënfaie settled in the region also had a strong Mesopotamian vibe, though perhaps that’s just colored by my recent reading — it made me think that Flewelling’s conception of premodern state capacity (much more in line with the late Bronze Age great powers in the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia than with anywhere in medieval Europe) might be intentionally “anachronistic”. the point, in any case, is that it was refreshing to see these (not-)elves diverge from typical Elves in a series whose setting is otherwise quite generic.
is the book groundbreaking? only in its frank portrayal of Alec and Seregil’s relationship, though the age difference continues to make this weird. but I did enjoy the book, and I will probably read at least the next one.
moods: adventurous, dark, mysterious, tense