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language: English
country: USA
year: 1977
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Riddle-Master trilogy, #2
dates read: 24.10.16-28.10.16, 5.1.18-6.1.18, 23.3.19-2.4.19, 26.5.20-29.5.20, 31.5.22-1.6.22, 11.10.25-18.10.25
Whatever you are gripping to yourself in secret, remember this: Isig holds great bueaty and great sorrow, and I could not desire anything less for it, than that it yields always, unsparingly, the truth of itself.
this is what Patricia A. McKillip’s Heir of Sea and Fire, the second book of the Riddle-Master trilogy and sequel to The Riddle-Master of Hed, is about: the relentless, “unsparing” pursuit of truth.
Heir picks up a year after the end of Riddle-Master, following Raederle, the daughter of the King of An. believing Morgon to be dead, Raederle — and an unlikely band of others — set out north to demand answers of the High One. instead of answers, though, Raederle finds more questions: about the history of the High One’s realm, and about herself. as Morgon was confronted with the unexpected (and, indeed, unwanted) name “Star-Bearer”, Raederle finds herself facing an as-yet-nameless and unwanted identity and a power that she has inherited from the shape-changers who have been hunting the Star-Bearer.
where The Riddle-Master of Hed was interested in the world-historical stakes of unfinished history — the dawning realization that history has not ended and that events from hundreds of years ago continue to reverberate no matter how much those in the present insist that they are past, irrelevant, (merely) “history” — Heir of Sea and Fire is interested in the personal stakes of history, the ways individuals are caught up in ongoing histories and the ways individuals inherit relationships with the past, whether they like or want them or not. try as she might, Raederle cannot escape the history of An and its entanglement with the shape-changers’ power. what she can decide is what she will do with them now, what she will take from those histories to shape the present and the future.
if McKillip’s approach to historical change is in some ways idealist in its emphasis on individual action, it is still, I find, galvanizing in the way it wants us to think about the relationship between past, present, and future. McKillip’s characters are not trapped by history but agents capable of intervening — and, indeed, obligated to intervene — in ongoing histories and systems of violence. we cannot ignore history, nor can we allow ourselves to be consumed by history, like the wraiths of An. we must, instead, face the truth(s) of history head-on. when we do, change becomes possible; another world becomes possible.
this is another way of saying that there’s a reading of Raederle as a kind of race-traitor refusing the benefits of white supremacy. (this is perhaps especially relevant since this book also identifies both Morgon and Danan Isig as brown-skinned, though only in passing and a bit obliquely in both cases.)
(Morgon is also described as “thewed like an oak”. Morgon of Hed is Ripped.)
alongside this aspect of the plot, Heir is also just a stunning mix of intensely emotional and extremely chaotic and fun — it has a certain amount of something I love in Diana Wynne Jones’s work, where every character is responding reasonably (if not always perfectly rationally) to the situations they encounter along the way, and every step of the plot makes sense in the moment, but the end result they lead to is absurd. the opening section in Anuin is devastating, and then the trek north can only be described as a series of wacky hijinks (it sounds like a joke — “the captain of the Morgol’s guard, the second most beautiful woman in An, and the land-heir of Hed walk into a bar…”). one of McKillip’s great strengths as a writer is her ability to balance the fantastic and the lyrical with the wrily mundane, and a lot of things in Heir really encapsulate that for me: it’s an emotional book about a growing crisis that threatens to consume the entire realm, and also it is often — at least to me — extremely funny.
it’s really good.
moods: adventurous, emotional, hopeful, mysterious, reflective