THE SPECUSPHERE:
The Crowthistle Chronicles, book 4 FALLOWBLADE by Cecilia Dart-Thornton
written by Heidi Wessman Kneale

Tuesday, 13 November 2007

Tor, October 2007

Fallow Blade, the final book in The Crowthistle Chronicles, continues on from Book Three: Weather Witch with the story of Asrăthiel Maelstronnar.

Due to her unique heritage, Asrăthiel has inherited some rather unusual skills: weatherworking and immortality from her father's side of the family, stunning beauty and an inability to accept the status quo from her mother's. Asrăthiel also has the ability to wield the sword called Fallowblade that can defeat Goblinkind.

And she's going to need it.

Not content with the bog-standard "we're the good guys, let's go get the bad guys" plotline, Dart-Thornton starts the book in the middle of a world war that engulfs all four human kingdoms of Tir. There's backstabbing, betrayal, brothers pitted against brothers in nasty choices of honour versus love, lies, deceit and attempted genocide. And that's just the humans.

Dart-Thornton loves exploring themes, especially in subplots that pay homage to our ancient myths and fables. She has stories of brothers who must fight against brother, men who choose might over right, with terrible consequences, and the redemption of penitents who have seen the error of their ways—the kinds of stories old warriors and bards like to sing about around campfires.

Asrăthiel is a staunch vegan and believer in rights for all creatures. However, I feel the theme could have been handled better from the beginning. In Weather Witch, Asrăthiel declares her philosophy openly, but we were cheated out of the journey that led to her choices.

A tantalising bit of that journey is carried forward into Fallow Blade. For example, between battles Asrăthiel has a bit of a chat with a king: "I would that this war had never begun," she explains to him, "not least because of the terrible toll humankind's battles take on horses." It's not that she's wrong in her observations, but in the battle preceding this, there is little mention of horses. As a reader, I would have preferred to see more of the battles through Asrăthiel's eyes. I wanted the sort of details that only she would have noticed—perhaps an example of a neglected horse in pain—to give me more of the same understanding she has, instead of her statement of horse rights out of the blue, which all too easily leads to a knee-jerk reaction of "people are dying, crops are destroyed and villages are razed, and you're worried about horses?" For such an important theme in this book, I wanted my sympathy engaged sooner.

Now, the overall presentation of Asrăthiel's beliefs is not a thinly-veiled sermon such as other authors are sometimes guilty of. Instead, Dart-Thornton has deftly used this as a thematic stepping-stone to introduce the Goblins. Once upon a time the Goblins were defeated by the weathermasters and Fallowblade. Now they're back and wreaking havoc on the war-divided humans. These unseelie hordes are riding out of the northern mountains, led by the Goblin King (think David Bowie in Labyrinth), with nary a shred of mercy to their names. They may look human, but they are not. They are very alien in their reasoning, motivations, morals and goals. Dart-Thornton does such an excellent job in portraying their otherness that I can forgive the earlier lack of thematic exploration.

This book is recommended if the prospective reader enjoys rich language, epic storylines and ending that are not so much "happily ever after" but rather, "setting things right". For more information on Dart-Thornton's work, go to www.dartthornton.com