Amazon.co.uk Review
Orphaned when his trapper parents failed to come back from the forest one day, young Darian is resentful when apprenticed to the damaged magician Justyn. He sees little point in the few tricks he manages to learn, and what has magic done for Justyn save leave him under-employed, sick and despised in a remote village? Then half-human invaders take the town and Justyn dies heroically helping people escape while Darian looks on in horror. Lost in the forest, Darian is rescued and recruited by the mysterious corps of Hawkbrothers... This is both a decent account of a difficult and disturbed boy coming to terms with his past and his future and a glance at new aspects of the world of the Heralds of Valdemar Mercedes Lackey has created in her other fantasy novels. Too often epic fantasy neglects the consequences of magical warfare for the peasants on the ground--the villagers' bad treatment of Darian and Justyn is a result of the necessary shattering of magic in earlier books, and Justyn is a brain-damaged veteran of those wars:
"But, like a lover scorned, his magic has left him as well. Much of what he had learned, the blow to the head had driven from his memory; he had trouble seeing mage-energies with any reliability, and the mind-magic he had was so seriously weakened he could no longer lift anything larger than a needle for more than a few moments".
This is a chastening and perceptive book about growing up and coming to realise that the people around you have reasons for being wrong. --
Roz Kaveney
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
The latest in the internationally bestselling Valdemar sequence of brilliantly imagimned fantasies. Darian is a young boy living as apprentice to the wizard Justyn in Errold Green, a small Valdemaran village. He is unwilling to hone his skill in magic as he believes it is quicker and a damned sight more efficient to achieve your ends by purely physical methods. Darien's parents disappeared on a hunting trip into the forest, the villagers believe they have fallen prey to the monsters created in the Mage storms, that they themselves may have been changed. But Darien believes differently. When Errold Green is suddenly and devastatingly attacked by a force of men accompanied by monstrous creatures of magic, Justyn makes a dramatic last stand , destroying the village in a cataclysmic spell that Darien witnesses. Escaping into the forest, Darien is chased down by 3 of enemy only to be saved at the point of capture by the mysterious Hawk brothers. It is the beginning of a new life, born out of the ashes of the old, where he will for the 1st time realise the worth of the magical talent he has always wanted to rid of.
by Mercedes Lackey
by Larry Dixon
by Mercedes Lackey
by Mercedes Lackey
by Mercedes Lackey
