Fawn Bluefield, the clever young farmer girl, and Dag Redwing Hickory, the seasoned Lakewalker soldier-sorcerer, have been married all of two hours when they depart her family’s farm for Dag’s home at Hickory Lake Camp. Alas, their unlikely marriage is met with prejudice and suspicion, setting many in the camp against them. A faction of the camp even goes so far as to threaten permanent exile for Dag.
Before their fate as a couple is decided, however, Dag is called away by an unexpected malice attack on a neighboring hinterland threatening Lakewalkers and farmers both. What his patrol discovers there will not only change Dag and hew new bride, but will call into question the uneasy relationship between their peoples—and may even offer a glimmer of hope for a less divided future.
Review:
When I reviewed the first installment in The Sharing Knife series, Beguilement, I lamented its lack of a more traditional fantasy novel plot. Itâ€
s not that it wasnâ€t good; it just wasnâ€t what I expected. This second volume, Legacy, definitely fulfills more of that traditional fantasy role while dealing with the aftermath of Dag and Fawnâ€s marriage in interesting ways.
Since the two books were originally conceived of as one, this one picks up two hours later, with the newly married Dag and Fawn on their way to Hickory Lake, the Lakewalker camp where Dagâ€s family resides. When they arrive, all sorts of questions are answered, though itâ€s the new ones that crop up that prove the more interesting.
Bujold again excels at writing in such a way that it is incredibly easy to visualize the scene and her worldbuilding is unique and thorough. I enjoyed all the details of life at Hickory Lake, including the way the camp is laid out, the clever patrol-tracking system in place in the commanderâ€s cabin, further information on sharing knives and the origin of malices, and the process for settling camp grievances. I also thought it was neat that, like Fawnâ€s family back in West Blue, Dagâ€s family is still unable to really see him for his own worth.
More compelling than this, however, is the fact that the novel deals with the question of what Dag and Fawn ought to do now that they are married. What will become of Fawn when Dag goes out on patrol? What if he doesnâ€t come back; can he trust the camp to provide for her? Will she ever be accepted, even if she displays her cleverness and desire to be useful over and over again? Indeed, itâ€s Fawn who makes the intuitive leap later in the novel that saves the lives of ten people, yet others almost immediately seek to award credit to Dag somehow. Even those who like her, like the campâ€s medicine maker, Hoharie, stop short of recommending a permanent place for her in camp life.
On the more fantasy side of things, Dag is contending with his “ghost hand,†ground that originally belonged to his left hand, now missing, which can be called upon in times of urgency to perform unexpected feats of magic. (Or, as shown in the too-detailed marital consummation scene early in the book, for sexy purposes. At least the rest of such encounters are less explicit.) When a jaunt as captain, commanding several patrols as they strive to exterminate a highly-advanced malice, ends with him using this hand in a couple of new ways, Dag begins to realize that perhaps his life is going to change directions.
What with the way Fawnâ€s being treated at the camp, the way farmers largely remain ignorant of the malice threat, the threat of banishment arising from his familyâ€s petition to dissolve his and Fawnâ€s marriage, and the knowledge that maybe he could be something other than a patroller, Dag eventually decides to head out and travel the world with Fawn by his side. Somehow I had absorbed the spoiler that this would eventually happen, but I like that the decision ultimately makes sense.
Overall, I liked Legacy more than Beguilement. I like the lead characters and hope that the small band of supporting Lakewalkers who were on their side in the camp council hearing will be seen again. It looks like Dag and Fawn will be acquiring some traveling companions in the next book, too, which Iâ€m look forward to.
Additional reviews of The Sharing Knife: Legacy can be found at Triple Take.
Fawn and Dag, newly married, head off to break the disturbing news to Dag’s Lakewalker kinfolk. The reaction is almost universally poor, and Dag’s immediately family take it especially badly. But the pair attempt to settle in and find their place anyway. Unfortunately, news from a neighboring area calls Dag away to fight a surprisingly strong malice, and Fawn is left at camp for a time to fend for herself. The pair are finally reunited after several harrowing experiences that still don’t convince the Lakewalkers of Fawn’s worth as a person. In the end, Dag and Fawn break ties with the camp and set off on their own.
My Thoughts
In the first book, very little about the Lakewalker home life is revealed to the reader, and the reader is left to draw conclusions based on inference and a tiny bit of actual information. It’s very easy to fall into the assumption, which I freely admit doing, that because the Lakewalkers presented such a contrast to the farmers in how they viewed and treated women, their culture must be more liberal and open. We discover pretty quickly in Legacy that such is not the case. In fact, the Lakewalkers are mostly a bunch of dicks.
Dag begins the book immediately on the defensive, much to Fawn’s dismay. She feels that his family (and culture in general) can’t really be that bad, and that she’ll have a shot at winning them over in the way he did most of her family. Resulting events suggest that he was correct, though it’s not clear to me that the outcome was completely inevitable. All the same, it was not very evitable and the sequence of events did not strain my view of the characters or their world very much.
We spend the first third of the book dealing with Fawn and Dag’s arrival at Hickory Lake camp and the assorted reactions of the Lakewalkers to their marriage. It’s here that the arrogance and calcification of the Lakewalker world view becomes clear. We learn more about the background of the world, which is apparently post-apocalyptic: at some point in the distant, distant past, a group of genetically enhanced “Lords” caused a disaster from which sprang the seeds that grow into malices. This disaster also drastically reduced the human population and led to the loss of most advanced technology and historical records from that time. The Lakewalkers, with their abilities to see and manipulate ground, feel that they are the descendants of these enhanced beings, and spend a great deal of time patting themselves on the back over their decision not to rule over the inferior farmers.
It soon becomes clear to the reader, however, that the Lakewalkers, in separating themselves from the farmers, have completely lost touch with the reality of the world and are falling behind technologically. Though Dag attempts to cast the problem in terms of Malice threat — what if the Malice comes up in a farmer city with well-trained craftsmen — it isn’t hard to extrapolate that pretty soon the farmers are going to lose their last thread of patience with the Lakewalkers’ bad attitude and may be fed up enough to attempt to rid themselves of their presence. This, of course, would be a disaster for everyone, but the farmers don’t know it and the Lakewalkers are too full of themselves to pass this information along.
This problem eventually comes to a head when, after several situations where Fawn again and again proves herself as capable and smart as Lakewalkers, Dag’s mother and brother make a last maneuver to try and get her thrown out of the camp and the marriage annulled. Dag has had enough, and realizes that he’s never going to figure out how to solve the problem of Lakewalker/Farmer friction if he stays in camp, so tells everyone off and then declares that he’s getting the hell out. The Lakewalkers are shocked, since their worldview does not permit even the idea that someone would prefer to live other than with their awesomeness.
After this scene, it became clear to me that the whole book had been working up to this point, and that what I thought was the goal — for Fawn and Dag to work within the Lakewalkers to effect change — was never the point at all. Dag needed to see that a single pair within the camp was simply not enough pressure to dislodge their very entrenched attitudes. So they leave in search of more leverage, though I couldn’t figure at that point what it might be.
Throughout the book an additional sub plot continues with Dag’s exploration of grounds, healing, and the relationship between what malicies do and what the Lakewalkers do. It seems mostly incidental here in spite of Dag’s vague angst about it all, but will probably be important later.
In Short
I didn’t really enjoy this book as much as the first one. The romance seemed to take a backseat to the description of Lakewalker society and attitudes. While all of the information is useful and important to the continuing series plot, it just wasn’t as interesting to me as the character development of Fawn and Dag as individuals and more importantly the development of them as a couple. I find them far more compelling when they’re together and operating as a team than when they are apart, and it felt like they spent a great deal of this book divided. On the other hand, a weak Bujold is still much better than most other books, and this one was necessary in many ways to further the actual plot now that the romance was solidly established.
Fortunately there’s a bit of magic and plot point in the middle of this sex scene. And also fortunately, once we get it over with, the story seems free to move on from there. Much like how the story got much better in the first book after the first sex scene was over with.
In this book, we’re off to meet Dag’s family. And we find out more about the sharing knives. Which seemed to me to contradict things in the first book. I thought any bone knife could be primed by any Lakewalker’s heart. Both bones and hearts being in short supply, it’d seem to be rather essential. But apparently a knife has to be set up by a maker in advance for a particular person. It can be switched later, but still requires a maker, and still has to be before it gets stabbed into someone’s heart. Except later on, they’re talking about killing a bunch of people and regretting their lack of knives available for the task.. except none of those knives if they did have them would’ve been ready for any of the intended dead people.
Dag goes off to fight some more malices and stuff, and Fawn’s left back at camp to deal with the in-laws. We get a bunch of domestic stuff and political stuff from her end, and some battle and stuff from his end. In that way, it was reminding me quite a lot of the Vorkosigan books. Domestic stuff, political stuff, tricky dire survival situation stuff.
Dag also reminded me a bit of Miles, mostly in the way Bujold was treating him. He’s missing a hand to start with, then she breaks his other arm. Fortunately we have Lakewalker healers who can fix him right up soon enough (when the broken arm thing was getting old plotwise). Then he’s free to run off and get himself hurt even worse, in more interesting ways. And, again, the healer magic can do some, but not everything. Likewise with Miles, advanced medical technology can fix him up quite a bit, so then he has to go and get himself beat up in more interesting ways that’re harder to fix.
I liked this book better than the first one. And I actually can’t really predict where this series is going in the next book. So it’ll be interesting to find out.