The War of the Rose trilogy
The Serpent and the Rose
The Golden Rose
The Last Paladin
- Kathleen Bryan (aka Judith Tarr)
Like Sean Williams' space epic Saturn Returns, this is a piece of writing that starts looking somewhat simple & grows to become much more complex. It starts out with a peasant boy whose mother denies his magic, who is destined to be the love of: a princess trained in magic, being called back to marry, who is a descendent of: the Paladins of old, who defeated the Serpent with the Young God & brought about the orderly world of medieval church & magic-using knight orders that we see today, which is about to be oppressed by: an evil king who is secretly trying to wake the Serpent. The magic of the civilised world is based in glass, & Knights of the Rose & Ladies of the Isle have to learn to make glass of all kinds as part of using their magic.
However, there is more than one kind of magic. King Clodovec uses ancient Serpent magic to cripple the order of the Rose in one blow, since Serpent magic hasn't been used since the fall of the Serpent, & no one knows how to defend against it, or even detect it any more. Gereint, the peasant youth, has been kept away from all magic by his mother, & has grown up not distinguishing between wild magic, orderly magic, or any other kind of magic. While he is being slowly trained in glass-based magic, he is also full of wild magic, & he alone can detect Serpent magic, since he hasn't been taught out of seeing the other kinds of magic. He & Averil, the young sorceress being called back from the Isle of women to rule her dying father's duchy, are falling slowly in love, as they & everybody else are trying to defend themselves from the king's secret magical attacks. Then the duchy falls, & the remnants of the heroes flee in the only direction open to them: the west, where all the wild magic of the world has been walled off. Will it kill them? Will it welcome them? Is it evil or good, & can they accept help from it? While Gereint adapts to magic & knights, everyone else must question their preconceptions for a couple books, while finding some way to fight the king. When the king is defeated at the end of the 2nd book, the process continues, as the forces the king sought out or turned still seek to free the Serpent and Averil, the new heir, seeks to bring the wildfolk (faeries) back into the world & random soulless armies wander around eating things. Like the excellent Flora Segunda, the book managed to make me not certain how the ending would turn out, & everyone gets character development enough that even I can see it (although sometimes it's a bit frustrating how long it takes them to realise things).
The books were fun to read, reading like traditional fantasy novels, although the descriptions of magic were vaguer than usual. There's a good love story for romance fans, & the story ends up being more complex than it originally looks like, which is nice. There are nice wonders of wild magic, a few brief dragons, & a great changing of the world. As for its view on race issues, it hasn't got one: the setting is medieval Europe with a few name changes (Lys, Prydain, Moresca), so there's only white people (including a few Spaniards) facing various forms of wild magic. It's kind of amusing seeing Christian terminology used slightly differently for the church, so there's a fall, but instead of mankind sinning it's the fall/beatdown of the Serpent. No original sin, so knights can take lovers - they just can't marry because they're in an order. (& of course nobility can't marry commoners, by law.)
Conclusion: a fun way to avoid homework, with some actual mind-expanding. Note: Judith Tarr is also Caitlin Brennan, so apparently she likes forms of this name.