Unrec: Morgan Howell's The Shadowed Path Trilogy
I read Morgan Howell's The Shadowed Path trilogy (A Woman Worth Ten Coppers, Candle in the Storm, and The Iron Palace) based primarily on the back of the book blurb on the first book:Seer, healer, goddess, slave - she is all these things and more.
Yim is a young woman suddenly cast into slavery, a gifted seer with a shocking secret - and a great destiny. Honus is a Sarf, a warrior dedicated to the service of the compassionate goddess Karm. A Sarf's sole purpose is to serve a holy person called a Bearer. But Honus's Bearer has been killed by the minions of an evil god known only as the Devourer. Masterless and needing someone to bear his pack, Honus purchases Yim for the price of ten coppers - and their fates are forever entwined.
It sounded like it could be a good slave AU. It got a little iffy in the second book, but by then I was so involved in it that I couldn't stop. The third book is terrible.
Before I dive into more detail and spoilers, the one thing I wish I'd known before reading is that this trilogy takes place in the same world as Howell's previous books, the Queen of the Orcs trilogy. I like to read things in order, and if I'd known that, I would have read those books first. (I have no idea if they would have made me more interested in reading these or if it would have prevented it. I'm certainly not going to go back and read them now.)
The rest of this post involves spoilers. The books contain sexual violence, including rape, and this post involves discussion of those elements.
Under the cut warning repeat: The rest of this post involves spoilers. The books contain sexual violence, including rape, and this post involves discussion of those elements.
Yim is "the Chosen," which, she is told, means she has been chosen by the goddess Karm to bear a child. She will, she is also told, know the father of her child when the time comes. In the first book, she sets off traveling with a Seer from the temple. In short order, they're set upon by villains and Yim is taken to be sold as a slave. Meanwhile, Honus, a Sarf (more or less a warrior for Karm; Sarfs travel with Bearers who carry their stuff and can read the prophetic runes Seers tattoo on each Sarf's back), has been in a battle that killed his Bearer, who told him that he must never bear his own pack. He conscripts a cowardly count's son to carry it, which works as far as a town of rough types. I'm sure you'll be shocked to know that he then buys Yim to bear his pack. The rest of the first book involves Honus and Yim traveling about, and is actually quite good.
We learn more about their world. Yim has powers and visions of the goddess Karm. We learn about Lord Bahl, who worships/is the earthly avatar of (I can't remember when we actually learn this for sure, but if you've read fantasy novels before, it's pretty easy to figure out) an entity known as The Devourer, which feeds on blood and death. Yim's powers include being able to fight the Devourer, or at least the malice it leaves behind.
In the midst of this, Honus threatens to rape Yim. He's bought her after all, and he thinks he might make use of her. Some unknown feeling stops him.
Their travels eventually lead them to Bremven. They're headed for Karm's temple, but they arrive only to find that it's been destroyed by the Devourer's followers. While there, Yim dispels the miasma of evil left by the Devourer and pulls Honus back from the brink of rage, which convinces him that she is holy and truly a Bearer.
Part of Howell's style is to give us sections of varying people's points of view. Some of these people never appear again. Some of them are villains. I wasn't thrilled about the villainous povs, but the general changing of pov actually works fairly well and the villainous povs didn't ruin the first book for me.
The problems begin in the second book, when Yim and Honus go off to visit their friends Cara and Cronin, who we met in the first book. Once they get near Cara's hall, they meet a woman who is fairy-touched. There are no fairies in the first book. The first book is all Karm and the Devourer, and adding fairies on top of that was a bit much. (This is also where I wished I'd read the previous series first. This book makes it clear that the fairies are in the previous story.)
The real problem comes with regards to Yim's child. By this point, Yim has fallen in love with Honus, which happens when she more or less merges their souls to bring him back from the dead. (Think The Sentinel without the spirit animals.) She finally gets to the point the books seem to have been leading to and decides that this must mean that Honus is meant to be the father of her child. That is a book I would have enjoyed. Unfortunately, this is not that book. In this book, Karm comes to Yim in a vision and says that, no, she must bear Lord Bahl's child. You may notice that I have not mentioned much of anything that would lead you to get to this conclusion on your own. Neither does Howell, which is too bad, because I'm sure it would have been possible to write this story in such a way that this is a conclusion that seems like a natural product of everything before. That would have also been an interesting book.
What we learn when Yim goes to Bahl is that his power is his until he has sex with/rapes (let's be honest: it's always rape with Bahl) a virgin, at which point she becomes pregnant with the next Lord Bahl and the power passes to the zygote. Yim has been very crafty about staying a virgin because she knows it's part of her role as the Chosen. Bahl's power manifests itself as both cold and, eventually, a desire for blood. (Literally; Yim later licks blood off of blades a few times.) Because it's what she's been chosen to do, Yim goes willingly to Bahl's bed, but it's a rape nonetheless, and that is in the book. If you decide to read the book but want to skip the rape, the section it's in starts on page 264 and ends on page 268. You may want to skip a wider swath; there's quite a bit of manhandling and sexual violence leading up to it, beginning on about page 247. I've become more sensitive to violence against women in fiction over the past few years, but I found this palatable, probably because it's clear from the narrative that it's a bad thing.
Yim decides that she can't go back to Honus, but that's okay because the fairies come to take care of her. Specifically, they get the forest creatures to fatten her up and then send her off to spend the winter hibernating with a bear. Yeah, you read that right.
When Yim wakes up in the spring, she is promptly captured by Lord Bahl's men. The Most Holy Gorm (the Devourer's high priest) needs her because the Devourer's power passes to the next Lord Bahl in a very specific way: when he comes of age, he engages in a ritual called "the suckling" in which he drinks his mother's blood and thus takes on the entirety of the Devourer's power.
Honus breaks her out, of course, because he's been hanging about harassing Bahl's men, just waiting for a chance to rescue Yim. Yim, however, decides that the child has to be kept away from death and destruction - which means he can't be around Honus, a man who has dedicated his life to fighting - and so she takes off north. Book two ends with her giving birth alone in the Grey Fens and being found by a couple of women who assume at first that she and the baby must be dead because they're so cold.
I wrote the beginning of this entry at work, and I had to go home at lunch and pull out the books, because that seems like an awful lot of stuff to happen in one book, and yet it all does, and I've even left out a lot of details. Perhaps that's one of the problems with the book.
The third book opens seventeen years later. Yes, that's right, seventeen years later. Yim and her son Froan (the name means "frost" in the Old Language) have spent all this time hiding in the Grey Fens. Yim has told Froan - and everyone else around - that his father was a farmer named Honus who died in the war, which is why she doesn't want Froan anywhere near violence. (She goes so far as to have the neighbors kill the goats that she then butchers and smokes far away from the house so there will be no chance for Froan to come into contact with blood. It did make me wonder if neither of them ever accidentally cut themselves on something in seventeen years.)
In the way of teenagers and destiny everywhere, this doesn't work forever. Gorm kills Lord Bahl, whose spirit comes to Froan and tells him the truth (more or less), which leads to Froan deciding to leave, but not before he cuts Yim's throat as they struggle over a knife. He doesn't drink her blood, and he leaves while she makes it to the neighbors and lives.
Most of this book, like the first one, is traveling: Froan takes on a band of river pirates before meeting up with the Devourer's priests and traveling toward the Iron Palace to take his place as the Lord Bahl. Yim travels toward the Iron Palace knowing eventually Froan has to end up there and she can try to talk him out of being Lord Bahl. Honus is saved from his general despair by a Bearer who then sends him on his way.
Yim and Honus meet up, of course, and have one night of love, but not until after Yim has killed people and subsequently started trying to fight the part of the Devourer inside her. She discovers she can beat it back to only a small part of her - one hand, for example - but that the confines of her body act as a barrier.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of other people doing things to prepare themselves to move toward the end of the book. You know how that "meanwhile" in the previous sentence is at least half a joke because no one would actually start a serious piece of writing with "meanwhile"? This is not something Howell knows, and there are whole sections that actually begin with "Meanwhile," or, for occasional varied construction, "While [Person A] was [doing X], [Person B] was [doing Y]." This is only the most obvious example of what turned out to be some really shoddy writing. (Howell thanks her editor by name in the acknowledgements at the end. If I were her editor, I wouldn't want anyone to know I was associated with the book.) The Iron Palace is possibly the most tell (in the show vs. tell metric) book I've ever read, and it was that, even more than the sudden switch to a book that had large swaths from the point of view of a not particularly sympathetic Froan, that nearly made me stop reading in the middle. But I'd gone that far, and I had to get all the way to the end.
Froan continues to become more and more Lord Bahl-like as time goes on - and as the priest who finds him eggs him on. Froan is one of the problems in this book, and not just because I didn't sign up for a book about a violent teenage boy. I think we're supposed to see Froan as torn between his violent impulses and the gentling influence of his mother and his upbringing, but because Howell tells us all of this instead of showing us, I never really believed it or cared about him.
In the end, Cara's fairy-touched daughter gives Yim seeds that will allow anything she eats to pass through her body without being digested, so when Yim lets herself be captured by Gorm and his men, she eats the seeds before they give her the paralytic and is therefore able to move when they lay her out with a mask (so Froan won't know who she is) to slit her throat and have Froan drink from it. When Froan starts to drink, Yim can feel the Devourer hovering between them and has a sudden realization that now that it's between her and Froan connected, it has to land in one body. So she pulls, brings it into hers, and jumps off the tower. Did you see that coming? Because I sure didn't, and not in a red herring way, more in a "what the hell are you doing with your story?" way. Remember that part where she learns to fight the Devourer's presence in her body? That was where this story seemed to be leading, to a place where she could teach that to Froan and they could fight it together. Instead, once she dies, the Devourer and its power are gone from the world - as is Yim's body; all Honus and Froan find when they go looking is her shift on the rocks.
Froan goes off traveling with Honus until they find a farm in Luvein, where they settle down. While they're there, a grape grower/winemaker and his daughter - Vaccus and Mimlea - happen upon them and settle down to grow grapes on their land. Froan marries Mimlea, of course, but only after he's told the true story of his past. (This whole ending requires some suspension of disbelief. Can Lord Bahl just disappear into everyday life?) And then we get to the part where I would have thrown the book across the room if I were the type of person to throw things. As Honus is dying (of old age), he sees the goddess Karm, who tells him that she is Yim and Yim was her self on earth, experiencing a human life. Karm invites him to come with her. In case you didn't get at that point that this means the entire trilogy was not just an iffy fantasy trilogy but actually a badly written Jesus story, the very last page of the book is this:From the Scroll of Karm
Morvus the Ill-fated perished upon Bahland's fall. Then Geraldus the Wise, who tore down the Black Temple, was emperor for twenty-three winters. Brucus the Younger succeeded him, and in the fifteenth autumn of his reign, Cara of Luvein entered Bremven. There she spoke to all those who would listen, and many proclaimed that she was the one whom Frodoric the Farsighted had sung about, he the bard inspired by the goddess.
Yet Cara said in her humility, "I am but a winemaker's daughter and not mighty in the eyes of men." Although she spoke those words, her deeds proved otherwise, and when she took to living within Karm's temple, its curse at long last departed. Then many came to hear her wisdom, and she spoke with authority.
Thus was the temple restored, but not all its customs. Sarfs no longer learned the ways of death, nor were their faces marked. No children were sundered from their parents to follow the goddess's path. When some asked why these traditions were abandoned, Cara replied unto them, "Of late, the goddess walked among us, a woman tasting life's sweetness and bitterness. After that, how could she be unmoved?"
Let me be clear here: I don't object to Jesus stories just because they're Jesus stories. I do object to Jesus stories when they're badly done. If Howell wanted this to be a Jesus allegory, she should have set it up better before the end. People occasionally mention that Yim looks a little like Karm - namely, that she is both comely and dark-haired, and that she spends time wearing white - but there is nothing in the trilogy, until Karm outright tells Honus, that suggests to the reader that they're the same person. The Jesus nature of Yim taking on the evil and then dying to take it out of the world is similarly unforeshadowed. This is not how you write a book. Everything should lead somewhere, and once we get to the end, we as readers should be able to look back and see the path from the beginning to the end. That is not true of this trilogy, and I'm sorry it's not because there was potential in it for several interesting stories.
I held onto the books as I read them (I had someone in mind to pass them on to who would have liked them if they had turned out to be the slave AU they might have been), so if, even after all of that, you're inclined to read them, let me know and you can have my copies. I'll hold onto them for a week or so before listing them on PaperBackSwap.
Yim is a young woman suddenly cast into slavery, a gifted seer with a shocking secret - and a great destiny. Honus is a Sarf, a warrior dedicated to the service of the compassionate goddess Karm. A Sarf's sole purpose is to serve a holy person called a Bearer. But Honus's Bearer has been killed by the minions of an evil god known only as the Devourer. Masterless and needing someone to bear his pack, Honus purchases Yim for the price of ten coppers - and their fates are forever entwined.
It sounded like it could be a good slave AU. It got a little iffy in the second book, but by then I was so involved in it that I couldn't stop. The third book is terrible.
Before I dive into more detail and spoilers, the one thing I wish I'd known before reading is that this trilogy takes place in the same world as Howell's previous books, the Queen of the Orcs trilogy. I like to read things in order, and if I'd known that, I would have read those books first. (I have no idea if they would have made me more interested in reading these or if it would have prevented it. I'm certainly not going to go back and read them now.)
The rest of this post involves spoilers. The books contain sexual violence, including rape, and this post involves discussion of those elements.
Under the cut warning repeat: The rest of this post involves spoilers. The books contain sexual violence, including rape, and this post involves discussion of those elements.
Yim is "the Chosen," which, she is told, means she has been chosen by the goddess Karm to bear a child. She will, she is also told, know the father of her child when the time comes. In the first book, she sets off traveling with a Seer from the temple. In short order, they're set upon by villains and Yim is taken to be sold as a slave. Meanwhile, Honus, a Sarf (more or less a warrior for Karm; Sarfs travel with Bearers who carry their stuff and can read the prophetic runes Seers tattoo on each Sarf's back), has been in a battle that killed his Bearer, who told him that he must never bear his own pack. He conscripts a cowardly count's son to carry it, which works as far as a town of rough types. I'm sure you'll be shocked to know that he then buys Yim to bear his pack. The rest of the first book involves Honus and Yim traveling about, and is actually quite good.
We learn more about their world. Yim has powers and visions of the goddess Karm. We learn about Lord Bahl, who worships/is the earthly avatar of (I can't remember when we actually learn this for sure, but if you've read fantasy novels before, it's pretty easy to figure out) an entity known as The Devourer, which feeds on blood and death. Yim's powers include being able to fight the Devourer, or at least the malice it leaves behind.
In the midst of this, Honus threatens to rape Yim. He's bought her after all, and he thinks he might make use of her. Some unknown feeling stops him.
Their travels eventually lead them to Bremven. They're headed for Karm's temple, but they arrive only to find that it's been destroyed by the Devourer's followers. While there, Yim dispels the miasma of evil left by the Devourer and pulls Honus back from the brink of rage, which convinces him that she is holy and truly a Bearer.
Part of Howell's style is to give us sections of varying people's points of view. Some of these people never appear again. Some of them are villains. I wasn't thrilled about the villainous povs, but the general changing of pov actually works fairly well and the villainous povs didn't ruin the first book for me.
The problems begin in the second book, when Yim and Honus go off to visit their friends Cara and Cronin, who we met in the first book. Once they get near Cara's hall, they meet a woman who is fairy-touched. There are no fairies in the first book. The first book is all Karm and the Devourer, and adding fairies on top of that was a bit much. (This is also where I wished I'd read the previous series first. This book makes it clear that the fairies are in the previous story.)
The real problem comes with regards to Yim's child. By this point, Yim has fallen in love with Honus, which happens when she more or less merges their souls to bring him back from the dead. (Think The Sentinel without the spirit animals.) She finally gets to the point the books seem to have been leading to and decides that this must mean that Honus is meant to be the father of her child. That is a book I would have enjoyed. Unfortunately, this is not that book. In this book, Karm comes to Yim in a vision and says that, no, she must bear Lord Bahl's child. You may notice that I have not mentioned much of anything that would lead you to get to this conclusion on your own. Neither does Howell, which is too bad, because I'm sure it would have been possible to write this story in such a way that this is a conclusion that seems like a natural product of everything before. That would have also been an interesting book.
What we learn when Yim goes to Bahl is that his power is his until he has sex with/rapes (let's be honest: it's always rape with Bahl) a virgin, at which point she becomes pregnant with the next Lord Bahl and the power passes to the zygote. Yim has been very crafty about staying a virgin because she knows it's part of her role as the Chosen. Bahl's power manifests itself as both cold and, eventually, a desire for blood. (Literally; Yim later licks blood off of blades a few times.) Because it's what she's been chosen to do, Yim goes willingly to Bahl's bed, but it's a rape nonetheless, and that is in the book. If you decide to read the book but want to skip the rape, the section it's in starts on page 264 and ends on page 268. You may want to skip a wider swath; there's quite a bit of manhandling and sexual violence leading up to it, beginning on about page 247. I've become more sensitive to violence against women in fiction over the past few years, but I found this palatable, probably because it's clear from the narrative that it's a bad thing.
Yim decides that she can't go back to Honus, but that's okay because the fairies come to take care of her. Specifically, they get the forest creatures to fatten her up and then send her off to spend the winter hibernating with a bear. Yeah, you read that right.
When Yim wakes up in the spring, she is promptly captured by Lord Bahl's men. The Most Holy Gorm (the Devourer's high priest) needs her because the Devourer's power passes to the next Lord Bahl in a very specific way: when he comes of age, he engages in a ritual called "the suckling" in which he drinks his mother's blood and thus takes on the entirety of the Devourer's power.
Honus breaks her out, of course, because he's been hanging about harassing Bahl's men, just waiting for a chance to rescue Yim. Yim, however, decides that the child has to be kept away from death and destruction - which means he can't be around Honus, a man who has dedicated his life to fighting - and so she takes off north. Book two ends with her giving birth alone in the Grey Fens and being found by a couple of women who assume at first that she and the baby must be dead because they're so cold.
I wrote the beginning of this entry at work, and I had to go home at lunch and pull out the books, because that seems like an awful lot of stuff to happen in one book, and yet it all does, and I've even left out a lot of details. Perhaps that's one of the problems with the book.
The third book opens seventeen years later. Yes, that's right, seventeen years later. Yim and her son Froan (the name means "frost" in the Old Language) have spent all this time hiding in the Grey Fens. Yim has told Froan - and everyone else around - that his father was a farmer named Honus who died in the war, which is why she doesn't want Froan anywhere near violence. (She goes so far as to have the neighbors kill the goats that she then butchers and smokes far away from the house so there will be no chance for Froan to come into contact with blood. It did make me wonder if neither of them ever accidentally cut themselves on something in seventeen years.)
In the way of teenagers and destiny everywhere, this doesn't work forever. Gorm kills Lord Bahl, whose spirit comes to Froan and tells him the truth (more or less), which leads to Froan deciding to leave, but not before he cuts Yim's throat as they struggle over a knife. He doesn't drink her blood, and he leaves while she makes it to the neighbors and lives.
Most of this book, like the first one, is traveling: Froan takes on a band of river pirates before meeting up with the Devourer's priests and traveling toward the Iron Palace to take his place as the Lord Bahl. Yim travels toward the Iron Palace knowing eventually Froan has to end up there and she can try to talk him out of being Lord Bahl. Honus is saved from his general despair by a Bearer who then sends him on his way.
Yim and Honus meet up, of course, and have one night of love, but not until after Yim has killed people and subsequently started trying to fight the part of the Devourer inside her. She discovers she can beat it back to only a small part of her - one hand, for example - but that the confines of her body act as a barrier.
Meanwhile, there are a lot of other people doing things to prepare themselves to move toward the end of the book. You know how that "meanwhile" in the previous sentence is at least half a joke because no one would actually start a serious piece of writing with "meanwhile"? This is not something Howell knows, and there are whole sections that actually begin with "Meanwhile," or, for occasional varied construction, "While [Person A] was [doing X], [Person B] was [doing Y]." This is only the most obvious example of what turned out to be some really shoddy writing. (Howell thanks her editor by name in the acknowledgements at the end. If I were her editor, I wouldn't want anyone to know I was associated with the book.) The Iron Palace is possibly the most tell (in the show vs. tell metric) book I've ever read, and it was that, even more than the sudden switch to a book that had large swaths from the point of view of a not particularly sympathetic Froan, that nearly made me stop reading in the middle. But I'd gone that far, and I had to get all the way to the end.
Froan continues to become more and more Lord Bahl-like as time goes on - and as the priest who finds him eggs him on. Froan is one of the problems in this book, and not just because I didn't sign up for a book about a violent teenage boy. I think we're supposed to see Froan as torn between his violent impulses and the gentling influence of his mother and his upbringing, but because Howell tells us all of this instead of showing us, I never really believed it or cared about him.
In the end, Cara's fairy-touched daughter gives Yim seeds that will allow anything she eats to pass through her body without being digested, so when Yim lets herself be captured by Gorm and his men, she eats the seeds before they give her the paralytic and is therefore able to move when they lay her out with a mask (so Froan won't know who she is) to slit her throat and have Froan drink from it. When Froan starts to drink, Yim can feel the Devourer hovering between them and has a sudden realization that now that it's between her and Froan connected, it has to land in one body. So she pulls, brings it into hers, and jumps off the tower. Did you see that coming? Because I sure didn't, and not in a red herring way, more in a "what the hell are you doing with your story?" way. Remember that part where she learns to fight the Devourer's presence in her body? That was where this story seemed to be leading, to a place where she could teach that to Froan and they could fight it together. Instead, once she dies, the Devourer and its power are gone from the world - as is Yim's body; all Honus and Froan find when they go looking is her shift on the rocks.
Froan goes off traveling with Honus until they find a farm in Luvein, where they settle down. While they're there, a grape grower/winemaker and his daughter - Vaccus and Mimlea - happen upon them and settle down to grow grapes on their land. Froan marries Mimlea, of course, but only after he's told the true story of his past. (This whole ending requires some suspension of disbelief. Can Lord Bahl just disappear into everyday life?) And then we get to the part where I would have thrown the book across the room if I were the type of person to throw things. As Honus is dying (of old age), he sees the goddess Karm, who tells him that she is Yim and Yim was her self on earth, experiencing a human life. Karm invites him to come with her. In case you didn't get at that point that this means the entire trilogy was not just an iffy fantasy trilogy but actually a badly written Jesus story, the very last page of the book is this:From the Scroll of Karm
Morvus the Ill-fated perished upon Bahland's fall. Then Geraldus the Wise, who tore down the Black Temple, was emperor for twenty-three winters. Brucus the Younger succeeded him, and in the fifteenth autumn of his reign, Cara of Luvein entered Bremven. There she spoke to all those who would listen, and many proclaimed that she was the one whom Frodoric the Farsighted had sung about, he the bard inspired by the goddess.
Yet Cara said in her humility, "I am but a winemaker's daughter and not mighty in the eyes of men." Although she spoke those words, her deeds proved otherwise, and when she took to living within Karm's temple, its curse at long last departed. Then many came to hear her wisdom, and she spoke with authority.
Thus was the temple restored, but not all its customs. Sarfs no longer learned the ways of death, nor were their faces marked. No children were sundered from their parents to follow the goddess's path. When some asked why these traditions were abandoned, Cara replied unto them, "Of late, the goddess walked among us, a woman tasting life's sweetness and bitterness. After that, how could she be unmoved?"
Let me be clear here: I don't object to Jesus stories just because they're Jesus stories. I do object to Jesus stories when they're badly done. If Howell wanted this to be a Jesus allegory, she should have set it up better before the end. People occasionally mention that Yim looks a little like Karm - namely, that she is both comely and dark-haired, and that she spends time wearing white - but there is nothing in the trilogy, until Karm outright tells Honus, that suggests to the reader that they're the same person. The Jesus nature of Yim taking on the evil and then dying to take it out of the world is similarly unforeshadowed. This is not how you write a book. Everything should lead somewhere, and once we get to the end, we as readers should be able to look back and see the path from the beginning to the end. That is not true of this trilogy, and I'm sorry it's not because there was potential in it for several interesting stories.
I held onto the books as I read them (I had someone in mind to pass them on to who would have liked them if they had turned out to be the slave AU they might have been), so if, even after all of that, you're inclined to read them, let me know and you can have my copies. I'll hold onto them for a week or so before listing them on PaperBackSwap.