UK paperback

Heir of Sea and Fire (1977) begins a year after the events of The Riddle-Master of Hed. Morgon hasn’t been heard of in all that time and, what’s more concerning to the land-rulers of this world, the High One has been equally silent. (His harpist, Deth, who usually acts as his messenger, hasn’t been seen either.) When Raederle of An, the woman Morgan was to marry thanks to his beating the Wraith of Peven in a riddling match, learns that the land-rule of Hed (that almost telepathic unity with their land that rulers are granted by the High One) has passed to his brother Eliard — which usually only happens when the previous land-ruler dies or loses their mind — she sets out to find what happened to her intended husband. On the way, she’s joined by two companions, Lyra of Herun (head of the Morgol of Herun’s guards, whom Morgon met in the previous book), and Morgon’s now thirteen-year-old sister, Tristan.

But this is Raederle’s story, and it proves to be something of an echo of Morgon’s in the first book. Like him, she has recently suffered the loss of a parent (just the one in her case); like him she leaves a very domestic-feeling (if more regal than his) home — a domesticity (like Morgon’s) mostly expressed in the fact that she, her brother, and father, bicker constantly; and like him she gains (or in her case, deepens and expands) unusual powers; and like him she starts to learn something troubling about her identity.

Unlike Morgon, Raederle has magical powers from the start, though minor ones. As in the first book, they’re introduced casually, naturalistically, and only highlighted and explained later on:

“She had left, in front of Rood’s horse in the College stable, a small tangle of bright gold thread she had loosened from her cuff. Within the tangle, in her mind, she had placed her name and an image of Rood stepping on it, or his horse, and then riding without thought every curve and twist of thread through the streets of Caithnard until, reaching the end, he would blink free of the spell and find that neither the ship nor the tide had waited for him.”

Darrell K Sweet cover for Del Rey paperback

She knows there’s some of the witch Madir’s blood in her ancestry, but comes to learn there’s something far more ancient there too. She is, after all, the Heir of Sea and Fire of the book’s title, and we learned in the previous book that a primal war is being fought — and has been for centuries — between the Children of the Earth (who Morgon allied himself with) and the Children of the Sea.

Like Morgon, as her abilities grow, Raederle begins to worry how this coming into her more powerful nature will alienate her from her family and the world she knows — will, in fact, alienate herself from the person she thought she was. It reminds me of a moment from the first McKillip book I reviewed on this blog, the semi-autobiographical Stepping from the Shadows, whose narrator becomes overwhelmed by the power and weirdness of her own imagination, as symbolised by the “Stagman” who starts to appear to her:

“God damn it!” I yelled at Frances. “Nobody else has a Stagman — why should I have one? I’m trying to lead a normal, ordinary, mediocre existence!”

Raederle’s journey is not the traumatic-schismatic stop/start of Morgon’s in the first book. It is, rather, a series of conversations, and could well have been adapted as a stage play. But, particularly towards the end of the book, Heir of Sea and Fire evinces one of those shifts in mode that genre fantasies sometimes undergo — I’m thinking of the way The Lord of the Rings, for instance, starts as a light children’s adventure story, and ends as a gruelling epic. As with The Lord of the Rings, the shift is most evident in the book’s language. At the start of Heir, Raederle speaks in a lively, informal, naturalistic way:

“No king I ever heard of married Madir,” Raederle said wryly. “Yet somehow the blood got into the king’s line. Let’s see: she lived nearly two hundred years, and there were seven kings. I believe we can forget Fenel; he was too busy fighting almost to father a land-heir, let alone a bastard. I don’t even know if he kept pigs.”

By the end everyone’s talking like this:

“You,” she whispered, “bringing empty words into this house, what did you ever know of peace? You small-minded man, content in your battles, you left a riddle behind you in Anuin when you died that was far more than just a sea-colored face. You want to fight with Farr over this skull like dogs over a bone. You think I betrayed my house: what do you know of betrayal? You have roused yourself for revenge: what do you know of revenge?”

It sounds as though the book has turned into a symbolic, almost ritualistic, drama translated from some archaic language, originating from a culture whose metaphysical outlook we can only infer from the way simple words have been accorded a new significance we can only grasp at.

Michael Mariano hardback cover

The characters undergo a similar shift. They don’t have much inner life to start with, but at least act like normal people (all that bickering); but by the end of the book they’re speaking and acting more like the semi-gods and supernatural heroes of Celtic myth. This is particular true of Raederle, whose magic — using a tangle of thread to confuse those who might follow her, or blinding a shipload of men with the flash from a small gemstone — is exactly the sort that would have been related in a throwaway sentence in a myth.

I have to say, this elevated style of speech and action feels like the more natural mode to McKillip. It’s closer to her earlier fantasy novel, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, as though she set out, this time, to write something more naturalistic but was dragged back to the mythic mode by the force of her material. And I was reminded of that former book most of all when, in Heir, we learn something of what happened to Morgon. He had been locked, for a long time — perhaps a whole year — in a sort of mental combat, in which his very identity was tried to be taken from him. Although we only hear of this through a report, it immediately reminded me of the central (and most dramatic) chapter of Forgotten Beasts of Eld, where Sybel has to defend herself from being sorcerously enslaved in a way that would kill within her the very thing that made her herself.

Del Rey paperback

So, is the Riddle Master trilogy itself proving to be a riddle? If the first book asked the question, “Who is the Star-Bearer?”, now, by McKillip’s schema, we’d get the story in response to that, before the stricture, or moral, in the third book. In a way, we get part of that — we learn something of the Star-Bearer’s fate, but not the whole of it. Instead, we’re asked a different “who is” question, “Who is Raederle of An?”, the answer being this book’s title, and something of what it signifies. Like Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, The Riddle-Master of Hed and Heir of Sea and Fire present first a male then a female journey of self-discovery, bringing the two protagonists together at the end. What they do together, and how the riddle will ultimately be answered, will come in the final book of the trilogy, Harpist in the Wind.