What's the Name of That Book??? discussion
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Beguilement
SOLVED: Adult Fiction
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SOLVED. Adult Fantasy series with some romance elements. The main characters are a 20ish year old non-magical woman and a much older widowed man with magic soul powers. Spoilers. [s]
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The Sharing Knife trilogy by Lois McMaster Bujold. The farmer girl is called Fawn, the traveler (they're known as Lake-walkers) is called Dag. I can't believe how much of the plot you remembered! There's also a sequel novella called "Knife Children", following one of Dag's patrollers. The monsters are called "malices", and Dag creates a mind-shield for Fawn from a walnut.The big malice had been growing bat men.
SOLVED!Thank you! The Sharing Knife is exactly correct, and I'm super impressed how quickly it was identified!
I read this some time around early high school based on the publication dates, but I didn't start my goodreads account until mid-way into college in 2014. At that time I tried to "mark as read" everything I remembered ever reading, and this series is the only one that I distinctly remembered but couldn't find (it also took me a bit to find the The Annals of the Chosen by Lawrence Watt-Evans, but I found that one within a couple of months). Anyway, it's been like a pebble in my shoe for the last decade, so thanks for your help!
You're welcome. She's one of my favorite authors. Have you read her "Penric and Desdemona" series?
I haven't, but I'll take a look!
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Beguilement (book 1) of The Sharing Knife series by Lois McMaster Bujold - Sue's find.
Here are the details I remember about the plot:
- There are two main characters. Their romance is a major plot point. They get together by the end of the first book and stay together throughout the series.
- The female lead is about 20 years old at the start of the series. She has no magic powers of her own, but is described as intelligent and with a forceful personality relative to other non-magical humans.
- The male lead is older and widowed. The age that comes to mind is 70 years old, but I'm not 100% on that. He is from the community of magical humans, who are longer-lived than the non-magical humans. At some point either before or during the series, he lost/loses a hand or arm. I'm leaning towards the fight at the end of book 1 as the time this probably happens, but I don't remember for sure.
- The magical humans and non-magical humans generally don't mix. Some of the magical society are elitist/xenophobic about it, and that becomes a plot point in the romance subplot throughout the series, but mostly not in the first book. I am not certain about this part, but I believe the non-magical population were referred to as "farmers" and the magical humans as "travelers". I will use these terms throughout this post, even though I'm not sure it matches the terminology from the books.
- There is a division of labor in society between the farmers and travelers. The farmers live their normal lives farming. The travelers fight a particular kind of monster that farmers are not equipped to handle. More on those later.
- When the main characters first meet, I think the female lead was escaping some kind of SA situation. Possibly a running-away-from-home scenario? I believe she was portrayed as having agency and taking initiative to fight back and escape the situation, but I also think the book might have played into the trope where the male lead helped rescue her.
- From there, the romance starts to develop. There is an attraction from both sides, but the male lead isn't over his dead wife at the beginning and struggles with that.
- Pretty quickly in the first book, the pair gets pulled into fighting one of those monsters I mentioned earlier. Either there were signs that the male lead was duty-bound to go investigate as a traveler or they were actually attacked or something. Either way the non-romance plot of the first book is about their fight against this first monster (there are several more over the course of the series).
- The monster in question is a hive mind of mutated animals. There's a central thing mind controlling the monsters, and I'm like 50% sure it was called a seed. These seeds grow more powerful the longer they can build up their forces before being discovered. This growing-more-powerful is via some combination of several mechanisms: more animals/humans in range of the seed are mind controlled over time, the animals/monsters are mutated over time with the seed learning how to more effectively combine traits from the animals it controls, and also possibly the seed's range just grows over time (I'm less sure about this one).
- Travelers are naturally resistant to the mind control of a seed, while farmers are not, justifying the division of labor I talked about earlier.
- In order to kill a seed, the travelers use some kind of special knife with soul powers. These special knives are one-time-use items. Some but not all travelers have sufficiently good soul powers to make these knives. Sometime later in the series (not book 1), the male lead learns to make these knives. Also at some point in the series after the first book but before the male lead learns to make the knives, they run out, and it's a problem because there's a seed but no way to kill it.
- As I mentioned, the male lead loses his hand/arm at some point. This might have something to do with how he develops the power/control to make the special knives. Even though he doesn't have his physical hand/arm, he still has the soul of that hand/arm, and he slowly learns to use that ghost limb. Either he uses that limb for the forging of the special knives, or the same practice of learning to control that ghost limb ends up useful for the knife forging as well.
- Later in the series (not book 1), the main characters figure out a way to protect farmers from the mind control of seeds. They make amulets out of acorns that can protect one person. This is not a scalable solution that can easily be used to protect everyone, but is used to protect individuals like the female lead as their small group delves in to try to kill the seeds. I think there was some explanation involving souls for how these amulets work, but I don't remember the details.
- Speaking of souls, the female lead has a very "bright" soul, figuratively reflecting the force of her personality, which is part of what the male lead finds attractive. His dead first wife, who was a traveler like him, also had a bright soul.
- Another power that travelers have is healing. At the beginning of the story, there is a taboo against healing farmers. This is because sometimes, when healing a farmer, the farmer will become infatuated with their healer kind of like a love potion. This is generally unwanted, and this contributes to the isolationism/xenophobia of the travelers.
- Later in the series, one of the twists/plot-points is that the characters figure out why this infatuation can happen. It turns out that the way healing works is that the healer gives part of their soul to the patient and it is this giving that results in healing. But by default, there is an exchange where in reciprocation some of the patient's soul is given back to the healer. In the cases where the healer is a traveler and the patient is a farmer, if the healer has elitist views where they think travelers are better than farmers, their soul would automatically reject the bit of farmer soul that is trying to be exchanged. As a result, the patient's soul wants to go to the healer and this desire in the soul manifests as the previously mentioned infatuation.
- By the end of the series, the male lead and all other travelers in the community that the main character builds up have "dirty souls" because they are often healing farmers and accepting their soul bits into their own souls. This is in contrast to other parts of traveler society who are judgmental about that kind of dirty/patchwork soul.
- One of the seeds that the main characters encounter late in the series had a very long time to develop before being discovered, and had control of flying monsters. I believe this was because the seed had been growing in a cave where it was controlling bats before it was discovered (though it might have been some kind of birds instead).
I would appreciate any help identifying the series. Thanks in advance!