Look here for the non-spoiler filled review, as this is really just a continuation of that.
First of all. The Mercy Killings. I kind of – after finishing it – love what they did. Not including all the Willow girls, most of Frey’s killings were mercy kills. The boy in the camp. The giant! All of them. No matter how hard she/they tried, they couldn’t get away from them. Not truly. They were the Boneless Mercies. And I love that they did that. To me, that is what makes this into a saga level interest. Because, these are characters that grew but didn’t change even when they wanted to. They were scarred, and that carried over into everything they did.
The Wanderer.
The Hanged Woman.
The Leaf Witch.
The Red Seer.
The Bone Man.
Death.
The High Priestess, reversed.
The Blue Moon.
…We are the wanderers… The dead girl at the crosswords…We will be given everything we need on our travels…Sea Witches…something malevolent, something dangerous that will block our path, come between us and our destination… It could be literal, or it could merely mean the end of something, a path or a choice…We will meet someone who appears to be a mystical leader, or visionary, but she is dangerous and should not be trusted….shadows and choices unmade. Our path will fork many times, and our choices will decide the outcome. Nothing is written in the stars – our journey is our own.”
-Juniper
The Boneless Mercies
Looking back at Juniper’s prediction, it did all play out, though not completely in the order predicted. Unless the high priestess is for the girl who predicted how they would find the giant.
The other odd-ish thing was the friendship/romance between Frey and Trigve. He passed up sleeping with the healer woman after the Willows, and there is something between them, yet Frey slept with Roth and said she would come back to him. (In all honesty, I rather like the two of them together best, even if Trigve is the better choice. Probably because I would choose him.) They have a deep connection – because of her he found the will to live again – and they are clearly close. It seems almost like Frey is trying to keep something open. Keep something both close and out of reach at the same time. Or that, perhaps, she doesn’t really want to settle down in any way, yet wants to carry the feeling of settling with her.
How someone dies says a lot in this book. And it is important as our main characters deal in the death trade. I did enjoy that this is a book in which the customs and culture fully rule most everything they do. They don’t make decisions lightly, they make them because of where they are and who they are. It isn’t often that a book can so fully separate its culture from the common one of its readers, yet hit all of the right marks so it is just on the other side of the veil of reasonable. Particularly because it hearkens back to our own culture’s past.
The other thing: this is a variation of Beowulf. I will need to go back and re-read that story, but it is similar. With that, it also has sincere differences. There wasn’t the child monster attacking followed by the mother monster. While the main characters were after glory, it was about more than just that. And the Jarl, while tired, still had some life about him. There was still some joy to be found in this dark tale.
These are just a few of the great things in this book that I wanted to touch on. If you’d like to talk more, please leave a comment!
