Synopses & Reviews
Chapter One
Winter 5647
"Thirty-five thousand marched to war.
Their weeping widows all died poor.
Swords against Darkness, reap for Light
Fell Shadow's Prince and rend false night.
"
" -- verse of a marching song from the
campaign of Dier Kenton Vale
"Third Age 5647
1. Fionn Areth
Strong arms closed and locked around Elaira's slim shoulders. Fingers strengthened by the sword and sensitized to a masterbard's arts tightened against her back. The dark-haired, driven man who cradled her surrendered at last to his blazing crest of passion. His lips softened against hers, the restraint, the control, the terrible doubts which bound him consumed all at once in a rush of tender need. She responded, melted. Her being exploded into sensation like fire and flight. At one with the prince who had captured her heart, her spirit knew again that single, suspended moment, with its promise of inexpressible joy.
Then the fulfillment of union snapped shy of release, doomed ever to fall short of consummation by the rough intervention of fate. This time, a harried, insistent pounding snapped the dream into fragmented memory.
The small-boned enchantress entangled in threadbare quilts jerked out of her fretful sleep. A muted cry escaped her. Chilled in the drafts which flowed over the sill of an unglazed croft window, she fought to regain full awareness. Once again, she grappled the irreversible reality: Merior's mild sea winds and the Prince of Rathain lay two years removed in her past.
Elaira squeezed her eyes shut against the ache. Instead of the muffled boom of breakers creaming against stainless sands, the ferocious, clawing breath of winter whined over thewhite-mantled dales of Araethura.
Yesterday's blizzard had delivered a biting, cold night.
Over the open glens, through stands of scrub oak and across the rustling flats of frozen marsh, the ice whipped in driven bursts, to rattle the ill-fitted shutters of her cottage at the fringe of the moor. Crystals found the cracks, tapped at the lintels, and fanned a frosted arc of silver across the leaked bit of moonlight admitted through the same chink. While the eddies moaned and clawed past the beams of the eaves, and the spent tang of ash commingled with the fragrance of cut cedar and frost-damp miasma of moldered thatch, Elaira exhaled a deep breath. Given time, the runaway pound of her heart would subside.
She untangled the fist still clenched through a coil of auburn hair. Too many times she awakened like this, struggling against the blind urge to weep, while the ripping, slow agony of Arithon's memory threatened to stop her will to live. In desperation, against the vows of the Koriani Order which tied her lifelong to a celibate service, her refuge from despair became the fiercely guarded shelter of her solitude.
Tonight, even that grace was forfeit. The disturbance which had torn her from lacerating dreams came again, the insistent hammer of a fist on wood.
There would be some emergency, of course. Elaira grumbled a filthy phrase in the gutter vernacular of her childhood and kicked off her tatty layers of quilts. "Fatemaster's twoeyed vigilance! Do they all think I'm deaf as a post?"
Whoever pounded for admittance, the abuse threatened to burst the tacked strips of leather that hung her rickety door.
Sped by awareness that she lacked any tools for small carpentry, Elairaheaved up from her hoarded nest of warmth amid the bedclothes. The shock of cold planks against her bare soles dissolved her invective to a gasp. She had retired unclothed, since yesterday's storm had soaked through to her shift. Through forced delay as she fumbled past the clammy folds of her cloak to snatch the first suitable garment from its peg, the hammering gained a fresh urgency.
"Fiends plague!" The dank cloak would just have to serve. "Whoever you are, I don't dispense remedies naked!"
Elaira bundled the soggy wool over her shoulders. She closed shivering fingers to secure the cloth under her chin, then shot the bar and stepped back as the door swung inward.
A dazzle of moonlight flooded through. The collapse of the drift left pocketed across her threshold doused her bare ankles in snow. Elaira yelped and leaped back. Her cloak caught in an eddy of wind, snagged the latch, and tugged itself free of her grasp.
The herder boy outside froze in startlement, saucer eyes pinned to the slide of the wool down the firm, naked swell of her breast.
Elaira managed the grace not to laugh at his expression. She caught the errant wool and snugged it back up to her collarbones. "Are you going to come in?" she asked with mild acerbity. "Or will you just stand 'til you freeze with your mouth hanging open)
The shepherd boy shut his baby-skinned jaw with a click. Too young for subterfuge, still innocent enough to flush to the roots of his tangled hair, he ventured a slurred apology behind the snagged hem of his sleeve.
"Of course there's trouble," Elaira said more gently. "You've a year yet to grow before you start calling on ladies for that sort of randy interest, yes?"
The boyshrank and turned redder. Since he was also frightened enough to bolt back into the night, the enchantress caught his arm in a grip like fixed shackles. She bundled him inside, wise enough to slam the door before she plonked him on the stool by the hearth and let him go.
"Who's fallen sick?" she demanded, brisk enough to shock through his stunned silence. She groped meantime across darkness to sort through the pile of last night's discarded clothing. The fire had done its usual and gone out. Gusts hissed down the cottage's flue and scattered ash across the stone apron where her herbal still rested, a dismantled glint of burnished copper and glass reflecting a meticulous upkeep. Seized through by a shiver, Elaira drew on the ley linen layers of her underthings, then laced the stiffened leather of her leggings overtop.
The herdboy huddled under mufflers on her stool and could not seem to find his tongue.
"Don't say no one's sick," Elaira murmured through chattering teeth as she turned her back, cast off the cloak, and wormed into the dank, frowsty cloth of her shift. The hem which had been dripping as she drifted off to sleep now crackled with thin, crusted ice.
Synopsis
The Mistwraith's curse has locked two princes, half-brothers, into lifelong enmity -- a battle that will hold the fates of nations and the balance of a world's mystical powers in its throes.
Synopsis
The wars of light and shadowWith the appalling destruction of the Vastmark warhost, recoil and grief reshapes the balance of power in the Five Kingdoms. Two half brothers, cursed by a Mistwraith to a lifelong enmity, are set into violent conflict: Lysaer, Prince of the Light. Arithon, Master of Shadow. And there are those between who will stop at nothing to fulfill secret desires and consolidate their own power. With faction set against faction, heart set against heart, and spells of high mastery engaged to cast down the ancient mysteries, the moves made by hunters and fugitive alike will remake the course of world destiny.
About the Author
Janny Wurts is the author of eleven novels, a collection of short stories, and the internationally best selling Empire trilogy written in collaboration with Raymond E. Feist. Her current release in her Wars of Light and Shadow series, Grand Conspiracy, and her forthcoming hardcover, Peril's Gate, are the culmination of more than twenty years of carefully evolved ideas. The cover images on the books, both in the US and abroad, are her own paintings, depicting her vision of characters and setting.
Through her combined talents as a writer/illustrator, Janny has immersed herself in a lifelong ambition: to create a seamless interface between words and pictures that will lead reader and viewer beyond the world we know. Her lavish use of language lures the mind into a crafted realm of experience, with characters and events woven into a complex tapestry, and drawn with an intensity to leave a lasting impression. Her research includes a range of direct experience, lending her fantasy a gritty realism, and her scenes involving magic an almost visionary credibility. A self-taught painter, she draws directly from the imagination, creating scenes in a representational style that blurs the edges between dream and reality. She makes no preliminary sketches, but envisions her characters and the scenes that contain them, then executes the final directly from the initial pencil drawing.
The seed idea for the Wars of Light and Shadow series occurred, when, in the course of researching tactic and weapons, she viewed a documentary film on the Battle of Culloden Moor. This was the first time she had encountered the historical context of that brutal event, with the embroidery of romance stripped from it. The experience gave rise to an awakening, which became anger, that so often, our education, literature and entertainment slant history in a manner that equates winners and losers with moral right and wrong, and the prevalent attitude, that killing wars can be seen as justifiable solutions when only one side of the picture is presented.
Her series takes the stance that there are two sides to every question, and follows two characters who are half brothers. One a bard trained as a master of magecraft, and the other a born ruler with a charismatic passion for justice, have become cursed to lifelong enmity. As one sibling raises a devoted mass following, the other tries desperately to stave off defeat through solitary discipline and cleverness. The conflict sweeps across an imaginary world, dividing land and people through an intricate play of politics and the inborn prejudices of polarized factions already set at odds. Readers are led on a journey that embraces both viewpoints. The story explores the ironies of morality which often confound our own human condition-that what appears right and just, by one side, becomes reprehensible when seen from the opposite angle. What is apparently good for the many, too often causes devastating suffering to the nonconformist minority. Through the interactions between the characters themselves, the reader is left to their own discretion to interpret the moral impact of events.
Says Janny of her work, "I chose to frame this story against a backdrop of fantasy because I could handle even the most sensitive issues with the gloves off-explore the myriad angles of our troubled times with the least risk of offending anyone's personal sensibilities. The result, I can hope, is an expanding journey of the spirit that explores the grand depths, and rises to the challenge of mapping the ethereal potential of an evolving planetary consciousness."
Beyond writing, Janny's award winning paintings have been showcased in exhibitions of imaginative artwork, among them a commemorative exhibition for NASA's 25th Anniversary; the Art of the Cosmos at Hayden Planetarium in New York; and two exhibits of fantasy art, at both the Delaware Art Museum, and Canton Art Museum.