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Raven's Shadow by Patricia Briggs
01/03/2006 . Source: Phil Jones 
pub: Ace. 334 page paperback. Price: $ 6.99 (US), $ 9.99 (CAN). ISBN: 0-441-01187-X. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out website: www.penguin.com
Tier is coming home to Redern, nine years fighting as a soldier against the Shadowed, an evil wizard, and his army. Tired, he decides to stop in a small village inn. There's a funeral pyre in the village square with a burnt body on top which immediately alerts Tier to a possible unwelcome reception to strangers.
On entering the inn, he seeks refuge in a corner and assesses the surroundings. A young girl, a traveller, is being held by the inn-keeper. The situation turns nasty with the potential of the girl ending up on the pyre along with her brother's body, which had been burned early by an angry mob, starts to become a real possibility. He rescues the young girl and after an initial chase, finally returns along with the girl to his home village. He offers to take the girl, Seraph, to any nearby traveller clans but insists she stays with his family that night.
Seraph insists that Tier has magical abilities and belongs to the traveller's Order of the Owl. He is a bard, with Seraph belonging to the Raven order. Tier persuades Seraph to stay longer and work in the family bakery, but she clashes with Tier's sister, and things eventually come to a head. The two of them are backed into a corner when Seraph pushed to the edge uses uncontrolled magic. Tier lies and says that they have been secretly married which they actually do and take up some land on the edge of the mountains and build a farm.
There is a relatively complex back story which we get throughout the book. In ancient times, a group of wizards are corrupted by the power of magic they wield and realise an evil entity on the world called the stalker. To entrap the stalker, they use their prize city to imprison it. The wizards then created a series of orders who would protect the rest of humanity and the evil would seep out and eventually the prison would weaken. The orders became travellers taking the skills and memories with them with their abilities passed down through the later generations.
The regular folk, the solsenti, started to become suspicious and hostile toward the travellers, never realising their true purpose or the fact that they protected them. We rejoin the story with Tier away hunting during the winter and Seraph looking after their three children who are all ordered in differing ways.
Tier goes missing and is presumed dead after his horse and a body are found in a supposedly magical area. After a number of events, it becomes clear that Tier is not dead but had been kidnapped by a secret society of Solsenti wizards who are trying to use travellers' magic for their own ends. They are capturing different orders souls in rings to try and release the Stalker from its imprisonment. Tier is held by them in a secret area of the palace and is bound not to escape. He will be killed after a year and a day like many other travellers before him.
Seraph and her family set out to rescue him but, in the meantime, the Emperor befriends Tier after a strange energy a Mermori leads the Emperor to Tiers cell.
So we have all the makings of a full-blown fantasy book. The start is emotionally charged with captivating scenes and good characters but once Tier gets to the village, the electric charge that was in Briggs writing seems to wane. After this initial build up, we suddenly jump 20 years with Seraph and Tier married with kids with different magical abilities and we seemed to have totally escaped any romantic or character explanation for their relationship. Briggs may want to dispense with the romantic poetry but a bit of development of their relationship would have been appreciated.
There is one too many plot holes and discrepancies for my liking, too. OK, it's a complex back story but some of it doesn't hold its own or fails to fit with the overall. The Stalker or those he influences (those who are shadowed) never really feel to be a real threat to the main characters. In fact, the most impressive opposition is a group of travellers that threaten Seraph on her quest to rescue her husband.
The wizards who kidnap Tier, the path of the five, never really hold much menace. Tier, after his initial confinement, has plenty of luxuries, given a year and a day (to organise an escape!) and allowed to roam and operate relatively freely with a certain area of the palace. The 'evil' wizards behave strangely but are not the only ones to behave out of character throughout the book.
So this really is fantasy-lite. Briggs can write extremely well. Some of the scenes are superb. Full of emotion and zeal. The characters on the whole are developed well but seem to peter out as does some of the plot element.
The book on the whole is not bad. It does tend to meander and you just get the feeling that if Briggs can improve character and plot inadequacies, she could produce some spectacular fantasy.
Phil Jones
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