James Nicoll Reviews

2004’s Covenants is the first volume in Lorna Freeman’s Borderlands secondary-universe fantasy series. Covenants is not a mystery, but on researching its author, I discovered that the author is a bit of a mystery.

Freston is the border outpost to which the Royal Army of Iversterre dispatches all those soldiers who do not fit the army mold, but who cannot be summarily dismissed or executed. Rabbit is one such, raised in the Borderlands by Iversterre expats, a man who dresses as well as he can under the circumstances and is considered finicky, who nevertheless has considerable woodcraft skills.

Or so everyone, including Rabbit, assumes. But currently Rabbit and the routine patrol for whom he scouts are hopelessly lost. Help arrives in an unwelcome form.

The patrol has encountered Laurel, a magical creature who looks like a bipedal mountain cat. Rabbit knows this being as a Faena. Laurel helpfully points out that their base, Freston, isn’t far away. It’s just magically hidden.

It seems that he cast a spell to waylay the patrol so that he could open negotiations. Laurel is an envoy from Border¹.

Border is populated by an assortment of beings humans would do well not to annoy. In ages past, invading humans were able to drive the magicals out of what is now Iversterre. However, the most recent war with Border was a one-sided debacle; the magicals won. No sensible subject of Iversterre wants to start another war with Border.

It is regrettable, therefore, that Iversterre poachers are doing their very best to provoke such a war. Magicals are people, but the poachers treat them as prey. Magical corpses are the basis for magical artifacts like armor and cursed staffs. Poachers kill the magicals, then smuggle their remains into Iversterre. Magicals aren’t all that united, but they do agree that this poaching is intolerable. If Lauren cannot secure guarantees from Iversterre to stop the poaching, the Border will declare war.

Rabbit is dragged into the affair. Despite his pretension to being a simple trooper, Rabbit is special in many ways. His Border-living parents have considerable influence in Border. Rabbit is descended, through sixty-two different lineages, from Iver, founder of Iversterre². Were such familial connections not enough to make Rabbit a person of significance, Rabbit also has magical potential he has been doing his very best to ignore.

Reluctant Rabbit soon discovers that there’s more to poaching than simple greed. It’s just one element of a far-reaching conspiracy whose schemers are willing to turn to the dark arts to further their plans.

~oOo~

In Iversterre there are two schools of thought about magic.

• Magic exists, is evil, and should be expunged. (Some well-connected folk seem to have magical powers, but they certainly cannot be doing anything wrong, unless they are ideological enemies, in which case they are doing something wrong.)

• Magic might exist or might be superstition, but in any case can’t possibly be as powerful as people claim.

Neither belief will help Iversterre deal with the looming conflict.

Lorna Freeman published Covenants in 2004, its sequel The King’s Own in 2006, and Shadows Past in 2010. She maintained her own website and diligently communicated with fans… until January 2011. Following a cheerful New Year’s Day post, her site and the author herself fell silent.

As far as I can tell, nobody knows what happened. Did Freeman suddenly decide to walk away from publishing and her public persona? Was she forced to leave? Did she die? Her fans do not appear to know. Freeman has no Wikipedia or encyclopedia entry. Her ISFDB entry is short on details. I sent email to her publisher asking for a clarification, but I don’t expect to hear back. If you know something I don’t, please let us know in comments!

Covenants is in many ways a consciously conventional secondary-world fantasy adventure in the style of the 1980s and 1990s. The setting is a standard quasi-medieval European one, complete with magic-hating churches. Rabbit is quickly revealed as a Very Special Person on whom the fates of nations depend. If you’ve not read Covenants, you’ve likely read books much like Covenants. The prose is workmanlike at best and the dialogue is not setting appropriate; the characters express themselves in modern-day North American vernacular.

Freeman does avoid formula with a few twists of her own. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation as to how the founder of the kingdom, Iver, managed to defeat entities that had no problem stomping the armies of Iver’s descendants. For another, there’s an amusing revelation concerning the source of magical talents. Humans assume it has something to do with bloodlines, and to an extent it does, but there’s another cause they’ve overlooked.

There are enough unexpected escalations to the scale of the crisis facing Iversterre and Border to keep Rabbit and company jumping. There were enough surprises in the narrative to keep me reading. I went into this hoping for a pleasant evening’s read and that’s what I got.

Covenants is out of print, as is The King’s Own. However, the third and so far, final book, Shadows Past, is available as an ebook. Is this simply because the first two books predated ebooks and so Roc did not secure the ebook rights? If Roc were in contact with the author or their estate, surely, they’d secure rights for all three?

1: Border, capital B, is a kingdom. The border, lowercase b, is the boundary between Border and Iversterre.

2: On one side of his family Rabbit is descended along thirty-two lines from Iver. On the other, Rabbit is descended from Iver along forty lines. This does not add up to seventy-two lines because some of the lines on both sides are the same lines. Inbreeding, not just for pharaohs and Habsburgs. The important thing is that should something happen to the current King, Rabbit has a strong claim to the throne. The King isn’t concerned, but some of the potential rival claimants are.