James Nicoll Reviews

C. J. Cherryh’s The Tree of Swords and Jewels is the second volume of her Ealdwood series.

Ciaran’s bold embrace of otherworldly powers saved the besieged at Caer Wiell. There was a price. Two prices: one immediate and one long term.

The immediate price is that Ciaran’s former allies, including his blood relatives, now believe he is an elf prince (or rather, a halfblood). The elves can be feared or hated, but they’re definitely not beings one befriends or trusts. Therefore, Ciaran is treated as a pariah by many of those he saved; he’s also regarded askance by King Laochailan and Ciaran’s brother Donnchadh.

Despite the above stigma (or possibly because of it, since who would risk the anger of an elf lord?), Ciaran becomes lord of Caer Wiell. Ten years pass, peacefully by the measure of this strife-torn era. Then Ciaran discovers the other price of saving Caer Wiell.

One may call on great powers, but there’s no guarantee that only the great powers whose attention one wanted will take note. Ciaran saved Caer Wiell from the soldiers of perfidious An Beag. In so doing, he woke the Drow Duilliath. Ever since he awoke, Duilliath has been working to establish his own realm, using Donnchadh as his cat’s paw.

Should Duilliath succeed, the result won’t be simply that one minor warlord replaces a different minor warlord. The people and their land will be subject to dark forces beyond their ken¹. These forces are powerful enough that even the Lady of the Eald, the elf lady Arafel might fall.

Ciaran could turn to elf magic for salvation once again… but if he does, the price will be mighty indeed.

~oOo~

The title and author credit are much more legible on my copy. 

Swords and Jewels isn’t so much a sequel as a direct continuation from the first volume, so it’s just as well that the current edition merges both volumes into the omnibus The Dreaming Tree.

A point made partway through Swords and Jewels is that had Ciaran not used magic to break the siege ten years ago, the results would have been terrible for the people inside the fort, but better for pretty much everyone else. In particular, the King would be much less paranoid.

In this book, the Fair Folk don’t seem to be terribly good at product safety labels, or letting people know about the magical Superfund sites littered near Caer Weill. Mind you, having lived in the area for centuries, humans should have at least a vague sense of the perils lurking under their farmland.

For reasons I don’t understand, I find both installments in this work opaque, even for Cherryh. It might simply be due to the formally structured prose she employs to establish mood. In any case, I had to read the book a couple of times to get the events straight (or convince myself I had got them straight). Good thing for me the books are short.

The Tree of Swords and Jewels is available as part of an omnibus, The Dreaming Tree, here (DAW), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

I could not find The Dreaming Tree at either the US or the UK Bookshop². While I did find it at Chapters, I am baffled that it’s tagged as both Science Fiction and High Tech. But then, Daw tagged the work as: 

• Fiction / Science Fiction
• Hard Science Fiction / Science Fiction
• Space Opera / Science Fiction
• Action & Adventure

???

1: USA delenda est.

2: In draft 1, Bookshop read Bookspan. Old habits die hard.