Tell of a Hunter
The Whisperer in White
By Y. R. Liu
25 Jul, 2025
Y. R. Liu’s 2024 The Whisperer in White is a stand-alone young-adult coming-of-age secondary-world fantasy.
Magistrate’s daughter Talia loves hunting. Her father’s insistence that her older brother Oren chaperone her on her expeditions is an affront. After all, how often could Talia’s habit of lobbing arrows at targets she cannot clearly see come back to haunt her?
Luckily for Talia, she does not manage to skewer Oren or even a young woman with her apron wrapped about her whom Talia took for a swan. Talia (non-fatally) impales a cat.
A talking cat.
The cat’s name is Morel. Being far more durable than mundane cats, it takes being shot with an arrow with considerably more grace than Talia deserves. However, as Morel is a Voice, there will be consequences.
Voices are essentially familiars, but instead of being bound to witches, they are bound to Whisperers. Whisperers are quasi-immortal magical guardians who ensure that certain arcane defenses are maintained. Whisperers are powerful and respected. Angering one by wounding its Voice is a serious misstep.
Morel’s Whisperer, known as Four, decrees that Talia will be imprisoned for a year and a day. Talia will serve her sentence as Four’s unpaid servant. Talia flees, but discovers that Four has no trouble tracking her or transporting her across vast distances to Four’s isolated home.
Although Four does not see fit to explain his motives in detail, the fact that Talia’s arrow was able to wound a Voice suggests that Talia has magical potential. She’s unaware of her potential. It’s possible that she could be useful in the never-ending quest to protect the world from the consequences of an ancient age of magic.
Of course, that would require Four to be a better teacher than he is, and for Talia not to be, well, Talia.
The Whisperers are, despite any sarcastic comments I may later make, sufficiently good at their jobs that events such as the Last Blight, which nearly ended the world, are seen as the stuff of myth. This isn’t entirely good. Maintaining the wards inconveniences mundanes. Moreover, it’s only natural for rulers to decide that maintaining wards is an archaic practice no longer needed. Failure to maintain vital infrastructure is apparently a universal human foible.
There’s a parallel here with a manga I’ve been following, Witch Hat Atelier. Magic is both extremely useful and extremely dangerous, leaving in its wake consequences on par with the most alarmist interpretation of nuclear waste1. The most effective counter-measures involve magic, which is to say the efforts to contain magical side-effects could themselves cause the very side-effects they’re trying to avoid.
One solution is to limit the number of Whisperers. This means the Whisperers are kept busy, maintaining wards and dealing with the occasional chaos-beast infestation. Another solution is to preserve the Whisperers’ skills by making them ageless… which may account for their lackluster talent at training up their (extremely rare) replacements2.
I will give Talia this: she is extremely consistent in her decision-making process throughout the book. Whether it’s taking the time to make sure she is aiming at what she thinks she is aiming at, or resisting the urge to express displeasure at a spoiled autocrat3, or doing homework, she is adept at convincing herself that her first impulse is the right one. This has consequences, from which readers may draw useful lessons.
This novella is short and to the point. This is for the best, I think, as I don’t know how well Talia’s reluctance to learn from experience would support a five-or-six-hundred-page plot (or rather, I am sure it would greatly facilitate such a plot, but Talia’s proclivities might grate at such a length). Still, I’m curious enough about the long-term consequences of the plot that I would definitely pick up a sequel.
The Whisperer in White is available here (Itch.io), here (Barnes & Noble), and here (Chapters-Indigo). I did not find The Whisperer in White at Bookshop US, Bookshop UK, or Words Worth Books.
1: USA delenda est.
2: Whisperers are not really immortal. They’re durable and ageless, but they can be killed or choose to die. The membership rolls over on very long time-scales.
3: Whisperers are very busy and leave the ruling to rulers… but if there were more of them, they could try to preserve systems of government that more effectively resist ultimately fatal policy excursions.