Celia was twelve years old on the day she cursed her brother.
Argent’s little sister is too young to understand that Argent is tired. He’s tired of trying to be the knight his father wants him to be, tired of being afraid of what would happen if he isn’t. He’s realized that where his father is concerned, he can be safe, or he can be happy, but he can’t be both. Celia doesn’t understand how her father can love her brother and still fail him so completely that one day Argent decides to disown himself and walk away from a lifetime of expectations. All Celia knows is that the brother she loves more than anything is leaving her behind forever, which means he obviously never loved her. And she has the wretchedly bad luck to reach womanhood and have her powers as a sorceress wake up the very instant she’s delivering the worst curse that a heartbroken twelve-year-old can come up with.
“I hope no one else is ever stupid enough to love you again!”
Argent is long gone by the time Celia finishes accidentally turning the guards’ swords to glass and realizes what she is, and what she’s done. I thought for sure we were in for a story about having to hide her powers to avoid being burnt as a witch, or instantly setting out for a child’s adventure in the Summer Lands to rescue her brother. But Celia is pragmatic as well as grief-stricken, the land of Prosper is thrilled to have the first sorceress born from the line of the Witch-Queen Selina, and Naomi Novik has an entirely different fairy tale in mind, one about curses and oaths and prophecies, and a generational war where one side never gets any less angry about a century-old betrayal, and the other side just tries to keep the butchery down to maybe three or four villages a season.
Summerlings can only attack Prosper in the summertime, and armies who try to cross over to the Summer Lands go crazy, or get old much too quickly, or come out a decade later still the same age. For most of the war, the strategy was to hunker down in forts, keep the Summerling armies distracted, and write off a few thousand soldier and villager deaths as “acceptable losses”. Not really something you can write heroic songs about, but this isa world where heroic songs can be a battle tactic, which is one of the many strategies Celia’s father used. I read the dozen or so pages of his rise from hedge knight to Grand Duke and winner of the Summer War in jaw-dropped amazement. Strategically ruthless and clever, he uses the Summerling’s own weakness for glory and epic songs against them, all while marrying and losing three wives to childbirth. And if you’re wondering, nope, there’s no hint of foul play in any of them, it’s just the reality of how dangerous pregnancy is, just more “acceptable losses.”
Every move Celia’s father makes is calculated to the smallest detail to put him close to the throne of Prosper, but not too close. And Celia has to continue the game and run her father’s affairs while her father is stunned from Argent leaving. One thing I love in stories is when a character is faced with a situation that’s kind of a lot and just handles it. Brilliantly. And not just administration or political marriages or trying to find word about Argent. Celia also has the matter of her other brother, Roric. The forgotten brother, never allowed to feel like her brother or an heir of their father. The two of them have to figure out how to navigate what a family looks like without Argent in the mix. It’s all handled so straightforwardly, with a handshake and lute lessons and silly stories about accounting, all in a setting designed by an author who’s dazzled me with her fairytale settings ever since I read Spinning Silver.
She’d opened one window to the breath of autumn air coming in, the cool rainy breeze, but the room was small and the fire kept it cozy, the colors of the rug and the tapestries bright in the summerglass glow, a jewel-box for them to sit in, as if they were both the jewels of their house.
The settings become even more dazzling when the story crosses over to the Summer Lands and the court of the Summer Prince. The images of dances and celebrations are quite a contrast with just how nightmarish the situation is. All of Celia’s plans can’t stand up to a tragedy that was started by humans’ complete inability to understand how summerlings think, or how ageless beings react to that same tragedy even though it took place over a hundred years ago.
We’re the same people who killed his sister, and it happened the day before yesterday.
It’s a no-win situation that Celia and her family are caught up in, with zero good choices. Do you kill, watch someone you love be killed, or die heroically? Keep in mind that not one of those options will stop thousands of people from losing their lives in a story they never asked to be a part of in the first place. All of the main players, even the ones who feel bad about it, are trapped by something that started from caring too much, or not enough. “The ends justify the means” running smack into “acceptable losses”. And the solution comes from the same place it does in all of my favorite stories of curses and oaths and prophecies: with glorious, unpredictable, totally brilliant loopholes.