Tamora Pierce, Wolf-Speaker
Simon Pulse, 1994
When fantasy meets environmental disaster
I wish I could hear both sides of this conversation. I feel so left out sometimes.
Numair Salmalín, whispering to the baby dragon Kitten
A year ago when bandits had attacked her village in Snowsdale, a wolf pack had saved Veralidaine Sarrasri's life. Now it is the wolves who need help, and they turn to the fourteen-year-old for assistance. Leaving her life as assistant horsemistress at the royal castle in the capital city of Tortall, Daine, her mage teacher Numair Salmalín and her baby dragon Kitten travel north to Dunlath Valley, where a nasty surprise awaits them.
Something is afoot at Fief Dunlath, something that smells fishy. Why else would there be an occult net over the valley to detect the use of magic, apart from Stormwing patrols and two forts full of soldiers? Deforestation for mining have laid the land to waste, and animals are fleeing from the forest surrounding the area. Ogres have been enslaved to work as miners, and other immortals such as hurrocks, Stormwings and a horrible thing called a Coldfang have been called into service as well.
Daine and Numair, and their animal friends, realize that it is not just the wolves, but all the inhabitants—two-leggers, four-leggers, no-leggers!—of Dunlath Valley are in danger, as is the land itself. If the lord and lady of Dunlath—Beldane and Yolane—and the mages in their employ are indeed mining magical opal stones as Numair suspects, then an irreversible environmental upheaval might be in the offing.
Daine, with her wild magic that gets stronger with every passing day, who can converse with animals and immortals alike, knows that secretly mining opals is illegal and realizes that Yolane plans to take the throne of Tortall for herself after overthrowing King Jonathan. But even with knowledge and proof of treason, she finds herself trapped inside a magical barrier, with Numair on the other side, and the future of Tortall at stake.
In this second book of the Immortals quartet, Daine explores the limits of her wild magic, alternately appalled and amazed at what she can do. Fans of the Protector of the Small Quartet will be interested to hear that it is in Wolf-Speaker that she begins to realize her shape-shifting abilities. She also meets and befriends the basilisk Tkaa. There are further details about the time Daine 'ran with the wolves' after her village was attacked and her mother and grandfather killed.
Tamora Pierce—as evidenced by the detailed acknowledgement at the start—put in considerable study in wolf behaviour for this book, and the interplay between Brokefang and his pack, the wolf pups and the-girl-who-is-Pack are both heart-warming and delightful. Daine gets to interact with a whole lot of other animals as well, including sharing the mind of a brave kitten called Scraps who is a real 'pawful', an adventurous squirrel called Flicker, a marmot called Quickmunch and a bat, among others. And each time she finds that she has taken on some physical characteristic of the animal in question.
"Daine can speak to you even when she isn't doing it from her own body?" asked Numair.
Tkaa listened to Daine and said, "She has learned she has that ability only now. She asks me to say that if you do not tell her what she can do once the mages have left the castle, she will ask Quickmunch to bite you."
(p.274)
As ever, Pierce's characters enthrall. Numair Salmalín is the quintessential enigmatic mage—the greatest wizard of the land—sometimes moody, sometimes playful. We also get a tantalizing glimpse into his past, and the circumstances that led him to change his name. Unusually tall, and called stork-man by some of Daine's menagerie, he:
wore his springy mass of black hair tied into a horsetail away from his dark face and out of his brown eyes. His ink brush was dwarfed by the hand that held it, an exceptionally large hand that was graceful in spite of its size.
(p.5)
As Daine struggles with guilt at having given her animal friends 'human' ideas, Numair constantly has to remind Daine that her wild magic is quite safe. His interaction with his magelet is rather endearing, and this book could have certainly done with more of him. :
"Don't fret [says Numair]... if there was a genuine seed of madness in it [Daine's mind], I would have found it."
Daine smiled. "There's folk who would say you're the last man to know who's crazy and who's not. I know a cook who won't let you in his kitchen, a palace quartermaster who says he'll lock you up if you raid his supplies again—"
(p.7)
Thrown into the mix are some intriguingly complex wolf characters, power-hungry mages, a courageous little ten-year-old, an enterprising ogre called Iakoju, apart from an assortment of other animals (including humans). There is also an interesting perspective of Stormwing philosophy!
Wolf-Speaker is an engrossing blend of middle-ages-type fantasy adventure and modern-day environmental disaster. While the good versus evil theme of fiction transcends times, genres and worlds, sustainability of the ecosystem has rarely been used! Tamora Pierce has surpassed herself in this one, despite the editorial glitches here and there.
RATING: 8.5/10
The Immortals quartet:
Book I: Wild Magic
Book III: Emperor Mage
Book IV: The Realms of the Gods