Strands of Starlight
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
|
| Cover of 1989 US release | |
| Author | Gael Baudino |
|---|---|
| Cover Artist | Thomas Canty |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Series | The Strands Series |
| Genre(s) | Fantasy novel |
| Publisher | Roc Fantasy |
| Released | 1989 |
| Media Type | Print (Paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0451453166 |
| Preceded by | Spires of Spirit |
| Followed by | Maze of Moonlight |
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
[edit] Running
The introduction to the Strands Series follows the trials of an young woman, Miriam, who is treated as a pariah by all she meets because she was born with the involuntary and irresistible ability to heal any injury she sees, though, cruelly, she cannot heal herself. Cast out of her home as a child, she winds up captive in the dungeon of the local Catholic authority, Bishop Aloysius Cranby, denounced as a witch.
Escaping from the dungeon despite the horrific injuries inflicted on her legs by her Inquisitors, she makes her way through the city and comes upon a visiting businessman, George Darci of Saint Blaise, who has slipped in the wet street and broken his ankle. In a hurry to escape the city and against her better judgment and wishes, she heals him. He offers her his cloak and some money; she accepts grudgingly, departs him, squeezes through the city gate, and crawls several miles down the road on her hands and knees away from the city before collapsing.
She is found by a travelling midwife, Mika, who takes her in and tends her injuries, despite her awareness of the public search for Miriam taking place and Miriam's unwilling healing of a minor injury on one of Mika's hands. Using the money George gave Miriam to bribe the soldiers they encounter, Mika takes her into her home in the village of Saint Blaise and allows her to stay indefinitely.
After Mika loses a patient's baby in delivery, another one of Mika's patients starts suffering from eclampsia; not wanting Mika to be devastated twice in one day, Miriam accompanies her despite the very real possibility that she would have no choice but to perform a healing in front of some of the local women. She indeed heals the ailing mother and decides to leave Mika. Mika advises her to seek out a nearby village named Saint Brigid since its inhabitants are known to be unusually tolerant. On her way there, she encounters a local nobleman, Baron Roger of Aurverelle, who has been mauled by a bear while hunting. After she heals him, he rapes her and leaves her for dead.
Coming to, she drags herself to her pony, and the pony takes her the rest of the way to Saint Brigid. She is found by the townspeople who bring her to the local church and call the elf Varden in to heal her wounds. He heals her physical wounds but discerns that she has even worse wounds on her psyche, caused by her life of abuse, fear, and rejection, that he can't heal. The last violation represents to Miriam an intolerable injury, a crossing of a line that had never been crossed before, and she descends into a deep depression.
Despite her dark mood, the townspeople take her in wholeheartedly and without reservation. As she gets to know the town's history and is instructed on reading and writing by the local priest, Kay, she discerns that several undesirable members of the village have disappeared under questionable circumstances that suggest the use of magical powers. Amassing her evidence, she finally works up the courage to confront Kay and Varden and demand the truth. They confirm her suspicions: the Leather Woman, a crippled and bitter elderly woman, and the Jacques Alban, the last priest before Kay, had been changed by Varden: the Leather Woman into the young girl who grew up to be Charity, and Alban into a pig.
Soon after, she and Charity are assaulted by Baron Roger in the forest, and when Varden intervenes and drives him off, Roger mortally wounds him. Miriam heals Varden, and later she demands that he change her, too, and make her taller and stronger, so that she can take vengeance on Baron Roger. Varden agrees to transform her. In a midnight ceremony, he reshapes her into a taller and stronger woman, although she is initially dismayed to find out that she has been made lovely as well.
[edit] Training
Another elf, Terrill, agrees to teach her how to use a sword. He instructs her intensely, but she soon finds that he is expecting her to behave and fight like an elf, not a human woman. As time progresses, she comes to realize that when Varden healed her, and later when she healed Varden, some of his nature passed on to her. Her mystical transformation by Varden has quickened the process, so now she is physically like an elf and is quickly learning to think, feel, and see like an elf. However, she finds she cannot let go of her rage against Baron Roger, which holds her back from taking the final step of giving herself to the starlight within and becoming wholly elven.
While her instruction with Terrill progresses, Aloysius Cranby, who has been tracking her escape route by interrogating Mika and the guards she bribed, arrives in Saint Brigid with two Inquisitors, Hoyle and Bartholomew, all dressed as Dominican friars. They take up residence with Kay, the priest, in the very same house Miriam is living in. She encounters him, and although he does not recognize her in her new body, she recognizes him and alerts the whole village to his identity. The villagers decide to mislead Aloysius and his two companions into thinking that Miriam had indeed arrived at Saint Brigid, and had committed suicide soon after arriving, a story that has more truth in it than Miriam likes. As time passes, Aloysius becomes more and more irritated and certain something is amiss, but he cannot identify anything concrete.
Meanwhile, Hoyle has developed lustful feelings for Miriam, and he attempts to corner her one morning on her way back from weapons training and coerce her into giving him favors. She kills him with her sword instead of using trying to defuse the situation with tact, a fact Terrill points out to her as he disposes of the body. Having witnessing the fight, Aloysius hastily rides his horse out of town, deliberately trampling Charity in the process. While Miriam heals her, Varden becomes aware of the near-tragedy, and he uses the hidden paths of the forest to get ahead of Aloysius, waylay him, and kill him with his bare hands.
[edit] Protecting
Miriam and Terrill discover that Aloysius had captured Mika and charged her as a witch. Upon finding that she is being held in the same dungeon that held Miriam, she resolves to free Mika. Terrill, knowing that Miriam can fight well but not like an elf, sustained by the vision of starlight, initiates a full-contact duel with Miriam. As he hopes, the strain of fighting Terrill makes Miriam finally give herself over to the starlight and conclude her transformation into an elf. As a symbol of acceptance of her completed change, she formally takes the Elvish form of her name, Mirya; by this, she also tacitly admits that she is, in a way, the semi-reincarnation of Terrill's long-deceased lover, Mirya, who was slaughtered by men of Aurverelle three centuries before.
Her training done and Terrill reassured, they continue on, stopping in Saint Blaise so that Terrill can look in on George Darci, whom Terrill had saved from a rampaging pig, the changed Alban, some time earlier. Despite knowing that George does not recognize her, and marveling at the tangled web of causality, she thanks him for his help in Hypprux. They find that his daughter, Janet, is being held as a hostage by Baron Roger to ensure his cooperation in the Baron's political schemes. Recognizing the much-diluted elven blood present in his wife, Mirya comforts her with a depth of compassion that surprises Terrill.
She and Terrill go on to infiltrate Hypprux. Using their elven sight and agility to find humanly-impossible ways of piercing the tight security, they make their way to the dungeon. After they free Mika and slay all of the Inquisitors present, Mirya restores Mika's sanity, which has been shattered by torture, using her newfound senses and powers. Then, all possibilities of escaping undetected finally collapse, and they have to escape via a rope strung between two towers; seeing Mika's fear, and with Mika's blessing, Mirya once again subtly alters Mika's being, and takes away her fear of heights, much to the awe of Terrill.
Leaving the city, Mirya, Mika, and Terrill return to Saint Brigid. Feeling the weight of her quest for vengeance pressing upon her, a quest increasingly alien to her, Mirya leaves the village, secludes herself, and enters the starlight. Pouring out nearly all of her energy, she forces into being a new future, wherein Baron Roger and she can duel. Baron Roger gets the idea to arrange a hunt in a nearby tame forest, so that he can be alone with Janet Darci and have his way with her. Mirya is waiting, and when he attempts to violate Janet, Mirya initiates a sword battle with Roger, knowing that he is a formidable swordsman with enormous strength and vast reserves of energy.
As she introduces herself to Roger, she realizes belatedly that her new appearance means that Roger doesn't even know who or why he is fighting, thus taking away the personal nature of her vengeance. Finally, Mirya prevails over him, and cuts open Roger's throat. At that nexus in time, with Roger's life ebbing away, she can finally see the many unpleasant futures that will follow Roger's death, whereas a future with a living, but changed, Roger can prolong the things she holds precious for a while longer. Putting aside her desire for Roger's death, she heals his wounds and then completely rips apart and reshapes his mental makeup so that he is no longer a rapist or violently aggressive and ambitous; it is a taking, she realizes, that is, in its invasive and personal nature, far worse than what he did to her.
Mirya returns Janet to her family, and she comes back to Saint Brigid, knowing that she and those she loves will have to deal with the effects of her actions for many years to come.
