Horizon (Sharing Knife Series #4) by Lois McMaster Bujold

From the Publisher

In a world where malices—remnants of ancient magic—can erupt with life-destroying power, only soldier-sorcerer Lakewalkers have mastered the ability to kill them. But Lakewalkers keep their uncanny secrets—and themselves—from the farmers they protect, so when patroller Dag Redwing Hickory rescued farmer girl Fawn Bluefield, neither expected to fall in love, join their lives in marriage, or defy both their kin to seek new solutions to the perilous split between their peoples.

As Dag's maker abilities have grown, so has his concern about who—or what—he is becoming. At the end of a great river journey, Dag is offered an apprenticeship to a master groundsetter in a southern Lakewalker camp. But as his understanding of his powers deepens, so does his frustration with the camp's rigid mores with respect to farmers. At last, he and Fawn decide to travel a very different road—and find that along it, their disparate but hopeful company increases.

Fawn and Dag see that their world is changing, and the traditional Lakewalker practices cannot hold every malice at bay forever. Yet for all the customs that the couple has challenged thus far, they will soon be confronted by a crisis exceeding their worst imaginings, one that threatens their Lakewalker and farmer followers alike. Now the pair must answer in earnest the question they've grappled with since they killed their first malice together: When the old traditions fail disastrously, can their untried new ways stand against their world's deadliest foe?

Publishers Weekly

Bujold's Sharing Knife series concludes on a cheerful note that will please fans of fantasy romance. The Lakewalkers have been humanity's only defense against the Malices, vicious creatures who turn their victims into murderous zombie-like "mudmen." Dag, a former patroller exiled for insisting that the deliberately aloof Lakewalkers reach out to farmers, has finally found a Lakewalker "medicine maker" willing to teach him healing magic. When Dag disobeys the rules to help a seriously ill farm boy, he's kicked out again, and he and his pregnant farmer-born bride, Fawn, head north to a friend's home, braving mountains swarming with mudmen. The frontierlike setting and its postapocalyptic elements are the stars here. Although the first half of the book is slow going, Bujold piles on the action later, making her characters earn their happy ending. (Feb.)

Jackie Cassada - Library Journal

With a small group of loyal friends, Lakewalker Dag Redwing Hickory and his farmer-born wife, Fawn Bluefield, have finally reached the port city of Graymouth only to learn that if Dag is to control his new power as a healer, he must find a teacher. Bujold ("Vorkosigan Saga") excels at blending strongly developed characters and complex social interactions, and her eventful conclusion to her latest series proves that her talent for storytelling persists regardless of genre. A strong addition to most libraries, particularly where the series has a following.

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Chapter One

The Drowntown day market was in full spate. Fawn's nostrils flared at the strong smells: fish, clams, critters with twitching legs like giant crawdads packed in seaweed; frying funnel cakes, boiling crabs, dried fruit, cheeses; piles of used clothing not well laundered; chickens, goats, sheep, horses. Mixed with it all, the damp tang of the river Gray, stretching so wide its farther shore became a flat blur in the winter morning light.

The lead-colored water shimmered in silence beyond the bright busy blot of folks collected under the bluffs that divided Graymouth's Uptown from its noisier—and, Fawn had to admit, more noisome—riverside. The muddy banks were lined with flatboats at the ends of their journeys, keelboats preparing new starts, and fishing and coastal vessels that came and went more in rhythm with the still-ten-miles-distant sea than with the river's moods. The streets dodged crookedly around goods-sheds, rivermen's taverns, and shacks—all built of dismantled flatboats, or, in some cases, not dismantled but drawn ashore intact on rollers by oxen and allowed to settle into the soil. The owners of the latter claimed to be all ready for the next flood that would try, and fail, to wash the smells and mess of Drowntown out to sea, while Uptownlooked down dry-skirted. It seemed a strange way to live. How had she ever thought of the rocky creek at the foot of her family's farm back north as a river?

Fawn shoved her basket up her arm, nudged her companion Remo, and pointed. "Look! There's some new Lakewalkers here this morning!"

At the other end of the square, where all the bigger animals were displayed by their hopeful owners, two women and a man tended a string of half a dozen leggy horses. The three all wore Lakewalker dress: riding trousers, sturdy boots, shirts and leather vests and jackets, not so different in kind from the farmers around them, yet somehow distinctive. More distinctive was their hair, worn long in decorated braids, their height, and their air of discomfort to be surrounded by so many ¬people who weren't Lakewalkers. Upon reflection, Fawn wondered if anyone else here realized the standoffishness was discomfort, or if they only thought it high-nosed disdain. She would have seen it that way, once.

"Mm," said Remo unenthusiastically. "I suppose you want to go talk to them?"

"Of course." Fawn dragged him toward the far end of the market.

The man pulled a horse out of the string and held it for a farmer, who bent and ran his hands over its legs. The two young women looked toward Fawn and Remo as they approached; their eyes widened a bit at Remo, whose height, clothes, and long black braid also proclaimed him a Lakewalker patroller. Did their groundsenses reached out to touch the stranger-kinsman, or did they keep them closed against the painful ground noise of the surrounding farmers?

The southern Lakewalkers Fawn had seen so far tended to lighter skin and hair than their northern cousins, and these two were no exception. The taller woman—girl—she seemed not so very much older than Fawn, anyhow—had hair in a single thick plait as tawny as a bobcat pelt. Her silvery-blue eyes were bright in her fine-boned face. The shorter woman had red-brown braids wreathing her head, and coppery eyes in a round face dusted with freckles. Fawn thought they might be patrol partners, like Remo and Barr; they seemed unlikely to be sisters.

" 'Morning!" Fawn called cheerfully, looking up at them. The top of her own dark curls came up just past the middle of Remo's chest, and not much farther on these women. At almost-nineteen, Fawn had given up hope of gaining further inches except maybe around, and resigned herself to a permanent crick in her neck.

The reddish-haired woman returned a nod; the bobcat blonde, seeming uncertain how to take the odd pair, addressed herself to a height halfway between them. " 'Morning. You all interested in a horse? We've some real fine bloodstock, here. Strong hooves. One of these could carry a man all the way up the Tripoint Trace and never pull up lame." She gestured toward the string, well brushed despite their winter coats, who gazed back and flicked their tufted ears. Beyond, the Lakewalker man trotted the horse toward and away from the farmer, who stood hands on hips, frowning judiciously.

"I thought Lakewalkers only sold off their culls to farmers?" said Fawn innocently. The redhead's slight flinch was more from guilt than insult, Fawn thought. Some horse traders. Suppressing a grin, she went on: "Anyhow, no, at least not today. What I was wondering was, what camp you folks hailed from, and if you have any real good medicine makers there."

The blonde replied at once, in a practiced-sounding tone, "Lakewalkers can't treat farmers."

"Oh, I know all about that." Fawn tossed her head. "I'm not asking for myself."

Two braided heads turned toward Remo, who blushed. Remo hated to blush, he'd said, because the awkwardness of it always made him blush worse than the original spur. Fawn watched his deepening tinge with fascination. She could not sense the flick of questing groundsenses, but she had no doubt that a ¬couple went by just then. "No, I'm not sick, either," Remo said. "It's not for us."

"Are you two together?" asked the blonde, silver-blue eyes narrowing in a less friendly fashion. Lovers together, Fawn guessed she meant to imply, which Lakewalkers were emphatically not supposed to be with farmers.

"Yes. No! Not like that. Fawn's a friend," said Remo. "The wife of a friend," he added in hasty emphasis.

"We still can't help you. Medicine makers can't fool with farmers," the redhead seconded her companion.

"Dag's a Lakewalker." Fawn shouldered forward, keeping herself from clutching the Lakewalker wedding braid circling her left wrist under her sleeve. Or brandishing it, leading to the eternal explanation and defense of its validity. "And he's not sick." Exactly. "He used to be a patroller, but he thinks he has a calling now for making. He already knows lots, and he can do some, some amazing things, which is why he needs a real good guide, to help him along his next step." Whatever it is. Even Dag did not seem sure, to Fawn's concerned eyes.

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Excerpted from The Sharing Knife, Volume Four by Lois Bujold Copyright © 2009 by Lois Bujold. Excerpted by permission.
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