Since I last posted here I have continued my Witch World reread, and finished both Three Against the Witch World and Warlock of the Witch World (they aren't long books).
In Three Against the Witch World, the three children of Simon and Jaelithe are born at a single birth—a thing that had never been known to happen before in Estcarp. And more than that, these children of a battle-hardened soldier from Earth and a former wise woman of Estcarp develop as extraordinary individuals in other ways. From a young age, the triplets (two boys and a girl) develop a three-way telepathic communion, which they keep secret from others. And while Kyllan and Kemoc are trained as warriors, as other youths are in their land, Kaththea shows promise of witch powers like those her mother possessed before her marriage. However, Simon and Jaelithe, knowing that Estcarp finds them useful but still distrusts them and their children for being different, refuse to give up their daughter for testing and fostering by the witches.
Years later, when Simon and Jaelithe have gone missing during an overseas adventure, and while the brothers are off on patrol, the witches swoop in and spirit Kaththea away to their heavily-guarded sanctuary. There she trains as a witch, but before she can take the final vows (and might, thereafter, be lost to her family forever), she contacts her brothers to warn them. Because the witches have been mustering all of their combined powers for—and focussing most of their attention on—a final devastating blow against their foes to the south, a chance to rescue Kaththea may finally be offered. And so it is, for as the witches strike out against enemy Karsten by literally moving mountains, many of the witches die while others are left temporarily too drained to stop the enterprising Tregarth boys. Now it is their turn to swoop in and carry Kaththea off. However, knowing that they will now be hunted as outlaws, they need a refuge, and so they turn to the forbidden land beyond the eastern mountains.
After an arduous journey, they arrive in the ancient land of Escore, which proves to be a land of wonders, as well as a land where powerful forces for good and evil exist in a sort of uneasy balance, ever since battles fought centuries ago. And the coming of the Tregarths upsets that balance.
While the previous book is told from the perspective of Kyllan, the warrior, Warlock of the Witch World is told from the viewpoint of Kemoc. While still in Estcarp, Kemoc turned a period spent recovering from a battle injury to good account by searching through the archives at Lormt, hoping to uncover secrets there. This is how he found out about the forbidden realm beyond the mountains in the first place, but he also uncovered a certain amount of magical knowledge. Because men in Estcarp have no magical power (at least until the arrival of Simon, and afterwards his sons) they are allowed full access to the archives because no one sees any reason to hide from them knowledge that they can't use anyway. Which in Kemoc's case, turns out to be not at all the case.
And now that he is in Escore, he is going to need every bit of magical knowledge he has acquired, every bit of magical power that he can muster.
I quite enjoyed this book because, unlike Norton's other books, this one has a fairy tale vibe to it (along with other elements more familiar to fans of her books). It is even possible to identify the specific inspiration ("Childe Rowland" and its small family of variants) for a large part of the plot. But along with the story of Kemoc going on an arduous quest to rescue his sister (yes, again), there are complexities to the story involving politics and alliances among different cultures, different races, and even different species (some of them the distant progeny of experimental subjects in laboratories—magical? scientific? some combination of both? too long ago to say), trying to unite in order to fight against a similarly diverse coalition, but that other one is allied with forces of the Dark. Kaththea is being seduced by a member of that other coalition, with promises of increasing her power beyond anything she could ever have imagined before. And in the course of trying to save his sister, Kemoc also faces questions about the dangers and temptations of power.
So now for me, it's on to the final book of the original series. Like I said, none of them are long, so I'll probably report back soon.
