Curse of the Mistwraith

Curse of the Mistwraith – Part one of the War of Light and Shadow ** Janny Wurts

With a title like this you might think this was a waddle of clichés.
And you would be right.
On the other hand you would be completely wrong too.

Two halfbrothers, one brought up as a royal prince and with the unexploited gift of Light and the other brought up by mages and with the very skilled and learned gift of Shadow, find them self locked in a deadly conflict between their two homelands. For generations, war has raged between these lands, one plundering the other in acts of piracy to feed a starving population and the other desperately trying to protect its hard working people.

Very cliché so far, huh?

The king of the rich lands marries a daughter of the mages, and her dowry is that her children will bear the magic gifts. It is never explained why she would marry a man she doesn’t love or submit to a joyless marriage with the most self-centred, puerile and violent king ever. She is a powerful mage; why doesn’t she just tell him to piss of or she’ll fry him to cinders? Anyway, after the first boy is born, the king throws one of his tantrums and tries to rape her. She escapes, and flees to the pirate-king of the other lands, getting a new boy with him, this one with the gift of Shadow.
Angry at the abuse of one of their kind, the mages refuse to teach the first boy’s gift of Light, focusing their attentions to the boy with the Shadow gift.

But as chance has it, the Shadow mage is caught during a raid several years later, and brought before the King who sees his chance of wiping off the stain on his honour from his wife’s betrayal by torturing the young man to death. But along comes his wife and casts a spell; whatever he does to one of her sons will happen to the other. One would think that just spiriting them away and letting them live in peace would have been a better spell, but I suppose that wouldn’t do for a story. Enraged, the king throws the Shadow Master into exile through a magic gate. Alas, his own son gets thrown along, and the both of them finds themselves in a strange landscape where the sun never seems to rise above the clouds, and the mist never raises.

Don’t worry, I’m not telling the entire story. All this happens in about 50 pages.

And that’s the thing with this story. It’s a lot of action; never a dull moment. Line up the problems and shoot them down in a matter of chapters. And that’s all good and well. Her writing is also very accessible.

But….(there is always a but)

The characters. The half brothers are…well the Master of Shadow has, to put it lightly, a quicksilver temperament. He changes his mood very fast. And mostly so that he could fit in to the ‘hero’ cliché, being slow and thoughtful at times, impulsive and arrogant at the next. You get no grip on his personality because it keeps changing in a most annoying way so that he might get of looking good.

His brother doesn’t fare much better, because he never seemed to do, or think, anything interesting. At all. He just wants to be a king (hmm…have I heard that before?), and now that he’s lost his heirdoom (is there such a word?) he just grabbs the next best thing that comes a long and decides to rule that. Fortunately, no one of the inhabitants seems to mind, because, as everyone knows, a King solves everything, right?

None of the brothers ever seem very upset that they can never come back to their own lands, or that they had to leave their supposed loved ones behind.

And then, oh gods, there is the mages and the witches. All you need to know about them is: Male power, good and steadfast, Female power (with one exception) bad and stagnant.

Yawn.