meganbmoore | The Witches of Wenshar by Barbara Hambly (Reply)

Set nine months after The Ladies of Mandrigyn, The Witches of Wenshar has Sun Wolf and his former second-in-command, Starhawk, arriving in Tandieras, looking for a mage to serve as a teacher. (Random aside: why is his name as two words, and hers as one?) The nearby kingdom of Wenshar, it seems, was once ruled by evil witches who summoned and controlled demons, but they had been wiped out. However, a mage of Tandieras, Kaletha, claims to have found the books of the witches, and used the to train herself, and Sun Wolf attempts to learn from her, even as the king hires him to train his weak son, Jeryn, in the arts of war.

I'm surprisingly happy with how Sun Wolf and Starhawk's relationship was handled. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, but I was fearful of something. Possibly, I worried about lovey-dovey-ness and...uhm...discussions, which wouldn't really fit them. Instead, Hambly takes the Simon R. Green route of "I like you, you like me, we're both allergic to mush. Let's go kill things." Starhawk's approach to this part of her life reminds me of Zoe in Firefly. Very direct and matter of fact, it is what it is and there's no point in talking about it. He can see the softer side of her, but can't talk about it outside the bed room, and her calm acceptance puts him in the position of being the more obviously emotional and touchy feely one.

It isn't as good as The Ladies of Mandrigryn, but it's still pretty good. The thing is that LoM didn't really need a sequel, it wrapped up everything it needed to. It didn't make the idea of a sequel an outright bad thing (I'd be appalled to learn that there are sequels to Dragonsbane even if I hadn't been warned they were bad, simply because that was very clearly The End of the story) as it's still set up for more adventures, they just aren't needed. I have to admit, though, that while I really like Jeryn and his sister, Tazey (I wouldn't mind seeing more of them when they're older, but I doubt that will happen) and the murder mystery that's lurking in the first half, and more prominent in the second, I wasn't overly impressed with the various other adult characters aside from Sun Wolf and Starhawk. I figure the LoM characters kind of spoiled me.