The Sky Weaver

The Sky Weaver is a companion novel to The Last Namsara and The Caged Queen, telling of events after those in The Caged Queen and featuring Safire, a supporting character in both earlier novels. Safire is cousin to King Dax and commandant of his army. In The Sky Weaver, she tries to catch Eris, a bold thief with a mysterious ability to get into and out of the most inaccessible places. Eris works for the pirate Jemsin who will grant Eris her freedom if she brings him the king’s sister, Asha.

While chasing Eris, Safire is captured and imprisoned on Jemsin’s ship. In the course of a shipwreck and capture by a rival pirate, Eris saves Safire’s life more than once, but Safire is unable to trust her, and, when Dax shows up, Eris becomes their prisoner. They all journey to the Star Isles, where Dax hopes the empress Leandra will give aid to his drought-stricken people. Eris is a fugitive from Leandra’s army, accused of a horrible crime, and Safire has to choose between turning Eris over to Leandra to gain the empress’s favour, or believing in Eris’s innocence and helping her escape. Meanwhile Eris is still being pressured to use Safire to find Asha. Eris and Safire’s growing attraction to each other complicates the matter.

Interludes between Eris and Safire’s stories tell a tale of a shadow god who falls in love with a mortal woman. Ultimately, Eris learns that she is the daughter of their union and that Leandra is actually a sea goddess who tried to kill her mother and imprisoned her father. Safire saves Eris from Leandra, and Eris releases the Shadow God from his prison.

The mythology and politics of The Sky Weaver are background to the hate-to-love story between two fierce and broken women who learn to trust each other despite their circumstances. The tension and fascination between Safire and Eris progress believably to passion, and the conflict between their love for each other and their opposing agendas makes for a compelling plot.

Leandra is not a fully-developed antagonist; her motivations are dictated by plot requirements, and the connection between her jealousy as a goddess and her machinations as a political ruler is not convincingly fleshed out. Jemsin is more interesting and frightening, but he disappears from the plot halfway.

Eris is an enjoyable character who compels sympathy as the arrogant thief with a tortured past who finally learns her true identity. She is believably amoral when her goal is survival, and the reader roots for her to choose loyalty to Safire while completely understanding her need to betray her.

Safire is also tortured by her past, and her interactions with Eris prod her in all the wrong places, making her defensive and self-doubting, but her inner moral compass convinces her that Eris might be right. Her conflicting loyalties are well played-out and her final decision to stand up for Eris is satisfying.

The magic of Eris’s ability to move “across” from place to place is well-developed and fits nicely into the mythology. It becomes a convincing symbol of her character growth when she realizes she no longer needs the prop of her magic spindle to transfer between places.

Two well-drawn and sympathetic heroines, believable interpersonal conflicts and a compelling love story make The Sky Weaver the strongest installment yet in this series of connected novels. The Sky Weaver can stand alone, but readers of The Last Namsara and The Caged Queen will enjoy seeing their favourite characters show up again.