The danger and the power, the friend and the foe

As the wind darkens into, I hope, a real post-Christmas blizzard, my brother and his wife have just left with their presents. We split up the holiday across the weekend this year: Christmas proper celebrated in two households, recombining for roast beef and plum pudding on Boxing Day. I had intended to make a goose with apples and quinces yesterday, but instead it wound up just a goose basted with honey and cloves; nothing went at all according to schedule, although somehow we still got a surprisingly functional afternoon of people and eggnog, not counting everyone who canceled on account of being either sick or asleep or both. I saw lesser_celery a mere two months after our last meeting. fleurdelis28 and sharhaun stayed for dinner. I received two of the best non-book presents I can remember in some time. One was the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab's "Last of the Three Spirits," which on me smells like green bitters and musky fruits; the other a bottle-green velvet blazer which looks vaguely Renaissance-ish when left unbuttoned and when done up properly, vaguely RAF. I should probably not wear both of them every day, but right now that's not my problem.

I also got Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain (2010), which I read last night before I failed to sleep. I agree with rushthatspeaks that it's her best work since Ombria in Shadow (2002) even as it revisits some of the core images from the Riddle-Master: riddles, harps, deep sounding notes and snapping strings, mythical archaeology, immortal provocateurs, the plain on which stands (and falls) the mysterious, endlessly spiraling tower whose door opens only to an unknown word. Its present day is a post-industrial, non-dystopian fantasy. There are royal bards and mnemonic triads; there are also steam trams and skylines. One of the protagonists is a princess, but she's by preference an archaeologist and eternally grateful she was born too far down the line of succession for her mother to do more than give her despairing looks when she turns up two hours late for a garden party in work boots, dungarees, and thousand-year-old dirt under her nails. There are echoes also of "A Matter of Music" and The Sorceress and the Cygnet (1991), but never such that the novel feels like falling back on familiar material rather than re-exploration. Its presiding figure is Nairn the Unforgiven, the Wanderer, the Fool, the Cursed, the dubiously legendary harper who failed the three bardic trials of Bone Plain and "render[ed] himself at once immortal and uninspired. Not a good example to follow." Especially given how entirely underwhelmed I was by Od Magic (2005) and frustrated by The Bell at Sealey Head (2008), I am very pleased.

Now I have to get back to grading papers.