I decided to start a new indie fantasy series and Silver and Shadow, by Melissa McShane, caught my eye. I’m glad it did! This is a fun and fast-paced book with a lady paladin and a guy werewolf who become friends…and more? It’s also as much a mystery novel as a fantasy novel, as we’ll see.
Ginnevra is a paladin who serves with a squad of her sister paladins, roaming the borders and less-populated regions of their land to protect the people from monsters. They worship the Dark Goddess, who gives them strength, sensory perception, and endurance beyond a normal human’s, especially when the moon is new. The Dark Goddess and her paladin followers are engaged in a perpetual battle with the Bright Lady and her evil monsters, who hunt humankind.
While Ginnevra’s paladin squad is investigating a bandit strike on a caravan, another of the other paladins is possessed by the tormented spirit of one of those killed on the site and attacks their captain. Ginnevra must kill her companion and friend to defend the captain. Wracked with guilt over killing another paladin, Ginnevra finds it difficult to carry out her duties. The captain grants her leave and orders her to visit Abraciebene, the holy city of the dark goddess.
Ginnevra travels there and meets with the Blessed, who leads their order. The Blessed has recently received word from a remote village on the border named Arrus that has faced repeated monster attacks and requested special protection. The Blessed believes some time in a quiet location where she will face easy battles against a few stray monsters in the forest neighboring Arrus will be just the thing to clear Ginnevra’s head.
Ginnevra arrives in the village and is given a cottage to live in that previously belonged to one of the villagers who recently died in a monster attack. From the beginning of her stay, though, something is odd about the village and the forest. For one thing, there are no monsters. Except for a squasc (a small fat creature with oversized rabbit-like ears and poisonous blood) that falls in the village well and is easily dispatched, Ginnevra sees no action during her first week there. After all the recent attacks the villagers complained of, shouldn’t there be numerous monsters around? At night, the forest is eerily quiet, devoid not only of monsters but even of normal forest animals.
Finally, on one of her nightly patrols around the village, Ginnevra decides she needs to venture deeper into the forest to see what’s going on. She almost gives up after she’s found nothing unusual after several hours, only to come across a werewolf running through the trees. This is a problem, as werewolves travel in packs, and a lone paladin would have trouble taking on a whole group of werewolves. Still, she’s sworn to protect the village, so Ginnevra tracks the creature, which proves easy as it has a strong musky odor. She soon detects another werewolf following, with a far more subtle odor. She falls back to try to get a better sense of the werewolf in the rear, but somehow loses them both, only to suddenly come across the stinkier werewolf by surprise.
The werewolf attacks her and gets in a serious bite that shreds her thigh, and she only fends it off with a blast of silver shot from her pistol. She draws her sword and counters another attack, but is rapidly weakening from blood loss. She’s about to pass out and the werewolf is poised to leap on her for the final kill. She’s surely about to die, except the second werewolf jumps from the trees to attack the first. She falls unconscious before she sees what the result is.
When she wakes up, she’s wrapped in a blanket in front of the fireplace at her cottage, her wounds are cleaned and dressed, and a strange man is walking around her home. He smells like the werewolf with the more subtle scent, and Ginnevra orders him to leave the house before she kills him, as she’s sworn to do with all monsters. Her threats are empty as she’s too injured to walk, though, as she discovers when she tries to rise. The man ignores her threats and introduces himself as Eodan.
As she heals over the course of the next several days, Eodan continues to treat her wounds and prepare meals for her. He has told the villagers he’s her brother, come to take care of her during an illness. Eventually, her curiosity wins out over her distrust and they begin to talk. Ginnevra learns that Eodan has been cast out from his pack because after a new alpha wolf took over, they decided to start worshiping the Bright Lady. Werewolf society is split between those who follow the Bright Lady and those, like Eodan, who prefer to remain independent, not worship anyone, and live in peace with humans. On the night she was attacked, Ginnevra had come between Eodan and a wolf sent from his old pack to hunt him down. By shooting the other wolf with silver and fatally injuring it, she actually did Eodan a favor. But since she herself was injured, Eodan feels an obligation to nurse her back to health. Although wary of humans, he doesn’t hate them or want to harm them.
Seeing Eodan’s patience and healing skills, and learning that not all werewolves follow the Bright Lady or kill humans, Ginnevra questions whether she really knows as much about monsters as she thought she did. It seems her paladin’s education was strong on monster biology (the better to know their weaknesses), but weak on the intricacies of things like werewolf social relations. Indeed, she comes to think of Eodan as not being a monster at all.
When Ginnevra is healed enough to walk, she decides to continue investigating why the forest is so quiet. She tells Eodan he can leave, but she’s not completely well and he fears she’ll re-injure herself, so he insists on accompanying her. In the forest, he can take his wolf form and move silently though the trees, his keen sense of smell detecting things even her enhanced human senses cannot. With his help, she discovers that one of the villagers goes into the forest on a regular basis. After the earlier monster attacks, shouldn’t the villagers be too scared to go in the woods?
They follow the human’s trail and discover that he’s hiding…well, something major that I can’t give away, but that accounts for the strange lack of monsters and other animals in the forest. Moreover, it’s not possibly something he could do by himself, so there must be other villagers in on the conspiracy with him. This is where the book really becomes more of a mystery. Ginnevra begins questioning the villagers, searching for clues, only to find that the closer she gets to the truth, the more some villagers (but she’s not sure which ones) want her and Eodan dead.
One thing that I liked about this book is that it’s so cozy. It’s got an epic fantasy setting, but we don’t get an epic fantasy story with huge, world-threatening stakes. Rather, we follow this tiny little mystery in a remote village, with Ginnevra on a highly personal journey as she questions her beliefs about monsters and, just possibly, sparks a little romance with Eodan (note this is in no way romantasy, though–the romance plays a secondary role in the plot). It’s easy to believe that in this world there might have been big epic wars and kingdom-shattering events in a previous generation or maybe coming up in a decade or two. But for now, things are quiet, and so we get a story like this. There’s just as much magic and adventure as during those other eras, but at a smaller scale.
The writing in Silver and Shadow is polished and down-to-earth, both the mystery and the romance develop plausibly, and Ginnevra and Eodan are likeable and believable characters. For fantasy readers who enjoy character-driven stories with undercurrents of mystery and romance, and are intrigued by a human-werewolf match, this novel comes highly recommended.