In Sylvan Shadows - Chapter Twenty-One
Jan. 31st, 2026 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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i_read_whatUgh. January. Busy month, January. Hopefully things will get calmer. Hah.
Anyway, back to characters having a much busier time than me! Last time, Cadderly pulled off the ritual and we got walking Ents! Nice!
So I usually don't comment on chapter titles, but this one seems a bit ominous: "Long live the King"
For all that I sympathize with poor Galladel, I know the book doesn't, and this generally is a sentiment for a new king rather than an old one. So yeah, I'm anticipating that Elbereth gets a promotion here.
It'd be nice if at any point on this journey Salvatore bothered to have the guy show ANY traits that would be suitable for kingship. As opposed to being a bully who likes to try to attack entire enemy camps with five people. Galladel wasn't great, but he was also old, tired and traumatized. It's clear from Shayleigh and Tintagel that THEY think Elbereth would be the better leader. It'd be nice if we got to see what they see.
Anyway, we start with a warning: Danica telling Cadderly, and us, that the battle is beginning in full. Cadderly senses a dangerous presence - Druzil. And Druzil means Dorigen.
And indeed, Dorigen shows up in the clearing. She's too distracted by the fact that the trees have uprooted themselves to notice that Cadderly and Danica are right there.
There's a moment of fright when Dorigen yells "What have you done?" but it seems like she means it rhetorically. She uses a ring to prepare a fireball to attack a tree, and I feel like that proves mine and Cadderly's point about the goddamn crossbow. But maybe Dorigen hadn't bought that weapon's proficiency.
So we get Dorigen vs. tree, and look, I'm not one for villain apologia, but this is a little silly:
“Fete!” the wizard repeated, and the flames did not relent. She moved her hand about, shifting the angle of the fire to immolate the tree. The great oak turned its cumbersome bulk about, inadvertently setting small fires on the trees beside it. It reached out with a long root for Dorigen, but the wizard lowered her hand in line with the root and burned it away to nothingness.
So horrified at the sheer wickedness of Dorigen’s destructive actions, Cadderly couldn’t draw his breath. He looked to his right, the west, for some sign of Danica, praying that his love would come out and stop Dorigen’s carnage. But while Danica was indeed concealed in the brush behind the wizard, she couldn’t easily get to Dorigen. Three orogs had moved out of the shadows and taken up a defensive position behind and to either side of the wizard.
"Sheer wickedness"?
Dude, Dorigen's done plenty of wicked things in this book, but using a fire attack against a tree enemy - especially when it's attacking her - is not unreasonable.
I appreciate that she successfully blows it up too. She heads for another one, and Cadderly knows he has to stop her. And he does:
Dorigen extended her fist again and started to utter the triggering rune, but she stopped, distracted by a curious sight off to the side. A beam of light emanated through the brush and from the shadows, rocking slowly back and forth. Keeping her fist extended, the wizard slowly moved over to investigate.
Her expression turned to one of curiosity as she neared the shadowed hollow. A cylindrical tube, the source of the light beam, rocked along the inner edge of a light blue, wide-brimmed hat that had been placed on its side. Dorigen didn’t recognize the hat, but she had seen the cylindrical object before, inside the pack belonging to the young priest, Cadderly.
I do like when Cadderly gets to be tricky. And Dorigen's a good adversary for this kind of thing. She's a bit too powerful a mage for either Danica or Elbereth to steamroll, and they're not thinker types.
Dorigen realizes that she's in a vulnerable spot, but she's prideful (which the narrative points out unsubtly). She looks for him, while Cadderly prepares a blow dart. He gets her in the face, but she apparently passes her fortitude save, because she doesn't drop. She prepares to attack.
-
We shift scenes to Ragnor who is now in a position to directly challenge Galladel. Galladel realizes quickly that he has to get in close to Ragnor if they're going to have any hope of winning. He tries to taunt him, and it doesn't work all that well.
That said, it seems like Ragnor's on board with a one-on-one type of fight. Galladel's folks try to talk him out of it, but Galladel has possibly read the chapter title as well and decides that even if he's incredibly weary and really only wants to go to Evermeet, it's his noble duty to do this.
So yeah, he charges with the intent to crush Ragnor with his horse. But a giant hurls a boulder which takes out the horse. Too bad. His escort and Ragnor's bugbears fight, while Galladel gets to face off with Ragnor on foot.
Ragnor declares that the fight is fair now. Galladel notes that the ogrillon seems a lot bigger now that he's not on a horse. Yeah, probably.
--
We switch to Cadderly and Dorigen. Apparently she didn't make the save after all. Or not completely. She yawns and her concentration is disrupted enough that Cadderly can charge in and bash her with his walking stick.
He has a moment of trauma, thinking of Barjin, and prays he didn't just kill her.
--
We switch to Danica, fighting orogs. This is the least interesting of the battles. No offense to Danica, or even Salvatore, as he's pretty good at writing an exciting fight scene and Danica's powerful. But there's no real suspense here. The only surprise is when Cadderly, who got his crossbow back, explodes an orog for her.
I rather like this though:
Danica looked back to see Cadderly, his crossbow, taken from the unconscious wizard, securely in his hand. Standing over Dorigen, he almost seemed a terrible thing to Danica, his visage stern and angry.
Unfortunately, we drift into the theme that I really haven't been enjoying in this novel:
Danica guessed what emotions tore at poor Cadderly; she understood the guilt and confusion that had brought him to this point. But now was not the time for weakness. “Finish her,” Danica instructed coldly. She glanced around quickly to ensure that there were no more enemies in the area, then ran after the departing trees, where the larger battles had been joined.
Cadderly looked down to the unconscious wizard, disgusted at what he knew he must do.
Is killing her the smart thing to do? Sure. But then YOU do it, Danica. There is no reason except cruelty to make Cadderly be the one to murder a helpless adversary. If you think his stern and angry visage is "terrible", then don't try to turn him into that person!
--
Now we switch to Elbereth. Apparently he'd had some battle plans in mind, but the chaos of the battle makes that impossible. He can't find a group of his own people to easily join, so he just starts fighting bugbears. Fair enough.
He gets a chance to use his horn, which causes Shayleigh to appear on her horse. She tries to give the horse to Elbereth, who initially refuses, but accepts when she tells him that his dad is fighting Ragnor.
He goes off, quickly, genuinely emotional because he remembers how strong Ragnor was and knows that he's better with a sword than his dad is. Aw.
I know "elvensteeds" are a thing in fantasy literature, but I wonder at the usefulness of cavalry in a forest civilization to begin with. Especially when your enemies include giants who like taking out horses with boulders. Elbereth's horse goes down, but it's a fake out. He comes back up and they continue.
--
Ivan and Pikel are also fighting. Nothing notable here.
--
We go to Rufo. His seemingly courageous move of jumping into an Ent's branches is now recharacterized:
Safe in his high perch, Kierkan Rufo thought himself quite clever. The angular man had no intention of playing any role in this horrific battle beyond that of observer, and in that regard, he thoroughly enjoyed watching the pitiful goblins and orcs and orogs fleeing before the incredible power of his moving oak.
I feel like Salvatore just did a sudden one-eighty on the guy's character arc. Maybe he figured out that Rufo will be a better villain going forward than an ally? But we just saw this guy fight off cowardice and compulsion to come clean to his comrades...and there are a lot of c-words in that sentence but I'm not rewriting it - that was a moment of significant growth and progress.
When he'd jumped into the tree, it had been a moment of triumph. I don't like this sudden backslide into "let's watch and sadistically sneer at the people fleeing from us". I feel like it's a bad sign.
Rufo's not so smug when giants start attacking his tree though. And eventually, he ends up knocked out of it with a broken leg. He ends up digging a shallow pit and hiding there instead.
--
Danica has apparently decided to leave Cadderly alone with his moral dilemma, with just a little bit of angst at not being able to protect him as she marvels at the trees fighting.
See:
Danica looked back behind her, worried for Cadderly. She couldn’t protect him this time—she didn’t really believe she could protect herself. With a resigned shrug and one longing glance back to where she had left the young scholar, the young woman set off, knowing that she would not have difficulty finding an enemy to hit.
She didn't even stick around to see if he'd actually kill her. Let alone provide any kind of moral support. I miss when I enjoyed this couple back in Canticle. Cadderly, you could probably do better.
--
And indeed, we switch to Cadderly:
Cadderly fumbled with the Tome of Universal Harmony, trying to find some answers that would offer him escape from the task Danica and the insane situation had placed upon his shoulders. Dorigen lay very still below him, groaning softly every now and then.
Danica, you're a terrible girlfriend.
Cadderly keeps dithering because of course he does. Because it's not like he had a combat-capable friend with fewer moral qualms who could have just done this for him a second ago.
On the plus side, he has his crossbow back and manages to blow up Druzil. So there's that.
And here we go:
Dorigen groaned and began to shift her weight, groggily trying to get up to her elbows. Cadderly turned the crossbow down at her and loaded another dart.
His eyes widened in shock at his actions; how could he think of killing the defenseless woman, and how could he think of using his damning weapon to commit the foul deed? His breath came in gasps; Barjin’s eyes stared at him from the shadows.
He dropped the bow and took up the book, closing it and grasping it tightly in both hands.
“This is not what you had in mind when you gave this to me,” he admitted, as though he were addressing Headmistress Pertelope, then he slammed the heavy tome on the back of Dorigen’s head, again dropping her flat to the ground.
...I mean, I get we're dealing with fantasy world anatomy, but I'm pretty sure the repeated head trauma resulting in unconsciousness would have probably killed this woman already.
Anyway, he starts disarming her, and this is...really thorough:
Cadderly worked frantically, before the wizard recovered again. He pulled three rings from Dorigen’s hands: one her signet ring bearing the design of this sect of Talona; one of gold and set with a shining black onyx (this was the one that Cadderly suspected had shot the magical flames); and the last of gold and set with several small diamond chips. The wizard’s robe came off next, Cadderly stuffing it into his backpack. He found a slender wand slipped under a tie in Dorigen’s undergarments, and fumbled through any pouches or pockets in her remaining clothing, making certain that she had no more magical devices or spell components.
Dude...I get that you don't want to kill her, but I'm not all that comfortable with you searching this woman's undergarments...
Especially as Cadderly realizes there are some spells that won't involve components at all. She could still wake up and hurt Danica with a few syllables...so...
Outraged by that thought, Cadderly grabbed his walking stick and laid the wizard’s hands out to the side. Grimacing as he swung, he smashed Dorigen’s fingers, on one hand and then the other, repeatedly, until her hands were black and blue and wickedly swollen. Through it all, the drugged and battered wizard only groaned softly and made no move to pull her hands away.
...Dude.
Okay, so I do get the logic here. Better to mutilate her than to kill her outright, I guess. But this seems like a pretty extreme thing to do without a lot of build up. She's ALREADY drugged to unconsciousness and stripped half-naked too.
And somehow I feel like Danica and Elbereth are going to find more fault in the fact that he didn't kill her than the fact that he left her naked and helpless at a battlefield...
I think I'm going to need to sort my thoughts about this for a while. I definitely do not feel good or satisfied by this, though maybe it can be explored more in the aftermath...
--
Back to Elbereth and I don't know. I feel like Cadderly's moral dilemma and it's questionable resolution really should have been the end of the chapter. I certainly am more invested in that than this.
But okay.
Elbereth gets to the battle in time to watch Ragnor win. Elbereth is now king of Shilmista. Poor Shilmista.
Anyway, back to characters having a much busier time than me! Last time, Cadderly pulled off the ritual and we got walking Ents! Nice!
So I usually don't comment on chapter titles, but this one seems a bit ominous: "Long live the King"
For all that I sympathize with poor Galladel, I know the book doesn't, and this generally is a sentiment for a new king rather than an old one. So yeah, I'm anticipating that Elbereth gets a promotion here.
It'd be nice if at any point on this journey Salvatore bothered to have the guy show ANY traits that would be suitable for kingship. As opposed to being a bully who likes to try to attack entire enemy camps with five people. Galladel wasn't great, but he was also old, tired and traumatized. It's clear from Shayleigh and Tintagel that THEY think Elbereth would be the better leader. It'd be nice if we got to see what they see.
Anyway, we start with a warning: Danica telling Cadderly, and us, that the battle is beginning in full. Cadderly senses a dangerous presence - Druzil. And Druzil means Dorigen.
And indeed, Dorigen shows up in the clearing. She's too distracted by the fact that the trees have uprooted themselves to notice that Cadderly and Danica are right there.
There's a moment of fright when Dorigen yells "What have you done?" but it seems like she means it rhetorically. She uses a ring to prepare a fireball to attack a tree, and I feel like that proves mine and Cadderly's point about the goddamn crossbow. But maybe Dorigen hadn't bought that weapon's proficiency.
So we get Dorigen vs. tree, and look, I'm not one for villain apologia, but this is a little silly:
“Fete!” the wizard repeated, and the flames did not relent. She moved her hand about, shifting the angle of the fire to immolate the tree. The great oak turned its cumbersome bulk about, inadvertently setting small fires on the trees beside it. It reached out with a long root for Dorigen, but the wizard lowered her hand in line with the root and burned it away to nothingness.
So horrified at the sheer wickedness of Dorigen’s destructive actions, Cadderly couldn’t draw his breath. He looked to his right, the west, for some sign of Danica, praying that his love would come out and stop Dorigen’s carnage. But while Danica was indeed concealed in the brush behind the wizard, she couldn’t easily get to Dorigen. Three orogs had moved out of the shadows and taken up a defensive position behind and to either side of the wizard.
"Sheer wickedness"?
Dude, Dorigen's done plenty of wicked things in this book, but using a fire attack against a tree enemy - especially when it's attacking her - is not unreasonable.
I appreciate that she successfully blows it up too. She heads for another one, and Cadderly knows he has to stop her. And he does:
Dorigen extended her fist again and started to utter the triggering rune, but she stopped, distracted by a curious sight off to the side. A beam of light emanated through the brush and from the shadows, rocking slowly back and forth. Keeping her fist extended, the wizard slowly moved over to investigate.
Her expression turned to one of curiosity as she neared the shadowed hollow. A cylindrical tube, the source of the light beam, rocked along the inner edge of a light blue, wide-brimmed hat that had been placed on its side. Dorigen didn’t recognize the hat, but she had seen the cylindrical object before, inside the pack belonging to the young priest, Cadderly.
I do like when Cadderly gets to be tricky. And Dorigen's a good adversary for this kind of thing. She's a bit too powerful a mage for either Danica or Elbereth to steamroll, and they're not thinker types.
Dorigen realizes that she's in a vulnerable spot, but she's prideful (which the narrative points out unsubtly). She looks for him, while Cadderly prepares a blow dart. He gets her in the face, but she apparently passes her fortitude save, because she doesn't drop. She prepares to attack.
-
We shift scenes to Ragnor who is now in a position to directly challenge Galladel. Galladel realizes quickly that he has to get in close to Ragnor if they're going to have any hope of winning. He tries to taunt him, and it doesn't work all that well.
That said, it seems like Ragnor's on board with a one-on-one type of fight. Galladel's folks try to talk him out of it, but Galladel has possibly read the chapter title as well and decides that even if he's incredibly weary and really only wants to go to Evermeet, it's his noble duty to do this.
So yeah, he charges with the intent to crush Ragnor with his horse. But a giant hurls a boulder which takes out the horse. Too bad. His escort and Ragnor's bugbears fight, while Galladel gets to face off with Ragnor on foot.
Ragnor declares that the fight is fair now. Galladel notes that the ogrillon seems a lot bigger now that he's not on a horse. Yeah, probably.
--
We switch to Cadderly and Dorigen. Apparently she didn't make the save after all. Or not completely. She yawns and her concentration is disrupted enough that Cadderly can charge in and bash her with his walking stick.
He has a moment of trauma, thinking of Barjin, and prays he didn't just kill her.
--
We switch to Danica, fighting orogs. This is the least interesting of the battles. No offense to Danica, or even Salvatore, as he's pretty good at writing an exciting fight scene and Danica's powerful. But there's no real suspense here. The only surprise is when Cadderly, who got his crossbow back, explodes an orog for her.
I rather like this though:
Danica looked back to see Cadderly, his crossbow, taken from the unconscious wizard, securely in his hand. Standing over Dorigen, he almost seemed a terrible thing to Danica, his visage stern and angry.
Unfortunately, we drift into the theme that I really haven't been enjoying in this novel:
Danica guessed what emotions tore at poor Cadderly; she understood the guilt and confusion that had brought him to this point. But now was not the time for weakness. “Finish her,” Danica instructed coldly. She glanced around quickly to ensure that there were no more enemies in the area, then ran after the departing trees, where the larger battles had been joined.
Cadderly looked down to the unconscious wizard, disgusted at what he knew he must do.
Is killing her the smart thing to do? Sure. But then YOU do it, Danica. There is no reason except cruelty to make Cadderly be the one to murder a helpless adversary. If you think his stern and angry visage is "terrible", then don't try to turn him into that person!
--
Now we switch to Elbereth. Apparently he'd had some battle plans in mind, but the chaos of the battle makes that impossible. He can't find a group of his own people to easily join, so he just starts fighting bugbears. Fair enough.
He gets a chance to use his horn, which causes Shayleigh to appear on her horse. She tries to give the horse to Elbereth, who initially refuses, but accepts when she tells him that his dad is fighting Ragnor.
He goes off, quickly, genuinely emotional because he remembers how strong Ragnor was and knows that he's better with a sword than his dad is. Aw.
I know "elvensteeds" are a thing in fantasy literature, but I wonder at the usefulness of cavalry in a forest civilization to begin with. Especially when your enemies include giants who like taking out horses with boulders. Elbereth's horse goes down, but it's a fake out. He comes back up and they continue.
--
Ivan and Pikel are also fighting. Nothing notable here.
--
We go to Rufo. His seemingly courageous move of jumping into an Ent's branches is now recharacterized:
Safe in his high perch, Kierkan Rufo thought himself quite clever. The angular man had no intention of playing any role in this horrific battle beyond that of observer, and in that regard, he thoroughly enjoyed watching the pitiful goblins and orcs and orogs fleeing before the incredible power of his moving oak.
I feel like Salvatore just did a sudden one-eighty on the guy's character arc. Maybe he figured out that Rufo will be a better villain going forward than an ally? But we just saw this guy fight off cowardice and compulsion to come clean to his comrades...and there are a lot of c-words in that sentence but I'm not rewriting it - that was a moment of significant growth and progress.
When he'd jumped into the tree, it had been a moment of triumph. I don't like this sudden backslide into "let's watch and sadistically sneer at the people fleeing from us". I feel like it's a bad sign.
Rufo's not so smug when giants start attacking his tree though. And eventually, he ends up knocked out of it with a broken leg. He ends up digging a shallow pit and hiding there instead.
--
Danica has apparently decided to leave Cadderly alone with his moral dilemma, with just a little bit of angst at not being able to protect him as she marvels at the trees fighting.
See:
Danica looked back behind her, worried for Cadderly. She couldn’t protect him this time—she didn’t really believe she could protect herself. With a resigned shrug and one longing glance back to where she had left the young scholar, the young woman set off, knowing that she would not have difficulty finding an enemy to hit.
She didn't even stick around to see if he'd actually kill her. Let alone provide any kind of moral support. I miss when I enjoyed this couple back in Canticle. Cadderly, you could probably do better.
--
And indeed, we switch to Cadderly:
Cadderly fumbled with the Tome of Universal Harmony, trying to find some answers that would offer him escape from the task Danica and the insane situation had placed upon his shoulders. Dorigen lay very still below him, groaning softly every now and then.
Danica, you're a terrible girlfriend.
Cadderly keeps dithering because of course he does. Because it's not like he had a combat-capable friend with fewer moral qualms who could have just done this for him a second ago.
On the plus side, he has his crossbow back and manages to blow up Druzil. So there's that.
And here we go:
Dorigen groaned and began to shift her weight, groggily trying to get up to her elbows. Cadderly turned the crossbow down at her and loaded another dart.
His eyes widened in shock at his actions; how could he think of killing the defenseless woman, and how could he think of using his damning weapon to commit the foul deed? His breath came in gasps; Barjin’s eyes stared at him from the shadows.
He dropped the bow and took up the book, closing it and grasping it tightly in both hands.
“This is not what you had in mind when you gave this to me,” he admitted, as though he were addressing Headmistress Pertelope, then he slammed the heavy tome on the back of Dorigen’s head, again dropping her flat to the ground.
...I mean, I get we're dealing with fantasy world anatomy, but I'm pretty sure the repeated head trauma resulting in unconsciousness would have probably killed this woman already.
Anyway, he starts disarming her, and this is...really thorough:
Cadderly worked frantically, before the wizard recovered again. He pulled three rings from Dorigen’s hands: one her signet ring bearing the design of this sect of Talona; one of gold and set with a shining black onyx (this was the one that Cadderly suspected had shot the magical flames); and the last of gold and set with several small diamond chips. The wizard’s robe came off next, Cadderly stuffing it into his backpack. He found a slender wand slipped under a tie in Dorigen’s undergarments, and fumbled through any pouches or pockets in her remaining clothing, making certain that she had no more magical devices or spell components.
Dude...I get that you don't want to kill her, but I'm not all that comfortable with you searching this woman's undergarments...
Especially as Cadderly realizes there are some spells that won't involve components at all. She could still wake up and hurt Danica with a few syllables...so...
Outraged by that thought, Cadderly grabbed his walking stick and laid the wizard’s hands out to the side. Grimacing as he swung, he smashed Dorigen’s fingers, on one hand and then the other, repeatedly, until her hands were black and blue and wickedly swollen. Through it all, the drugged and battered wizard only groaned softly and made no move to pull her hands away.
...Dude.
Okay, so I do get the logic here. Better to mutilate her than to kill her outright, I guess. But this seems like a pretty extreme thing to do without a lot of build up. She's ALREADY drugged to unconsciousness and stripped half-naked too.
And somehow I feel like Danica and Elbereth are going to find more fault in the fact that he didn't kill her than the fact that he left her naked and helpless at a battlefield...
I think I'm going to need to sort my thoughts about this for a while. I definitely do not feel good or satisfied by this, though maybe it can be explored more in the aftermath...
--
Back to Elbereth and I don't know. I feel like Cadderly's moral dilemma and it's questionable resolution really should have been the end of the chapter. I certainly am more invested in that than this.
But okay.
Elbereth gets to the battle in time to watch Ragnor win. Elbereth is now king of Shilmista. Poor Shilmista.