![]() Kai, Daniel’s aforementioned spouse, is one of those beings, rescued by Esther and her Hex some five years before and brought home to heal, who fell in love with Daniel and decided to stay. She carries labour organising literature in her pockets in case she finds someone, in the realms across the Beyond, who might benefit from it, for many of the realms connected to the Beyond and their trading emporia support slavery and the trafficking of sapient beings. She comes across as a complicated woman, one with a thorny history, deeply attached to her family – particularly Daniel, his spouse Kai, and their children – and vigorously opposed to injustice in all its forms. It’s time to get the band back together for one more gig – but, to stretch a metaphor, if anyone official catches them playing, there’ll be hell to pay.Įsther is a compelling and engaging character. ![]() Neither she nor the rest of her Hex are supposed to travel the Beyond for another ten years, and Esther hasn’t spoken to some of them since that happened.Įven more unfortunately, Daniel’s just been kidnapped, and in order to get him back, Esther’s going to have to traverse the Beyond, with the team whose livelihoods were badly affected by her choices. Esther has never met an injustice she didn’t want to work at putting right, and in this case her sense of justice and her ability to cover her tracks weren’t pulling in the same direction. Esther, unfortunately, got her Hex suspended by the Concilium a year ago. There’s an inter-realm body that regulates Hexes, known as the Concilium: we don’t learn exactly what powers and dominions make up this body, but it certainly includes dragons, which appear to be the most powerful of the beings that travel between realms. Her son, Daniel, is Keeper for their Hex: he holds the Keep that forms an entry and exit point from Earth to the Beyond, and which acts as a safe zone in that perilous space. Most people on Earth know nothing about the Beyond, but it runs in Esther’s family. It delighted me, but let’s be honest: one usually expects a novella to be a little more contained.Įsther Green is 60, and a Lantern: part of one of the six-people ‘‘Hexes’’ that can navigate between realms through the inimical emptiness of the Beyond. It certainly is for me! For others, it might prove a source of confusion, for even as I enjoyed it, I sometimes found myself a little startled by the way the edges of the world – and the implications of the story – kept opening up into wider and wider vistas. ‘‘Epic’’ is the word I most associate with her work, and into this slender novella Elliott has packed a whole trilogy’s amount of worldbuilding, implication, and possibility. ![]() The Keeper’s Six is Elliott’s latest outing. From epic fantasy with the high politics and romantic entanglements of the Spiritwalker trilogy, the convulsions of societies in transition of the Crossroads trilogy, or the more tightly focused but nonetheless still epic story of colonialism, extreme sports, and revolution in Court of Fives and its sequels, to the high-stakes, high-energy epic space opera of Unconquerable Sun, Elliott’s work is always compelling. Kate Elliott is a writer whose work I have long enjoyed and admired for its humanity and its scope, even when that work tackled subjects I couldn’t quite enjoy.
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