Wild Magic
Tamora Pierce
Welcome to some fantastic nineties fantasy novels! I really loved these books as a kid, and I still enjoy them now. I think I owned nearly all of them…
Wild Magic is the first book in the Wild Magic quartet - a series which follows Veralidaine Sarrasri (Daine) as she travels from being a minor peasant girl in a minor country to being part of the court of Tortall. Along the way she finds friends (both human and animal), magic, a place where she fits, and dragons!
Admittedly the dragon doesn’t play a huge role in this book, but she is present in others, and I love her.
The story goes like this: Daine meets and takes a job with Onua, a horse trader for the Queen’s Riders in Tortall. They travel back towards Tortall and meet their first immortals (recurring antagonists of the series) in the form of Stormwings and Spidrens, and pick up a mysterious bird that turns out to be a man. When they reach Tortall, Daine becomes an instructor for the Queen’s Riders, a quais-military group. She starts to settle into a new life, making friends and finding that she is not alone. At the same time, she starts lessons in control of her wild magic with her new teacher Numair. Both of these threads come together in the final act of the book, where Daine and the Queen’s Riders are trapped in their summer training ground by a ‘pirate’ fleet and an army of Stormwings - leading to Daine needing to face her fear of losing her humanity in order to help.
This book shares locations and characters with both the Lioness quartet, and the Protector of the Small quartet. I remember how much I enjoyed the characters in this book and others - it was good to see them again.
The book begins with Daine approaching a horse trader - Onua - for a job. Onua sets her loose inside the herd she already has, and it is here that Pierce starts laying down hints that all is not as it seems with the girl. At first we might be inclined to do as others do, and just assume that Daine has been alone for so long she talks to animals just to hear her own voice; but that is not the case. Through the book, particularly when Numair appears, Daine goes from 'simply ‘being good with animals’ to harnessing the actual power she has to work with them effectively. Her work through the book comes to a head in the final act, where she draws in a kraken to help deal with an invading fleet.
It was a very funny scene when Daine woke up, and her friends told her that the two mages - Numair and Alanna - had scared the kraken so much that he ran (swam?) away after the battle and took all the water with him!
Pierce is very good at writing young characters - Daine is believable, even as someone with powers that none of her readers will ever have. You will really feel for her when she tells her new found friends about the time she became feral after her and was nearly killed for it. I’m sure we’ve all experienced her fears that we will lose somebody important to us - we can all relate to how she is feeling in that moment!
This book is a very good first installment, and it will make you want to read the rest of the quartet, and maybe the rest of Pierce’s books too! Highly recommend.