Product Description
The newest novel from the World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Bell at Sealey Head.

With "her exquisite grasp of the fantasist's craft"* (Publishers Weekly) Patricia A. McKillip now invites readers to discover a place that may only exist in the mystical wisdom of poetry and music.

Scholar Phelan Cle is researching Bone Plain-which has been studied for the last 500 years, though no one has been able to locate it as a real place. Archaeologist Jonah Cle, Phelan's father, is also hunting through time, piecing history together from forgotten trinkets. His most eager disciple is Princess Beatrice, the king's youngest daughter. When they unearth a disk marked with ancient runes, Beatrice pursues the secrets of a lost language that she suddenly notices all around her, hidden in plain sight. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

First book of a rich, absorbing fantasy
Reading "The Riddle-Master of Hed" is like trying to solve the riddle of someone else's partially-glimpsed dream.You enter a rich world of metaphor, sometimes baffling but always beautiful. A standard hero's quest is overgrown with fabulous beasts, children of stone, and death-dealing harps.

When Land-Ruler Morgon of Hed wins a bride and a crown in a riddling contest with a ghost, he wipes the cow manure off of his boots and sets sail from his tiny island kingdom.Unsure as to whether his beautiful, red-haired prize has any interest in marrying a farmer-king, Morgon sets course for the College of Riddle-Masters at Caithnard, where he was once a student and where his bride's brother still resides.His companion for the journey is Deth, the thousand-year-old High One's harpist.

Morgon and Deth are shipwrecked, and once Morgon regains his memory he discovers that he has unknown, shape-changing enemies who will stop at nothing to destroy him. As he flees through the kingdoms of his world, he is befriended by the various land-rulers and is gifted with a harp and a sword that are decorated with three stars--identical to the birthmark of stars on his forehead. He also learns how to change his own shape into beasts and trees.

Finally Morgon makes his way to Erlenstar Mountain with Deth, the harpist, hoping that the High One will solve the riddle of his stars and defend him against his implacable enemies.

Warning: don't read "The Riddle-Master of Hed" without the last two books of the trilogy at hand. The ending of the first book is a completely unexpected sucker-punch, and although "Heir of Sea and Fire" ends by reconciling Morgon with his bride Raederle, they are both still being pursued by a very nasty wizard and an equally nasty horde of shape-changers.You have to read to the very end of this absorbing trilogy before you find even a tentative glimmering of peace and happiness at the end of "Harpist in the Wind."
... Read more