The Hawk Eternal

The story

The Hawk Eternal is a sequel of an unusual kind. It moves to an alternate version of Sigarni's world, reached through a gate in space and time, and for most of its length it belongs to other people. The Aenir, invaders with a taste for slaughter, are laying waste to the lowlands beyond the clans' mountains, and the clans are slow to accept that they will be next.

Caswallon of the Farlain is a thief and a fighter who goes his own way, not much liked and not much troubled by it. During the sack of a lowland town he saves Gaelen, an orphaned lowland boy who has been living by theft, and brings him home. Caswallon and his wife Maeg take the boy in, and a good part of the book follows Gaelen learning to live as a clansman: hunting, fighting, making friends and enemies among the Farlain boys, and competing in the clans' games.

Meanwhile the adults argue. Caswallon is certain the Aenir mean to invade. Cambil, the Farlain's Hunt Lord and no friend of Caswallon's, is not, and goes as far as inviting the Aenir to the clans' summer games. Watching over all of this is Taliesen, a druid and the last of the gatekeepers, who knows how to open the gates between times. He has seen Sigarni, the Hawk Queen, arrive in this world and has no idea why she has come, only that heroes are going to be needed. Gaelen and his friends cross her path early on, in circumstances that make full sense only much later.

When the invasion comes, Caswallon has to try to bring the clans together, and the gates become part of the war. The book is at heart a coming-of-age story and a novel of clan politics, with the time-travel threads arriving late to tie it back to the Hawk Queen.

Reading notes

The Hawk Eternal followed Ironhand's Daughter in October 1995, and readers expecting a straight continuation of Sigarni's story are often disappointed. She is a supporting presence, and the book is better understood as a parallel story that shares her world's shape and some of its ideas, particularly the gates between realities, than as the second half of her life.

Taken on its own terms it has a lot going for it. Caswallon is a good creation, a hedonist and risk-taker forced by events into responsibility, and his arc answers Sigarni's in the first book in interesting ways. Gaelen's growing up among the Farlain is warmly done, and the time-travel elements serve the book's central concern with responsibility and consequence rather than being mere spectacle. The weaknesses are real, though. Big events and important changes in character pass very quickly, the late romance is hurried, and the worldbuilding is thin: the Aenir are, in one reviewer's fair summary, extra-nasty Vikings let loose on an idealised Scotland.

It suits readers who enjoyed the highland setting of Ironhand's Daughter and are happy to follow new characters. Read it second, and do not expect it to be Sigarni's book.