WiC Reads: Blood of Elves

CHAPTER SEVEN

If Blood of Elves has one big weakness, it’s that there’s a lot of setup and fairly little follow-through. This final chapter doesn’t bring any of the few threads in the story to a climax, but rather builds the relationship between Yennefer and Ciri, a relationship I assume will be important in the books to follow. This isn’t a bad chapter, mind you, nor is Blood of Elves a bad book, but there’s less movement than I thought there would be for the first proper novel in the series. Mostly, we’re still waiting for the hammer to fall.

But while we wait, we get to spend time with two of the show’s most intriguing characters. Like most odd couples, Yennefer and Ciri start off not getting along. Yennefer is Yennefer, towering and domineering and demanding, and Ciri is resistant to be trained by her. You do have to wonder if Yennefer couldn’t ease up a bit on this young girl, and I don’t like the implication that part of their friction is due to Yennefer being jealous of Ciri over Geralt, but if she weren’t needlessly harsh, she wouldn’t be Yennefer.

And by the end of this chapter, these two have formed a bond as deep as any in the story so far, perhaps deeper. It’s built on a foundation of truth — Yennefer makes it clear at the outset that if she is to teach Ciri magic, there can be no lies between them, so they tell each other everything. Yennefer is frank about her past with Geralt, and Ciri — at long last — comes close to talking about what happened to her during the sack of Cintra, although the specifics of what happened with the black night still elude us. Again, there are more books to get to. But as close as they are, this pair should be formidable going forward.

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Yennefer also gives us our clearest understanding yet of the role magic plays in this world, and how it works: it is at once Chaos, an Art, and a Science. I’m still not entirely clear on what a “source” is, but it might be as simple as it sounds: a place where sorcerers can draw magic power. And how powerful is Ciri now, trained in the ways of the witcher as well as the sorceress, albeit not (yet?) put through the transformative processes that render both of them a little less human? Ciri is being set up as the focal point on which the story turns, so it only makes sense that she would become an exceptional figure.

I liked some of the stuff on the margins of this chapter. I liked kind Nenneke, doing what she can to shield Ciri from the worst of Yennefer’s brashness. I liked Jarre, the young scribe-in-training who clearly has a crush on Ciri. It’s hard to know if we’ll see either of them again, as the chapter ends with Ciri and Yennefer leaving the Temple of Melitele to test what Ciri has learned in the real world, much as Ciri left Kaer Morhen earlier in the book. Bring on the action! Bring on the revelations and the answers and the twists! Bring on Time of Contempt.

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