Beguilement

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement is a fantasy novel by Lois McMaster Bujold, published in 2006. It is the first book in the The Sharing Knife series. Beguilement is part one of Lois McMaster Bujold's latest novel series and setting, The Sharing Knife. In it she establishes a fictional space inspired by the part of North America she has spent her life in: the country south of the Great Lakes. (However, this fantasy universe is not and has never been... more

The Sharing Knife: Beguilement is a fantasy novel by Lois McMaster Bujold, published in 2006. It is the first book in the The Sharing Knife series. Beguilement is part one of Lois McMaster Bujold's latest novel series and setting, The Sharing Knife. In it she establishes a fictional space inspired by the part of North America she has spent her life in: the country south of the Great Lakes. (However, this fantasy universe is not and has never been our own.) Recovery from a grand collapse of a prior high magical culture has brought population and technology back to roughly the state of the early 1800s American frontier -- minus gunpowder. The grand collapse is accounted for in terms of hubris, though not in technology but in spirit, for lack of a clearer term, with a caste of near-magical aristocrats all but wiped out in a series of wars with their spirit-eating creation and its hatchlings, termed malices or blight bogles. A malice feeds on 'life force' or, in the novel's terms, ground ... less