Phew!
Friends, I have a confession to make. I have felt quite motivated the last couple of weeks and I think I’m back on the horse in terms of my reading and even starting to write again, though I may need to offer apologies to the Wheel of Time Reread. I pushed through a few books that have been lingering, and I’m feeling good (about reading, anyway). It’s been a while, relatively speaking, for October Daye, so I picked up The Unkindest Tide and I’m starting to take notes and speculate about a couple of characters (who *is* Maeve, anyway?) when I thought maybe I should double-check that I’m caught up on actually writing about the rereads.
I am not.
I finished Night and Silence back in August, so we’re going to do the best we can here.
Welcome back, dear readers. Today we’re going to revisit the twelfth novel in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series: Night and Silence. We are making a good push to catch up with publication, and with no October Daye novel this year, and if the September publication schedule holds with Tor (the series having moved from DAW), I’ve got some time. If I don’t flake. Twelve down, six to go.
The preceding novel, The Brightest Fell, took Toby to the deepest (and sealed) realms of Faerie to bring home the sister she never knew she had. Being a hero, she might have done so anyway, but Toby’s Firstborn mother Amandine took Tybalt and Jazz, and so a-questing-she-did-go. As an investigator and fully named Hero of the Realm (not always in capital letters), many of Toby’s novel-length missions involving finding people.
Night and Silence is the second book, after One Salt Sea (#5), where Toby has to find her missing daughter. There’s a much longer story there, and hopefully, if you are reading me talk about book twelve, you’re well familiar. If this is all new to you—hey, I really like the October Daye series, definitely recommend you read it, and start from the beginning. The books more or less stand on their own, but there is a growing impossibility of references and connections to how all this fits together that so much of the richness would be lost if you start *here*. There are worse places to start (Be the Serpent), but this is maybe also not the place.
If you are here, though, you’re ready for the search for Gillian and for Secrets to be revealed. I really like lore, and Night and Silence builds the lore of Faerie through the storytelling and also with more detail that Toby’s ex-husband and Gillian’s father has remarried a woman named Janet. Because this is a Seanan McGuire novel, Janet is far more than she initially seems—which is just the new wife who raised Gillian when Toby disappeared (being turned into a fish for fourteen years and all) and resents the mere idea of Toby trying to get back into Gillian’s life—but begins the novel accusing Toby of kidnapping their daughter, a scene that does not go well for either Toby or Janet at all. With grace, these are two hurting parents with no reason to like or trust the other. We see everything through Toby’s perspective, of course, which is one of the things I most appreciate about this series, because we see Toby trying to give understanding to Janet (and others). She may not always verbalize it, but she is more thoughtful than she often gets credit for by other characters.
Let’s just be clear that I’m going to spoil Night and Silence and, frankly, anything that runs through my mind while working through this.
I’ve mentioned Janet as the woman who married Cliff, Toby’s ex husband. If you’ve read the series this far, you don’t know Janet. You know Miranda. People have multiple names in this series and alternate titles and it’s just a mess of names. Miranda has been magically alive for some five hundred years. This bit doesn’t make a ton of sense, but it’s also the underpinning of the series. Back in the day when Oberon, Maeve, and Titania were walking through Faerie, there was a “Ride” where a human becomes a part of Faerie and is granted some power and position, but that incurs a debt, and that debt is paid through the sacrifice of that human’s life during the Ride of one of the Big Three of Faerie.
Janet, then a daughter of a Scottish landholder, fell in love with a man named Tam Lin, and Tam Lin was to be Maeve’s sacrifice in her Ride. Through the conniving of Firstborn Eira Rosynhwyr (always, she’s the worst), Janet “broke” Maeve’s ride and is ultimately responsible for Maeve’s disappearance and the splintering of Faerie. She, through a dalliance with Oberon, is also the mother of Amandine, which makes her Toby’s grandmother and Gilian’s great-grandmother despite now being married to Cliff and being known as Gillian’s mother.
It’s an absolute mess and also holy crap. McGuire has brought up breaking Maeve’s Ride a number of times throughout the series, and it’s mythic in every possible way. It’s this thing that happened so long ago (and is it weird that I wonder if 500 years isn’t actually that long in Faerie?) that it’s legend—but then, for all the fae, now Oberon and Maeve and Titania are all legend, and we are very close to McGuire pushing towards a presumed endgame in bringing back Oberon and Titania (like her daughter Eira, Titania is the WORST) and we have to be on the cusp of Maeve’s return. I’ve got a theory, which I’ll discuss more when I write about The Unkindest Tide, but it’s almost a certain that we’ve already met Maeve.
Lore! It’s a lot of Lore!
Also lore, but truly pertinent to Night and Silence, but for a number of books now the Luidaeg has been talking about needing to do something about the Selkies and that their debt is going to come due and they are on the clock and Toby is going to help the Luidaeg deal with it—but through the eventual rescue of her daughter, Gillian is elf-shot, and being fully human (see One Salt Sea), is going to die. But wait, there’s more! To save Gillian, the Luidaeg gives Gillian one of the lost Selkie skins, which anchors Gillian into Faerie, and Gillian *cannot* take off the skin for one hundred years and return to being human, or the elf shot will kill her. Faerie is seldom kind.
What all that means is that we are truly on the cusp of the Luidaeg doing something about the Selkies, and now Toby will have an even more personal stake in that action.
Next up on the reread will be The Unkindest Tide, in which the Selkies’ debt is paid, Toby is stabbed again, more Firstborn!, and because the path from A to B will always run through any number of additional letters, there is a bonus murder mystery.
Open roads and kind fires, my friends.
Previous Rereads
A Local Habitation
An Artificial Night
Late Eclipses
One Salt Sea
Ashes of Honor
Chimes at Midnight
The Winter Long
A Red-Rose Chain
Once Broken Faith
PUBLISHED BY: Joe Sherry - Senior Editor of Nerds of a Feather. Hugo and Ignyte Winner. Minnesotan.
