Review: Cyador’s Heirs, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr.

Last updated on: June 3, 2014 at 3:08 am by willduquette

Review: Cyador’s Heirs, by L.E. Modesitt, Jr. 2014-05-31T16:09:00-05:00 willduquette

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Cyador’s Heirs is the latest outing in L.E. Modesitt Jr.’s long-running cash cow, the Recluce series. If you’ve not read the Recluce series, and you like fantasy, you should probably go find The Magic of Recluce (the first book in the series) and see if it is to your taste. I found it strikingly original when I first read it (when it was new), and I’ve enjoyed it a number of times since.

These days, the Recluce novels are among my comfort books. When I’m feeling too sick to do much, I’ll grab a Recluce novel (or two, or three) and just read it straight through. They tend to be long, so they fill time nicely; and I admit that I always know what I’m going to get.

I’m going to get a story about a young person, almost always a young man, who has a natural gift at manipulating the powers of order or chaos or both. Order builds up; chaos tears down; and the two are related in a number of interesting ways that are explored as the series plays out. We see our hero learning how to use their gifts, often under desperate circumstances where their own lives or the lives of their loved ones depend on their being able to stop some massive social or military of magical juggernaut that is looming over them.

The setting changes, from one place to another, or one time in history to another; the constraints of the individual’s peculiar gifts change; but the basic template remains the same: will he learn to use them in time, and will he do the right thing with them? I’ve often thought that Modesitt’s books (not just this series) are an extended meditation on consequentialism, and the price people pay when they use disproportionate ends to achieve good means.

There’s also often a lot of time spent on the main character learning some non-magical skill. For Lerris, the hero of The Magic of Recluce, it’s woodworking; in later books it’s all too often the art of war, and so in this case.

Following the events of The Chaos Balance, the survivors of the Empire of Cyador fled the continent of Candar and found refuge on Hamor, where they founded the city and duchy of Cigoerne. Perhaps twenty years later the duchy is reasonably prosperous, but also under threat from the surrounding duchies. Lerial is the younger son of the Duke of Cigoerne, the grandson of the last Emperor of Cyador; his fifteen as the book begins, and is just coming into his powers. The men of his house are traditionally “white” mages, that is, they use chaos exclusively; Lerial is clearly destined (to practiced readers of the series) to be a “gray” mage of sorts, one who uses both together. In this story we follow Lerial as he learns about his powers and how to use weapons; and as he begins to step into his role as one of the heirs of the Duke. It’s a sufficiently different setting and situation from the previous Recluce novels that it was quite refreshing…at first. The last half of the book features Lerial as a junior officer, fighting a war as the aide to a skilled commander against a monstrously larger army…and we’re back in formula land.

That said, even given the formula, even knowing how these books work, I still enjoy them. I enjoyed Cyador’s Heirs as much as I expected to, and given that Lerial’s story is clearly not yet complete I rather expect to be enjoying the sequel some time next year.

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