Traitor's Moon: The Nightrunner Series, Book 3 [Mass Market Paperback]

The Queen is sending her youngest daughter, Princess Klia, along with one of her best military leaders, Beka Cavish, but they need an escort, someone who understands this strange land in which outsiders, or Tirfaie, have not been welcomed for centuries. That's where Seregil comes in. He is an exile of Aurenen, forced to leave as a young man for a crime of which he has never spoken. Idrilain has negotiated his return on very strict conditions, and Beka manages to convince a very reluctant Seregil to accompany them back to his homeland.

Alec, who is part Aurenfaie, is thrilled to be journeying to Aurenen, Seregil is decidedly less so. The land holds many memories for him, both happy and dark. As Alec learns more about their shared heritage, he learns much about his lover's hidden past as well. He needs to learn quickly however, because things are very different in Aurenen, and Klia will need all the help she can get on her diplomatic mission. The Aurenfaie live very long lives, so they see things quite differently. They take longer to make decisions. The problem is Skala doesn't have a lot of time. Things are getting worse on the battlefront daily, and a decision must be reached soon. Ancient intrigues threaten to sideline their work, and when a Skalan delegate is found dead, it's up to Seregil and Alec to work their master spy skills to save the mission-and Princess Klia-from certain doom.

Traitor's Moon is the third book in this series, and it differs from the first two in several significant ways. Seregil and Alec are finally a couple after their cautious and awkward courtship that spanned the first two books(...). Flewelling compensates for this well by exploring their untested relationship as they journey into Aurenen together, and by throwing in a new dose of romance with Beka and a suspicious Aurefaie guide. This book is also less action driven and therefore reads a little slower. It feels more like a political thriller than the swashbuckling adventures of the first two installments. Still, it was such a pleasure for me to return to old friends like Seregil and Alec that I loved every minute of it. Flewelling is a masterful writer and her world building skills and character development are on a par with the best in Fantasy. I was sorry to see the book end, and I'm already looking forward to the next book, to be released hopefully in 2005.

To begin, Lynn's writing seems to have changed a bit since Stalking Darkness. Her writing style has certainly gotten more fluent, but also more vague. It's as if she decided that since she has two books under her belt, she could relax. With characters moving to entirely different areas in the span of a sentence without much due description, it's hard to imagine the charactersï¿ surroundings, leaving your mind to fill in the blanks. Exposition abounds. Lynn's notorious habit of having characters stop in the middle of nowhere to give long-winded history lessons is replaced by the narrator stopping in the middle of nowhere to give small history lessons. This doesn't at all interfere with the pace of the book, but it can get distracting.

In Traitor's Moon, Lynn takes us to Aurenen, the sacred homeland of the Aurenfaie race, the land from which Seregil was exiled in his youth. Lynn is introducing an entirely new culture here, and I must commend her for the good job she did with it, even if she did go overboard at times. At the beginning you're given lessons disguised as scenes about Aurenfaie culture which are mercifully brief and entertaining, but once the boys reach Aurenen you're thrown into the deep end of the pool, drowning in a sea of Aurenfaie terminology, hard to pronounce words, and overly long names. "Bilairy's Balls, Captain, I haven't understood a word since we got here," one of the characters complains, echoing my own thoughts as I read that sentence.

The pace of Traitor's Moon is slow, sometimes painfully so. The beginning drags on and on as if it is building for some spectacular plot twist, which it is, but the going is slow. Don't expect this to be much like Luck in the Shadows or Stalking Darkness, burglary is practically absent from this book and the political intrigue comes much later. The pace doesn't really pick up until roughly 200 pages into the book. "Something interesting finally happened," the narrator comments at around page 200, again eerily echoing my own thoughts as I read that particular sentence.

However, once you get the hang of Aurenfaie culture and get past the opening fluff, it's full speed ahead, launching into another masterful tale of political intrigue. Gone is the pitifully cliched "prophecy" of Stalking Darkness (ok, just ignore the Rhui'Auros babble). The juxtaposition of fantasy and "whodunit" mystery is is a refreshing change from the typical fantasy fare, and as usual, Lynn's mastery of bringing her characters to life shines through. The characters are just as real, funny,interesting, and "human" as in her past books. Seregil and Alec are definitely the stars, but it seems they may be upstaged by Beka and Nyal if they don't watch out.

Overall, this is an excellent book, if a bit slow and hard to get into initially. I recommend you read the first two books before this one, though, as they are the faster and more gripping parts of the series. The book looses a star because of the flaws I listed above, still you'd have to be a fool to dismiss this book.