The Empty Crown

Twelve Treasures #1-3

by Rosemary Edghill

Omnibus edition of the first three (The Sword of Maiden's Tears, The Cup of Morning Shadows, and The Cloak of Night and Daggers) of what was intended to be twelve novels in the author's Twelve Treasures series. An elven mugging victim appears in modern-day New York City, drawing Ruth Marlowe and four of her fellow library school students into an epic adventure involving conspiracies both elven and human.

Genres: Fantasy, Fiction, Urban Fantasy

829 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

She was born long enough ago to have seen Classic Trek on its first outing and to remember that she once thought Spock Must Die! to be great literature. As she aged, she put aside her fond dreams of taking over for Batman when he retired, and returned to her first love, writing. Her first SF sale (as Eluki Bes Shahar) was the Hellflower series, in which Damon Runyon meets Doc Smith over at the old Bester place. Between books and short stories in every genre but the Western (several dozen so far), she's held the usual selection of odd and part-time writer jobs, including bookstore clerk, secretary, beta tester for computer software, graphic designer, book illustrator, library clerk, and administrative assistant for a non-profit arts organization. She can truthfully state that she once killed vampires for a living, and that without any knowledge of medicine has illustrated half-a-dozen medical textbooks.


Her last name -- despite the efforts of editors, reviewers, publishing houses, her webmaster, and occasionally her own fingers -- is not spelled 'Edgehill'.


Also writes under the name Eluki Bes Shahar.

Reviews

[Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Normally when I read a trilogy (which I mistakenly thought this book was back in the 90s, when I got it from the Science Fiction Book Club), I review each novel as I read it. The three novels collected here don't lend themselves to that approach, however; none of them can stand alone, and they all involve major plot threads that aren't resolved until the end of the third book. Indeed, although some of the major threads here do have a basic resolution of sorts there, several of them do not, and what resolution there is opens up other kettles of fish. As it turns out, Edghill intended there to be twelve novels in the series. But the publisher chose not to publish any more after these three, which means the reader of these is getting far less than the whole body of work that was meant to be. That's an important caveat which readers need to be made aware of. :-(

I wrote the Goodreads description above; it describes the premise in a nutshell. To elaborate a bit, on the evening of her 30th birthday, Columbia Univ. library school student Ruth finds and befriends a strange mugging victim --with pointed ears. He proves to be a elf newly come through a dimensional portal, right after which he was assaulted and robbed of a magic sword; and this sword carries a very nasty curse for any human who touches it, so Ruth and four ill-assorted friends quickly find themselves caught up in the efforts for its recovery. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, for there is a major conspiracy afoot to steal the Twelve Treasures of the elven kingdom of Chandrakar, a conspiracy that threatens the survival of the land itself; and in our world, a sinister quasi-governmental agency knows entirely too much about elves, and isn't burdened with any sense of ethics. (The first book here is set entirely in New York City, the second almost entirely in Chandrakar, and the third alternates between this world and the Lands Beyond the Morning (of which Chandrakar is one).

Edghill's plotting is masterful (and not at all predictable), and she does a wonderful job with characterization; all of the major characters here are complex, vividly realized and fully rounded. (Several of them are dynamic characters who face the kinds of moral decisions that have always been the stuff of great fiction.) More than most fantasy writers, she seriously explores the social dynamics of a class-conscious, racially-based fantasy world in which elves are on top of a rigidly feudal structure and humans on the oppressed bottom. But she's no apologist for contemporary U.S. conditions, either; her social criticism there comes across as right on the money, too. Her prose style is all her own, with a wry third-person approach that shifts among a number of viewpoints, all nicely individualized; she flavors it with a pot-pourri of literary and pop cultural allusions ranging from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to The Twilight Zone and all points in between. (Not all readers will pick up on all of these --there were some I couldn't identify myself, though I recognized that they were allusions-- but they enhance the book for those who can.) This isn't "humorous fantasy" (people and other living things can suffer and die tragically here, and some characters have endured things nobody should have to), but the author's dry humor in places reflects a universe where laughter and tears are both realities, and caused my wife to laugh out loud at several points. (I read the book aloud to her, as our "car book.") She also writes with a psychological realism and penetration that would do credit to any Realist writing descriptive fiction, if any could do as well.

Our Earth-born characters here are mostly what might be called "yuppies" (Young Urban Professionals), a demographic I don't have much in common with; but the author brings their world to life very well, and makes them understandable and often likeable human beings, not just alien stereotypes. (In that respect, it probably helps that most of them are fellow librarians/library students --and I'd surmise that the author is or has been in that milieu herself; she knows details that a layperson wouldn't. Her vivid portrayal of a character with bipolar disorder, but functioning on a carefully-maintained medicine regimen, suggests a first-hand knowledge of that condition as well.) While I didn't classify this book on my "action heroines" shelf, since that motif isn't really prominent, there are some female characters here who definitely fit that description (another plus, for me), and Ruth and other female characters are shown to be emotionally strong, capable people. Violence is a part of the plot at times, but it's no more graphic than it has to be, and there's no explicit or casual sex. (In the couple of instances where implied sex takes place, it happens "off-stage," and is handled so tastefully that if I'd read this as a pre-teen, I wouldn't have had a clue it had occurred.) Some (not all) characters do use a certain amount of profanity and obscenity at times; this is only the case with some of the human characters, not the elves.

At first, I wasn't sure I should rate this; it seemed inappropriate to rate a truncated work that only includes a fourth of what the author intended to eventually present. Certainly, I can't rate it on the completeness of the plotting. :-( But I decided that I could do the same for this book as I did for The Faerie Queene: rate it on the quality of what's here, and the pleasure I (and Barb) took in reading it. Of course, in Spenser's case, his magnum opus is incomplete because of his death; this series is incomplete by the decision of a publisher. I don't know why they chose not to publish more books, but I hope they revisit that decision (and I intend to e-mail them and encourage them to!). If you can live with some unresolved issues and questions, though, I'd recommend this as a great read.

Note: This author uses both Rosemary Edghill and Eluki bes Shahar as pen names. (I don't know what her real name is.) Under the latter name, she's also the author of the wonderful story "The New Britomart," which can be found in the Chicks in Chainmail anthology. So far, I haven't read any of her other work; but given an opportunity, I'd definitely like to!

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it - have read it three times at least. Hey, it's about librarians and elves, so how can I lose?

[Nick Klagge]

DNF'd near the end of The Sword of Maiden's Tears (book 1). I picked this up because of my deep love for the Hellflower series by the same author, and hoping that love would translate to her other work. But alas. This book was fine, and I loved the '90s NYC setting, but in no way was it the same lightning in a bottle as Hellflower was for me. I stopped when I realized I didn't care very much about how the plot would turn out.

I will say, this book was cool in having an extremely high rate of both words I didn't know and poetry allusions that I had to look up. I kept a running list inside the front cover and almost filled the whole page despite not even finishing the book!

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

I LOVED the first two stories in this series sbut the third is too much like the first I love tha character but she is just to similar to the first woman all in all this is a great group of stories you are really drawn into this captivating story

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably one of my absolute favorite books

[Mark Young · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another three books in one volume tome, and one I had previously read. I approached it with some skepticism, though--I remembered the first book as being very good, but the others not so much. I even wondered as I began reading it whether this was an example of an attempt to create too large a work from too few ideas. I remembered two ideas that were rather good. The one was the concept of twelve treasures, identified with medieval objects, each held by a different elfin noble house with a specific individual treasure keeper. The treasures each had their own powers, but their very existence held the power that maintained the land of Chandrakar in which they lived.

The backstory tells us that the elfin king has died, and that the noble houses were struggling to agree on a successor when a legendary elfin beauty, Hermonicet the Fair, announced that she, recently widowed in a separate incident, would only marry the king. That set them at war with each other; but then she chose a clerk without a house and announced that he was her choice for her husband and the next king. Meanwhile, her real interest was to obtain all twelve treasures (or have them lost or destroyed) so that she could take their magic for herself. She manipulates her chosen king and his own resentment of the nobles to deprive each of the treasure keepers of their treasures, hidden during the war, in the expectation that when the war is over they will be unable to present their treasures at the coronation, and under law they will be exiled from the land.

The other clever idea is the basis of the first book and of the minor arc that covers the first three. The Sword of Maiden's Tears (title of this book) is the treasure of House Rohanan, but when Rohanan Melior attempts to retrieve it from its hiding place, he discovers too late that it has been trapped, and it drags him, along with itself, down to the bottom of all worlds, the World of Iron, known to us as Earth. The trap was set by Hermonicet's wizard Amadis, who arranged a car crash which had killed three kids going to an after prom party and put Ruth Marlowe in a coma for eight years, during which time Amadis had taken half of Ruth's soul and trapped it in the hilt of the sword, creating something of a rubber band between sword and girl. Ruth miraculously recovered in her mid twenties, and on her thirtieth birthday is about to complete a degree in library science; but she feels as if part of her is lost beyond recovery.

Ruth is not the first person to encounter Melior; she is the first to encounter him after two muggers steal the sword. This is bad, as Melior explains, because the sword is protected by a curse, that if a human takes it or uses it that person will become a cannibalistic monster which can only be killed by the sword it possesses.

The story unfolds around Ruth and four friends; several other characters are introduced who become more important in later books. They remain skeptical of the story despite the fact that Melior is obviously not human, but ultimately they realize that there is a monster, living in the New York subways, and they help Melior kill it.

In all this, Ruth and Melior fall in love--Ruth slowly, Melior instantly, as Ruth is literally the woman of his dreams. Yet when he attempts to take her back with him to Chandrakar she realizes that he cannot make it and bring her, so she chooses to send him without her and hope that he will return.

It was an excellent and very credible story all the way around, and it set up the second, The Cup of Morning Shadows. It is, in the World of Iron, two years later. Ruth works for a public library upstate, and is having Christmas dinner with the staff when the library alarm is triggered. Nicodemus, the director, is required to check that it is just a false alarm, so everyone goes back with him. Checking the "second file" deep in the basement, Ruth finds a hole in the back of the shelves (a stack of magazines had been removed and left on the floor) through which summer sunshine is shining. As she impulsively dives into it, Nicodemus follows her, and the two of them begin trying to get to Melior--impeded by the wizard Amadis who realizes that if Melior can bring Ruth and sword together before the high council, he would be able to prove what Amadis did. Melior, though, has hired his own wizard, who has apparently taken a significant interest in all of this and bargains with Nic, already intent of protecting "Miss Marlowe", to enable him to do exactly that. The story is very convoluted, running through dozens of fantasy tropes, but is really a much better book than I remembered. However, it has something of the aspect I find most egregious about Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, which is that it to some degree seems to be a bridge to get us from the end of book one to the beginning of book three. At the end of the second book, Melior is captive of Amadis, who is using him and his sword to lure Ruth into a trap; Ruth has teamed with Nic, Melior's cousin, and a notorious Robin Hood outlaw who happens to have escaped from Earth, to attempt to rescue him, and are headed toward the trap.

The third book, The Cloak of Night and Daggers, struck me originally as the weakest. It happens to begin in the World of Iron, and to involve a few incidental characters from the first book. Somewhat annoyingly, a fair amount of the action revolves around a fantasy convention. Most annoyingly, the author used a pseudonym in writing this book, and gave it as the name of a character in the book who is also a fantasy author. It is clearly spoiling something to tell that this particular author was born a human slave in Chandrakar, that her elfin mistress decided to flee and take the young slave with her, that the mistress died along the way, and the child took the cloak she wore to keep her warm for the remainder of her journey--which brought her to the World of Iron, where she pretended to be a college student, audited some classes, and then established herself as a successful fantasy writer (write what you know, right?). She is not the trigger of the story, though. Rather, Holly, EMT who delivered Melior to the hospital when he was found wounded in the subway tunnels, sees a disoriented person wandering the halls of the hotel in a hospital gown, and when she attempts to help him discovers that he is an elf escaped from a secure holding facility. This begins an adventure that runs around upstate New York for a while, in which they recover the Book of Airts and hide it in a random library, discover that the author has the cloak and persuade her to return it, and then in seeking Ruth, friend of one of Holly's convention roommates, discover that she and Nic have vanished through a gate in the library basement. The elf and Holly follow, and become instrumental in rescuing Ruth and Melior and the others from Amadis' trap. At the end it is not quite yet happily ever after, but it appears as if all the important immediate matters have been resolved.

Time was a problem in the later stories. The author speaks as if years in the World of Iron pass very quickly relative to time in the Lands Beyond the Morning, and there seems to be some of that in relation to the time Melior spends in New York and the time in which he is searching for Ruth before she manages to get to him, but usually it is the other way around--when Holly and Mac crawl through the gate an hour after Nic and Ruth, they arrive nearly a month later, and although Fox was only gone from Earth for a few months, he had spent years in Chandrakar becoming a famous outlaw leader. And while it might be attributed to magic, Nic returns home a mere few hours after he departs, despite spending a month away.

There was a separate problem with time, something the author did that makes perfect sense once you recognize it but is easy to miss and very confusing: the third book begins about a week before the second book begins, such that Holly and Mac and the others are running around upstate for days dodging pursuit and trying to get to safety, reaching the library where Nic and Ruth had just crawled through the gate--within the first couple hours of the first book--an hour before.

Ultimately, though, I complain that the story is unfinished. It is not so much that she only covered three of the twelve treasures, but that she left too many unresolved issues that are clearly intended to bring characters back in future books--Nic has made an enemy of the agent who was trying to recapture Mac and Holly; Ruth and Melior have not yet gotten permission to marry from the Earl of Silver, who is a bit angry at the moment; Mac left the Book of Airts in the World of Iron, and he is the treasure keeper; Melior has promised his wizard that he will find a suitable voluntary human bride (tough, given that the wizard is a firedrake); the lords of the elves have seen the evidence that their king-elect (not yet king) has tampered with at least some of the treasures in an effort to destroy their houses, but have not yet determined whether they can do anything short of resuming the war; the humans have been given a freehold city but have not yet attempted to live there; Melior's wizard has taken Fox for some purpose not revealed; Holly is a respected warrior awaiting her next adventure. There are more characters who might return to tell the rest of their stories. Yet there has been no new book since 1997. It's not a bad end point, in some ways, as it brings Ruth and Melior's story to what is a good break point, but it is not at all the end of the tale. That is disappointing.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Back in high school and college (when this book would have been new), I read a lot of fantasy. This was nostalgic in that regard. I did enjoy reading it but I just never really liked the main characters including Ruth. Maybe it was the 'snarkiness' with all the 'Oh, shut up.' but it seemed multiple characters said it through out that they all melded together. I did go into it knowing that these are the only 3 of what would have been a 12 part series so yes, there's a lot of loose ends. The secondary characters including Nic Brightlaw and Raven I really liked. I enjoyed it but am ok with not knowing what happens. It's a slow read. And the last book instead of wrapping up what happened in books 1 and 2, opened up so many cans of worms.... oh well.

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a classic of urban fantasy. One of the first to introduce elves interacting with the modern world. It is a bit dated as it was written before WI-fi, cell phones and the destruction of the Twin Towers BUT the story is still enjoyable.

[MarsianMan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh, I don't really know why I read it. I was probably just desperate for books. The pace is uneven and the plot had serious potential.

[Jessica Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mediocre, boring, unoriginal. Nothing else to say on this one.

(Note how long it took me to get through this book. That should be more than enough evidence as to what I thought about it.)

[Nancy Raines]

12 Treasures series

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Weird, interesting urban fantasy.