The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

Sybel is sixteen and lives alone on Eld Mountain with the creatures her dead father, the wizard Ogam, and his father before him called there: the Boar Cyrin, the Lyon Gules, the Falcon Ter and others, beasts out of legend who speak with her mind to mind. She has her father's books and one unfulfilled wish, to summon the great white bird Liralen. Then Coren of Sirle rides up the mountain carrying a baby, Tamlorn, and claims kinship. Sybel takes the child in with the help of Maelga, a witch who lives nearby, and for the first time in her life she has someone to love.

Twelve years later Coren comes back for Tam, wanting him for the quarrel between the lords of Sirle and Drede, King of Eldwold. Tam turns out to be Drede's son, and Sybel gives him to his father instead. Then Drede sends the wizard Mithran to break her will. She escapes by calling up the Blammor, a shadow creature made of fear, which crushes Mithran. What follows is the heart of the book: Sybel marries Coren in order to use his love against Drede, sets about arranging a war, and finds her revenge eating away at what she is. She stops herself, releases her beasts, and they keep the armies apart. Drede dies, apparently by the same force that killed Mithran, and Tamlorn becomes king. In the last pages Sybel and Coren reconcile, and she learns that the Blammor is the darker side of the Liralen itself.

Atheneum published it in 1974, and it is short and measured, written in careful, polished prose with a vein of quiet humor underneath. It reads like a fairy tale, and it has a fairy tale's limits as well as its grace. Reviewing a 2017 reissue, Kirkus found the two men flat beside the animals and Sybel short on introspection, and still called the book "gorgeous, evocative, and fragile." It suits readers who like Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea or older fantasy that trusts quiet over spectacle.