"Moth and Spark" by Anne Leonard (published 2014)

"A woman in one village had the Sight and predicted doom. There were always such stories somewhere; natural philosophy was still the province of the rich and educated. The poor would have their gods of tree and stream and hollow, their hedgerow cures and charms. But those things were not usually tossed about in tavern gossip. For them to come out now meant fear of something else that was too hard to face. He had seen the hex signs, the wardings, on the farmhouse doors and the roofs of barns. On the sides of the roads were little primitive pyramids of stone for guarding and shrines with offerings of food. People expected evil. It made no sense, not even accounting for the uneasiness the dragons cast... it was the newness of it, he decided, made from raw fear and not unthinking custom." (p. 8, 10)

Anne Leonard's Moth and Spark (2014) tells a saga of old magic's renewal in desperate times of unknowing and obscured discernment within the kingdom of Caithen, a country both medieval and Victorian, primordial and civilized, ancient and modern; a complete fantasy with dragons, dragon riders, wizards, and Seers. There is a prince, of course, named Corin, who is as charming as he is sensible and brave, yet who has burdens - deep, potent burdens - concerning the people over which his father's kingdom rules. There are other royalty, dukes and princesses, and there are commoners, one of which is our main character, Tam, a clever and passionate doctor's daughter, sent to Caithen to find a husband, yet she lets her curiosity of more important things take over once she's within the castle walls. 

Of the more "important things" is a disease called Blood-Dust, not an ordinary sickness by any means. When Tam witnesses a horrifying death by the consumption of blood-dust (part of which is the release of black moths from the infected person's mouth), she is determined to find out how it happened. Naturally, she tunes in even more finely to her acquaintances banter, to the small scenes happening around her in the castle, and seeks knowledge in the library. Meanwhile, Corin has to figure out mysteries of his own, such as decoding his strange connection to the dragon beasts flying high and mighty in the land's skies with no place to call their own, Corin must also comprehend what to make of new enemies, such as the Sarian warriors who are against him. 

"The heaviness of it settled in him. He had been told that history had tides, but this felt more like a chain, one cold thick link added at a time." (p. 27)

Though Moth and Spark is Anne Leonard's debut as an author of fiction, the novel, as you might have already been able to tell, is a mesmerizing work of solid and skilled world building, the kind a good fantasy story deserves. There are the dragons, but also witches and wizards:

"The Basilisks were Aram's secret servants, not called upon for ordinary matters. They were remnants of the race of true wizards, nothing like the conjurers and magicians who claimed to be able to cast spells and tell the future. Every village had its witch who murmured over potions and laid the cards to no effect. In cities men tried secretly to conjure up the dead and find the path to immortality and got nothing for their trouble but a reeking mess of oils and entrails and candlewax. It was not so with Joce and his people. A thousand years ago, longer, they had been able to do all manner of things: change into animals, call the wind, speak mind to mind, see in a puddle of water what happened miles away. They needed no incantations or tinctures of antimony." (p. 27-28)

It is this one wizard, Joce, who helps Corin understand his connection to the dragon-world and also how to ride them. The scenes in which Leonard describes how connecting to a dragon and riding one feels are some of the most enchanting I've read, something out of a vivid dream, ethereal and uncanny and wondrous. Moth and Spark is worth reading for those scenes alone, but there is quite a lot more involved with the already thrillingly complicated plot. But, fairy-tale elements emerge prominently alongside the fantasy-driven action, such as the slower, more subdued scenes in which Tam, the more homely, less-"wealthy" lady, becomes acquainted with the palace in which she is deigned to stay for a few months. Her character a little bit like Belle's (or Beauty's from Beauty and the Beast), Tam brings in some of the atmospheric qualities within Leonard's writing:

"Age itself did not impress Tam; her own city in Dalrinia was dotted with buildings that were hundreds of years old, and some of the roads were even older. Caithenor too, she was told, had its share of ruins and overgrown rich-fields. Civilizations had risen and fallen for millennia. Remnants of walls and foundations were scattered across the landscape, buried, built upon. She had been to the City of Silence in the west, where no grass grew and the only things that moved were the tiny dust-devils in the streets, and every stone house was full of stone people. There was no record, no memory,   of what had happened there, only stone and dust. Coins, knives, shards of pottery, the rubbish of the past, were constantly being unearthed as fields were tilled or foundations were dug. A gift from the Old Ones, people said, flinging them aside. The past was everywhere in Caithen, and therefore unremarkable. But here there was continuity to it; the building continued, through time, but the roots were ancient and undisturbed. If she could strip off the graceful layers she would find something unmovable and strong. For a thousand years, long before warring lords had been united under a single king, this place had been a center of power. She could not help feeling humbled." (p. 37)

Scenes such as this, and others full of romantic, clever dialogue and lovemaking tinge the pages with an added joyous emotional quality, even while a darker, brutal, and menacing world threatens to arise in the midst of all of it. By the end, evil takes full force, and Tam doesn't take on any less of a role: she goes into war with Corin, not just idly standing by on the sidelines. It is not much of a spoiler to say that Corin and Tam become an item by the middle of the book, and not without many complications (on this, Corin sweetly muses: "What she could not have by law she could have by fact." p. 156). Both of them, their strength of character, the idea of *building true character* through arduous trials, that a woman without much money but with more wealth in compassion than most could find her way to the throne righteously, and that a prince could really be courageous, intelligent, and wise, not vain, pompous, and fearful - are all part of the fairy-tale dreamwork of this tale. 

Back to magic. One of the themes recurrent within the book, as mentioned at the beginning of this review, is the idea that something very, very old, perhaps something even timeless, had been hidden for a very, very long time and was again awakening... in a vision Tam experiences while visiting a witch at a carnival with Corin, the narration remarks:

"There was something old, old, old rousing itself, its hour come around." (p. 147)

Throughout the chronological narrative, the unfolding of that narrative's history reveals itself in meta-narratives soaked with all its' feudalism, all its' petty, dangerous wars, it's stolen goods and grudges held. And it comes to Tam and Corin; the weight of it lays on those two in strange ways, in visions and interactions with a realm correlated to, but apart from, reality itself. Tam says:

"'I think maybe it's like looking at water under a lens, it's full of living things, moving, in their own world, and they're there even when we can't see them, they've been there all along and only in the last two centuries have we learned to see.' The righteousness of what she said was like a force. A difference in seeing. The world itself was unchanged... he kissed her." (p. 172)

If anything (and there should be many things should you decide to read this fantastic tale), Moth and Spark offers a wide-eyed gaze at the world underneath the contemporary one of today. In this deeper world vibrating with conflicting histories both theological and secular, Old World and New, there is strength found in honing in abilities of intuition, wisdom, and virtue, though not through conventional means. Liko, another character in Moth and Spark, tells his audience this:

"The spells, the rituals, they focus the mind, that's what opens it. It doesn't matter what color candle you burn or where you burn it or how the planets are aligned, it's the attention to the flame that counts. Trance is the same." (p. 234)

So while there is tedious work being done, such as the medical work Tam so lovingly learned from her father, or the political work Corin so judiciously learned from his father, there is still more work that, no matter hard life tries to escape it, is always after us, asking us to remember it without fear, to remember it to quell rogue power. Read this book with that in mind, read it to find out how madness is not the only way to see the dark place, read it for thrilling adventure, for its fantastic dialogue as skilled as soldiers sparring, and for its really delicious bits of lasting ardor and affection, all enough to reach each corner of every kingdom.