Eventually she happens upon a group of Arturus’ companions and helps them fight off a bandit troop. With these, she sets about battling the bandits that have been terrorizing the farmers. She happens upon the partly buried body of a warrior and takes his weapons and leather armor before giving him a better burial. Because of her strength and skill, she is always taken for a young man, though in one romantic encounter she sleeps with a young woman who learns her secret but pledges to keep it. The mother puts a spell on the girl that makes it impossible for her to speak about Elen or reveal the location of her cave.įrom there we follow Peretur as she encounters peasant families whom she helps and from whom she accepts food and shelter. Finally, when it is clear the girl is about to leave, Elen reveals her true name Peretur (from a Welsh word for spear-enduring) and declares that she will never see her again. Though she tries to keep the girl as close as possible, she grows stronger and roams more widely, sensing gradually that her fate lies elsewhere.

It was he who had enslaved Elen and taken her soul and from whom she stole the cup as payment for her suffering.

Her mother Elen stays as close to their cave, completely hidden from view, as she possibly can, fearing always that the girl’s father, Manandan, will return to take the cup and the daughter from her. “Before harvest, when the bee hum spreads drowsy and heavy as honey, she tastes in their busy drone a tale of the stream over which they skim, the falls down which stream pours, the banks it winds past where reeds grow thick and the autumn bittern booms.” Spear, Advance review copy in Kindle edition, Location 30 Even in childhood, the natural world sings to her of its subtlest shifts and portents of change. She seems to be imbued with her own special powers. We see Peretur first as a young girl, so far without her true name, raised in the isolation of a cave by a mother determined to keep the child from her mysterious father.

The others are the sword Arturus keeps at his side as the source of his power, the stone from which he took it and the great spear that becomes Peretur’s weapon. Spear gives us a vivid and completely original portrait of the figure known variously as Peretur, Parzifal, Parsifal or many related names, but here as a woman, and the search for the great cup that is one of four magic objects that belonged to ancient gods.

Spear by Nicola Griffith