Rowan is a Steerswomen: that makes her different from the rest of the people in the Inner Lands, The Outskirts and the whole known world. She, and the other members of her order, walk the roads and sail the rivers of their world mapping, asking questions, and giving answers. They are the repositories of knowledge, the keepers of wisdom, and the record keepers.
When you ask a Steerswomen a question she is honoured bound to answer you the truth. When she asks you a question you owe her the same obligation. If you refuse a steerswomen's request for an answer or the truth, you are placed under the Steerswomen's ban that means they are forbidden to answer any question you ask, no matter how banal.
The Steerswomen (there are only a few Steersmen) record everything they learn in their journals. These journals are stored by the order as references for Steerswomen to come, and as a record of events of the ages. No scrape of knowledge is beneath the notice of the Steerswomen; the eating habits of goats in the Outskirts might just play a vital part in the survival of people in another part of the world.
Long ago when the wizards and the first Steerswomen came into contact the wizards were placed under the Steerswomen's ban for refusing to answer questions about their powers and what they did in the world. The wizards did not believe themselves to be subject to the laws of the common folk, and used those who lived in their districts with a capriciousness bordering on the cruel.
Seeing how it is the desire of every Steerswomen, and the direction of the order, to find out as much about everything in their world as they possibly can, the wonder is that they haven't come into open conflict with Wizards until now. But it wasn't until Rowan started to investigate mysterious blue jewels that first appeared in the world forty-five years ago that wizards made any move against a Steerswoman.
Rowan has only been a Steerswoman for five years when she comes across a small blue jewel of which there has been no previous record. It is in The Steerswoman that we first meet her as she is beginning her quest into the origins of these strange items. As she discovers more and more samples of them throughout the know territories she starts to realize that they are distributed in a straight line across the lands.
Unlike a normal jewel that is mined, these have shown up in strange places; embedded inside a tree for instance, only discovered because the tree was felled for construction. When Rowan befriends one of the barbarian Outlanders named Bel the mystery only deepens. Bel wears a belt decorated with those same jewels given her as a reminder of her father.
Article comments
1 - Anna
Great review! I heard about these books from some folks over at sf-books.com earlier this year. I've only read these first two, but I look forward to the rest. Kirstein has a knack for storytelling with compelling characters and sufficiently obscured mysteries. Both of these books end with almost as many new questions raised as those that have been answered.