#dalemark

“Cart and Cwidder” isn’t Diana Wynne Jones’s best known book, but it’s arguably one of her most mainstream-accessible stories (along with its 3 sequels that make up the Dalemark Quartet). It’s not as humorous as her other work (without being dour, either), and as always it deals with children thrust into a situation beyond their control.

What’s interesting about this series is that it plays a lot of fantasy tropes straight while also building in Jones’s signature realism when it comes to character psychology, themes of friendship, and how people cope in different ways in dire circumstances.

So this is all running through my head while sketching Moril, Brid, and Dagner, the three bard siblings who find themselves having to make a rush for the northern border with Kialan, a recently escaped political hostage with Southern forces on his tracks. And all the while, the stories of the North, the South, and forbidden histories and ballads haunt their road, reminding everyone that some stories are too powerful to happen only once or twice. Some stories repeat themselves whether we want them to or not. The only escape is to take the story in hand and twist it, hard.

So Moril (the youngest sibling) twists the story. And it’s one of the most terrifying things written in a Jones book.