Kate Eliot’s Shadow Gate suffers, a bit, by standing in the unenviable position of the second book in a series.  Much of the character and world building is out of the way, but enough grand action must be left for the books that follow to give them a reason to exist.  Luckily, Shadow Gate is buoyed up by an interesting cast of characters and a well-crafted ending that leaves the reader satisfied that something has happened but without making the stories feel finished and the next books superfluous.

It begins with Marit, a reeve and main character in the first book, Spirit Gate, collapsed on a Guardian altar and remembering, quite vividly, being murdered.  Her continued existence is not the result of a rescue or healing, but of some sort of unclear transformation.  After being ambushed, she manages to escape dying in front of the soldiers through the intervention of a winged horse, and she finds herself waking, again, collapsed on a Guardian altar with only a new scar to show for her most recent death.

This time, though, nearly twenty years have passed, and Marit must investigate her new existence more completely and carefully. Is she a Guardian? Why, of all people, has she been chosen? She sets out and finds the world at war, and her beloved reeves and their birds corrupted and ineffectual. Stalked by others intent on capturing her new-found and little understood powers, Marit finds herself fleeing across a landscape strewn with the detritus of war as she struggles to understand and find her place. Although she has gained the power to hear the thoughts of others and feel the emotion in their hearts, her only true ally is her winged horse, Warning, and her only path is straight into the war raging across the land. Her journey and the implications of her new existence sketch a haunted path through the rest of the book.

The narrative does not solely rest with Marit. It frequently jumps from group to group and stretches across the entire world of the novel. From following the Outlander leader Anji and his family attempting to forge a new life and new alliance for themselves, it leaps to stalk across the land with a refugee family, and then flings itself into the gut-wrenching story of a girl who sells herself into slavery to find a lost family member. There is a band of spies attempting to infiltrate enemy lines, and, always, Marit’s search for the truth about her predicament and the other Guardians who inhabit the world.

Some of the stories are filled with violence, many of them contain moments of betrayal and despair, and all of them reflect the stark and horrific realities of the war that engulfs the world around them. Each of these stories is deftly woven, but it is not until the final third of the book that the narrative as a whole gathers momentum and twines the stories together. Although the reader, and the characters themselves, are often aware of their complicated and connected stories, these connections feel as if they have little purpose until the final battle lines between Marit, the rogue Guardians led by the villainous Lord Radas, and the Outlander-led army are drawn.

While Elliot’s world feels complete, the sheer number of characters overwhelms any real sense of the world they live in. In fact, each character exists in a unique world built with the choices they have made over their lives.  Where some find happiness and family, others find desolation and despair.  Where some refuse to give up and form new lives, others find a life where the only true choice left is in the manner of dying.  This makes the book tricky to follow at times but pays off in the ending, when the worlds of the separate characters begin to collide and reverberate with  each other.  The ending also leaves a number of questions to answer later in the series, and, as all good second books should, gets you just far enough along that you wish you could know, soon, what happens next.

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