We first meet Vali Hallsdottir on the planet Nhem, on an assassination mission. Due to an unfortunate love affair with a man who she feels betrayed her (it is a moot point, or insufficiently delineated, whether he actually did) she has come under the influence of the Skald and has vowed not to have sex except as an aid and precursor to killing someone. Vali’s Skald training means she can utilise the seith, a set of enhanced intuitions which is inbred but nevertheless has to be honed.

Asides. 1. The prelude to the assassination is described as a rape but, while to the man concerned it is - as by implication are all the sexual encounters on Nhem, where women have been reduced to the state of animals and are treated as possessions - Vali is complicit in the act (and moreover has to be to fulfil her mission) so the word is not entirely appropriate. Admittedly the true mot juste does not spring readily to mind.
2. Williams describes Vali’s usual sexual abstinence as celibacy. It is, rather, chastity; there is a difference.

Vali’s disguised ex-lover, Frey, accompanied her to Nhem where he seemed to betray her again. He is from the part of the planet Muspell known as Darkland which severed ties with the set of islands known as the Reach a long time before the action of this book since some men disagreed with women’s rights. As the depiction of life on Nhem illustrates, the book is riddled with sexual politics such as these.

Darkland is home to the vitki, people with even more enhanced powers than Vali’s. When Vali subsequently travels there to seek out Frey and gain her revenge she encounters a vitki called Thorn who has plans for her.

Williams has her characters on Muspell descended from islanders - specifically from Orkney, Iceland, Greenland and Eire. As it is set 2000 years after these people left Earth I’d have thought old names might have been forgotten. Yet places are called Stronsay, Tiree and Coll, and a stretch of water is known as the Minch. (This is a curious echo of Mike Cobley’s Humanity’s Fire trilogy where Scots, Russians and Scandinavians settled a planet they named Darien.)

Darkland often veers over from SF into fantasy territory; no more so than in the other strand of the narrative set on the planet Mondhile, where a young man called Ruan is strongly attracted to a mysterious tower embodying a dark energy of some sort and to the strange girl called Gemaley who lives there. The off-worlder who is also entangled with Gemaley is of course Frey. Alerted to Frey’s whereabouts by Thorn, Vali soon arrives on Mondhile, where the bulk of the book is set.

The novel is actually two different stories; a first person narration SF one centred on Muspell, the Reach and Darkland and a third person crypto-fantasy on Mondhile. Williams does attempt to give the dark powers on Mondhile an SF gloss but it is never convincing. So too with the presence of Frey on Mondhile which seems merely to be a device to bring Vali there. The SF-ness of the Muspell sections and the fantasy slant of the Mondhile segments did not sit well, I thought.

The problem may be that the overall story was probably conceived as being longer and had to be split for publication.