Shadow of the Get

As promised, I'm alternating the Clan Novels with the Tribe Novels, which follow events in Werewolf: the Apocalypse. When they released this particular series, they released 14 books in 7 volumes, thus why you're getting a twofer with the Werewolf entries.

In this particular case, we get Shadow Lords and Get of Fenris, which follow in particular Oksana Yahniva and Karin Jarlsdottir. Oksana currently lives at the Sept of the Dawn, run by Sergiy Dawntreader of the Children of Gaia. While she's a daughter of Margrave Konietzko (who shows up in Apocalypse), right now she's busy representing her tribe among a rather mixed group of Garou, who are in turn hosting the notorious Silver Fang Arkady, who is followed by rumors of Wyrm taint. (OK, since we're dealing with a setting some readers may not be familiar with,Werewolf runs under the concept that werewolves are mostly servants or the Earth, aka Gaia, with gifts from crazy Aunt Luna, aka the moon. There are three concepts that govern their worldview; the Wyld (primal chaos or creation), the Weaver (primal order, or pattern), and the Wyrm (primal balance, although corrupted). In long ago aeons, the Wyrm got ensnared in Weaver's creations, and became corrupted trying to escape her designs. As such, Wyrm is trying to destroy everything to free itself. Thus Wyrm is bad.) Any rate, the Shadow Lords feeling that they should be the rulers of the Garou Nation rather than the Silver Fangs, Oksana is involved (with plausible deniability) in a plot that winds up roping in Arkady, his cousin, and a fosterling Get of Fenris Cub named Arne Wyrmbane. Since the plot involved Fomori trying to kill off Arkady's cousin, the Shadow Lord Yaroslav Neyizhsalo (who was consorting with the Wyrm corrupted humans) winds up taking the two Silver Fangs and the Get of Fenris cub looking for a tin mine where the Wyrm taint is supposedly coming from.

Anyway, a Wyrm creature does indeed appear, manages to kill Arne, but strangely, Arkady seems to be able to control it. Thus setting up the second half.

The Get of Fenris got revised a lot over editions of the game, since in first edition, they came off as Werewolf Nazis. in later revisions, they remained Norse in tone, but lost much of the worst connotations of their Heathen nature. Their Tribe history evidently now is something to the effect that Fenrir wasn't the bad guy, Wotan was. Anyway, Karin Jarlsdottir runs Spearsreach north of the Arctic Circle in Norway. It was from her caern that Arne Wyrmsbane came, and in exchange, they hosted Cries Havoc, a metis Child of Gaia. (Metis are the deformed children of two werewolves. In Cries Havoc's case, his deformity manifests as a pair of ram horns growing out of his head.) Arne's father insists that Cries Havoc must die to pay off the weregild for the death of his son, which manages to get all the other tribes involved. Which gets a boost due to Arkady's involvement in the situation, since he's supposed to be the best of the best, other than the whole being a servant of the enemy.

So, everyone shows up at Spearsreach, including Margrave Konietzko and the Stargazer Antoine Teardrop. The moot ends up condemning Arkady as wyrmspawn, and Karin against the advice of most of the rest of the tribes, does sacrifice Cries Havoc. Although she really only knocks him out and adopts him into the Get to fulfill Antoine's prophecy of a third pack, the Silver River Pack, who we'll hear much more of in 4 books (or two volumes).

As I said when I first read these, the plotting in the Tribe Novels is much more cohesive than the Clan Novels. (We'll see how much that remains true as we go through the re-reads; I think half the timeline issues with the Clan Novels had to do with the eternally delayed release schedule.) While I was never a big Werewolf fan, the fiction was usually better than average for the setting. As such, a volume wherein the story picks up almost directly from the preceding volume is a welcome relief.