Early in the book, her sister taunts her: “That stupid dream - the light of the world! Ha! That was when she still thought you might come out a boy!” Indeed, gender remains the main question of Hild’s life.

Many assume she is a witch others find the strikingly tall, silent girl deeply strange. Though her success in prognostication quickly brings Hild power and wealth, it also brings fear. Hild even learns to read before nearly anyone else, thanks to the Irish priest who serves as her teacher. She teaches Hild to gather and understand information, weave it into a plot and then persuade the king to act on it based on what she says she sees in her dreams or in the flight of birds. This has less to do with any uncanny ability on the part of the girl than with her quick-witted, self-preserving mother, Breguswith of Kent.īreguswith is crafty, in both senses: She is an accomplished weaver and herbalist, which gives her standing among the women of the court, but she is also a supreme manipulator, scrutinizing the warp and weft of royal intrigue and shaping it to her ends. They settle at the court of her uncle Edwin, an ambitious rising king who is quickly convinced that Hild will be his seer. Her father, a prince, will be murdered she and her mother and sister must flee their royal estate.

Her pregnant mother dreamed the baby would be “the light of the world,” a beacon for their people. Though she’s only 3 when the book begins - a little 7th-century Anglo-Saxon princess playing at the edge of a wood - Hild’s fate was set in the womb. Now into that void steps the title character of Nicola Griffith’s terrific new novel, “Hild,” a fictionalized version of St. Katniss Everdeen notwithstanding, female heroes in fiction are still as rare as a decent meal in District 12.

Hild by nicola griffith