"He tried to stand, but he had no strength left. The wind seemed to be hounding him out of his own shape... He harped with the winds that blew from dawn until night, sometimes with only one high string, as he heard the lean, tense, wailing east wind; sometimes with all strings, the low note thrumming back at the boom of the north wind."

Author Patricia McKillip grew up in Oregon, and she gets the wind right. Actually, the wind and the wilderness "wastes" are regular elements in her work, and sometimes it is difficult to define whether the setting ever acts as metaphor, or if instead the plot is the metaphor, and the setting is the thing. Her books are always place-rich, filled with the murkiness of a swamp, the fire-pitch of a desert, or the wind-blasted lines of a rocky coast. But the Riddle-Master trilogy is unlike all of her more recent - and more obscure - stories, in that the relationship between land and soul and self, typically only implicit, is here fully reviewed and revealed.

In Riddle-Master, McKillip creates a world and its law: land-rule. Land-rule takes different forms across the realm, but consistently it is a force that binds one man or woman to a geographical place, such that he or she joins intimately with that earth and with its peoples. Morgon is the land-ruler of Hed, a gentle and obscure backwater island that holds no stock in war or in prestige. Morgon is also a man with a passion for riddles and a uncomprehended destiny on his forehead, and as that destiny begins to wreak its way through Morgon's life and across the realm, a confrontation approaches that will define the human relationship to nature for the next long era. In order for the balance to be forged, Morgon will have to gain a knowledge that once permeated the human world: "[When]... our faces changed with every season; we took knowledge from all things: from the silence of the backlands to the burning ice sweeping across the northern wastes," and he will have to face the reckless destruction that is made possible by such an understanding.