On Tuesday of this week, I reviewed The Changeling Prince, a YA novel VVV published in the mid-1990s. Today’s review subject is the sequel — or perhaps The Changeling Prince is the prequel, as it was written later but chronologically comes before. There’s even a short story, entitled, “Just Another Dragon-Slaying”, from the Xanadu 2 anthology (co-edited by Jane Yolen and Martin H. Greenburg), that came before both books, but takes place after both of them. So she wrote the whole mess backwards. According to the introduction to my copy, she filled out Lylene and Weiland’s stories on the recommendation of the people in her writer’s group. I seem to remember that the fourth volume of Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles was written first, so Vande Velde’s order was not terribly unusual.

Lylene is sixteen; her older sister Beryl is seventeen, and on Beryl’s wedding day, a nearby baron named Theron stages a raid, kills Beryl’s intended (plus a few family members incidentally), and kidnaps the bride. Lylene is horrified, especially since she can find no recourse through the Church or through the law. Instead, she finds the local wizard and convinces him to take her on as an apprentice. Unfortunately, things backfire strangely, and she ages instantly to about seventy. She now has some magic powers, yes, but no friends and no way to help her sister. What can she do?

Lylene is not a princess, any more than Weiland was a prince. The wizard calls her one out of spite. She is, however, a member of the nobility, and has the manners and speech of a member of the nobility. These even show when she’s seventy. She runs into Weiland and his friend Shile in a pub — they cause a fight, pick a lot of pockets, and escape, with her in tow. Weiland, on the other hand, may or may not be a member of the nobility (he doesn’t know his ancestry) and doesn’t trust magic. Lylene, Weiland, Shile, and the wizard are really the only characters in the book. Everyone else is around for perhaps a scene at most, and none of these people are fleshed out enough for me to remember them. The majority of the interest in the book is the force of Lylene’s personality. She has just enough to keep it going.

There is no romance in this work. Most readers — including myself — would expect that Weiland and Lylene would end up together (despite the seeming age difference), but they don’t. It’s pretty rare to find a work of fiction that doesn’t have a romance in it somewhere, especially a non-thriller, non-murder mystery, YA-fantasy book, but this is one of them. In some ways, it was disappointing — a good love story is always satisfying. In other ways, however, VVV avoided a heap of cliches by having the book end this way. Also, given what Lylene had just experienced and the fact that she was only sixteen (albeit in a medieval world), ending the book with her falling into his arms would have been unrealistic and contrived. For those readers who are looking for fantasy-romance, though, this novel is not it.

It’s such a short book that, although the plot was complete, I was left wanting more. Much more. Unfortunately, all we have to show that Lylene and Weiland did pretty well for themselves is the short story I mentioned earlier. Since these books were written over ten years ago, I doubt that Vivian Vande Velde has any idea to write more in their world. I do wish she would, though! 4/5 stars.