The Keeper’s Six, Kate Elliott’s latest work, is a novella that’s stuck with me in the month or more since I first read the uncorrected proof. Partly, I expect, because I’ve read so many fewer books recently than in any other year of my adult life, so each individual one stands out more clearly. But partly because The Keeper’s Six combines a number of elements that I haven’t seen often in the last several years (or indeed at all) and it combines them into a vivid, gripping whole.
Elliott has, of course, a long track record of writing gripping speculative fiction. Her career under this name kicked off in 1992 with science fiction epic Jaran, though she published four earlier novels as Alis Rasmussen between 1988 and 1990. The majority of her career has focused on epic fantasy, including 1996 World Fantasy Award finalist The Golden Key (written in collaboration with Melanie Rawn and Jennifer Roberson), and 2020 saw her first return to space opera in nearly thirty years with the publication of the (absolutely fantastic) Unconquerable Sun, a novel strongly influenced by the adolescence of Alexander the Great. The Keeper’s Six represents her first long-form foray into contemporary fantasy, and I was decidedly interested to see what it would do.
Buy the Book
The Keeper’s Six
The Beyond transcends the boundaries of ordinary space, an alien and inhospitable landscape outside the grip of normal reality. It touches multiple worlds—some of which take official cognisance of it, and some of which, like Earth, do not have governments that even know it exists. Traversing the Beyond is possible, albeit perilous, and the commerce that crosses it is governed by the powerful Concilium—as are the people. The rules, both legal and physical, are different there. It takes six people to travel the Beyond safely: five to travel it, linked with a Keeper to hold the permanent Keep, the bridge that links a world with the Beyond.
Esther Green hasn’t been in the Beyond in a year, since the Concilium banned her and her Hex (her six-person team) from it for ten years. Esther has never met an injustice she didn’t want to try to right, and when many of the realms linked to the Beyond have permissive attitudes to things like chattel slavery and labour exploitation, sometimes righting wrongs means breaking a rule or three. (And surreptitiously spreading labour-organising manuals along the way.) But when she wakes up in the night to find her son—the father of her grandchildren, Keeper of her home Keep—missing, kidnapped by a powerful, amoral dragon lord, she will have to summon her old team and enter the Beyond to get him back. The ransom the dragon demands for Daniel’s safe return involves a tangled knot of old crime: the dragon’s, his counterparts’—and Esther’s, whose long-ago rescue of a trafficked young person eventually resulted in her having a child-in-law.
The Keeper’s Six mixes its quest story with family reunification, its entertaining team of misfits with an ongoing argument on law, loyalty, and justice. It’s four parts a portal-story puzzle to five parts a meditation on power and labour, personhood and parenthood, and the long slow work of building a fairer, more just world one small act at a time. And Elliott argues with these themes in a story whose characters come vividly to life, and one in which the worldbuilding sprawls vibrantly off the edges of the page. (Perhaps a little too vibrantly. At times the amount of information and implication packed into the narrative can become a little confusing, and I like me a nice vast and chewy world to get my teeth into.) The narrative moves along briskly despite the sprawl, strongly paced and keeping its tension well-modulated until the final denouement.
We still don’t see many older women as protagonists and point of view characters in fantasy. Certainly far from as many as we see young women. (My short list of the strongly memorable counts Lois McMaster Bujold’s Paladin of Souls and Martha Wells’ Wheel of the Infinite at the top, but it’s not all that long a list.) Esther is a compelling character, one whose hinted-at history illuminates her stubborn sense of morality, her love for the people she cares for, and her belief in grace, kindness and mercy. Her sense of self is solid, not mutable in the way of the young: she knows who she is and what the shape of her mistakes look like, and how to go on after making them. And how thin her patience can be, even when she knows better.
Her companions are more lightly-sketched, but nonetheless interesting. Particularly Marianne, a woman who’s in the lucrative field of Beyond-crossing purely to make money, is unashamed of this, and doesn’t mind being rude. She consequently serves as an abrasive foil to Esther, whose choices—in service of doing the right thing—got the Hex banned.
The Keeper’s Six shares narrative DNA with both portal fantasy and sword-and-sorcery, while being firmly its own hard-to-categorise thing. Esther is a mother, a grandmother, and a Jewish woman whose religion matters to her life. I could definitely stand to see more of all of these elements in the fiction I read, so The Keeper’s Six, with its tense, rollicking story, fascinating world(s), and enjoyable characters, is an absolute delight to me. And it manages to do it all in less than two hundred pages. How can you not give it a try?
The Keeper’s Six is available from Tordotcom Publishing.
Liz Bourke is a cranky queer person who reads books. She holds a Ph.D in Classics from Trinity College, Dublin. Her first book, Sleeping With Monsters, a collection of reviews and criticism, was published in 2017 by Aqueduct Press. It was a finalist for the 2018 Locus Awards and was nominated for a 2018 Hugo Award in Best Related Work. She was a finalist for the inaugural 2020 Ignyte Critic Award, and has also been a finalist for the BSFA nonfiction award. She lives in Ireland with an insomniac toddler, her wife, and their two very put-upon cats.
