Sorrow vs. Hope
Before Luna defeats Ignatia, she feeds on the Sorrow of the whole Protectorate. But earlier than this in the novel, the conflicts between Ignatia and Adara serve to represent this battle between the magic of Hope and the magic fueled by Sorrow. When Adara is sorrowful about her child being sacrificed in the woods by the Council, Ignatia delights in feeding off of her. But as Adara slowly loses her mind and accesses more and more magic and feels more and more hope, it physically hurts Ignatia and she starts to starve.
When Ignatia leaves the Protectorate, the Sisters in the Tower immediately start sleeping better, and the women in the village who have sacrificed their children before start to dream of the lives of the Star Children in the Free Cities, suggesting that the Sorrow-farm that Ignatia has built out of the Protectorate and its people was blocking them from their natural magical abilities.
Luna discovers that the reason Ignatia feeds off of Sorrow is that she locked away her own Sorrow inside of her and it made her more and more hungry over the years to eat the emotions of other people. The more she consumed, the more she hungered. Sorrow, then, in the novel, is based on a cycle of greed, whereas Hope in the novel is represented by the generous actions of people for one another.
Storytelling vs. Forgetting
Ethyne is able to understand the truth about Ignatia, the Tower, and the Protectorate because she recalls the stories her mother told her about a Witch with Seven League Boots and the heart of a Tiger. The power of generational memory is so important because these stories are what enables Ethyne to learn and teach others the truth about their world despite Ignatia’s seemingly total control of information passed down over the 500 years of the Protectorate.
Xan’s forgetfulness is her great weakness. For much of the novel, she is unable to remember the truth about Ignatia, who ate her Sorrow when she was a child, as well as the truth of what happened to the other wizards and witches that Ignatia allowed to be destroyed by the volcano. Luna’s inability to remember magic is another major barrier for these women. Throughout the novel, she slowly regains memories of her mother, but the many years of her mind refusing to allow her to understand the concept of magic was very difficult for her.
Gherland, who tells stories about a Witch in the woods to the villagers of the Protectorate and makes them sacrifice their children, is eventually forgotten from the local memory, suggesting a truer death than the one that Xan is met with, since she will continue to feature in stories told by mothers to their children for all time to come, according to the end of the novel.
Power, Inequality
The Council of the Protectorate is inordinately wealthy in comparison to the rest of the people living in the Protectorate. They make their shoes out of reeds, toiling away in the Bog for little money, while the Council Elders are all fat and comfortable. This, as well as the stories about the Witch and the Day of Sacrifice, are how the Council keeps its power over the people. The Sisters of the Tower similarly restrict the knowledge of the people, refusing to allow any apprentices to learn from their library. These exclusive practices are ways that the power structures in the Protectorate society maintain their dominion over the workers and prevent them from thinking independently.
