"Winter was coming. Last night’s snow hadn’t melted and the bare trees were laced with it. Toronto woke that morning to see itself cloaked and made over in white, and it was only November."
This quote constitutes the very first words of this book. Though it is intended quite literally, it will eventually come to take on an equally important metaphorical aspect. This is one of those cases where the literal and the figurative significance overlap. Also overlapping are the settings. The literal context of this opening line is the coming winter in Toronto. The figurative subtext is the imminent arrival of an unnatural winter in Fionavar.
“Childslayer!”
With this one word, the focus of this fantasy trilogy is altered forever and substantially. The word which Kim says out loud is an incantatory spell singularly capable of summoning the appearance of a rather surprising figure into the narrative: King Arthur. From this point forward throughout the rest of this novel as well as the concluding book in the series, important figures from the legend of Camelot will become integral to the narrative. The unlikely word choice to bring into the world the legendary founder of the Round Table is a reference to one of the darkest points in the Arthurian legend. “Childslayer” derives from Arthur’s Herod-like directive to get rid of all babies born on May Day in a pre-emptive attempt to stave off a prophecy by Merlin warning of the danger of one of those infants: Mordred. Arthurian legend is introduced into the pre-existing storyline in this way in order to more deeply explore the themes of free will and the ability to make actual individual choices in life.
“Darien lay in bed listening to it. He’d thought at first it was another nightmare but then knew he was awake. Frightened, though. He pulled the covers up over his head to try and muffle the voices he heard in the wind.”
Darien is a character that is also at the center of the novel’s themes about free will and choice. As the offspring created from a violent rape, Darien’s very existence is all about choice. A mere child as this point, he will age unnaturally fast into a teenager. The childish response to fears expressed in this passage set the stage for the rest of his part in the narrative. He will become the central representative of the thematic exploration of what extent—if any—free will actually exists. This image of trying vainly to protect himself from his fears with unlikely shield of a blanket foreshadows his maturation process. He will be persistently presented as being unable to withstand the onslaught of voices tapping at his subconscious. The issue of choice arising from free will is symbolically encapsulated in the scene from which passage is extracted. The voices in the wind are urging him to go outside and play, but the potentially fatal danger of the storm outside is equally strong in urging him to remain in bed.
