Two weeks ago, I posted a personal tribute to the great Patricia McKillip, who recently passed away.

In that tribute I mentioned her powerful gifts of storytelling and language, worldbuilding and characterization—but as I continued to revisit her books over the intervening period, I realized that I had left out something really important.

You’ll know from the title that it’s something to do with magic. Specifically, I realized that Patrica McKillip’s ability to create worlds where magic is not only possible but real, and not only real but part of the essential warp and weft of life, while simultaneously creating a sense of the possibility and reality of magic in the reader, may just be her most significant attribute as a Fantasy author.

Magic breathes from every page, beginning with the opening lines in The Forgotten Beasts of Eld:

“The wizard Heald coupled with a poor woman once, in the king’s city of Mondor, and she bore a son with one green eye and one black eye. Heald, who had two eyes black as the black marshes of Fyrbolg, came and went like a wind out of the woman’s life, but the child Myk stayed…There was a streak of wizardry in him, like the streak of fire in damp, smoldering wood.”

To the opening pages of Ombria in Shadow…

“A shadow city rose behind Ombria, a wondrous confection of shadow that towered even over the palace. … [Lydea’s] … voice became dreamy, entwined in the tale. “The shadow city of Ombria is as old as Ombria. Some say it is a different city completely, existing side by side with Ombria in a time so close to us that there are places — streets, gates, old houses — where one time fades into the other, one city becomes the other. Others say both cities exist in one time, this moment,  and you walk through both of them each day, just as, walking down a street, you pass through light and shadow and light …”

…and those of The Changeling Sea:

“Her mother was enchanted, Peri decided. Enchanted by the sea.

She knew the word because the old woman whose house she stayed in had told her tales of marvels and magic, and had taught her what to do with mirrors, and bowls of milk, bent willow twigs buried by moonlight, different kinds of knots, sea water sprinkled at the tideline into the path of the wind. The old woman’s enchantments never seemed to work; neither did Peri’s. But for some odd reason they fascinated Peri, as if by tying a knot in a piece of string she was bending one stray piece of life to another, bridging by magic the confusing distances between things.”

On balance, I think failing to mention Patricia McKillip’s power to weave an inextricable magic through her stories, and create believable magical worlds, must count as a glaring omission.

In fact, I’m going to nail my colours to the mast and say that when it comes to making magic real, yet keeping the sense of magical possibility fresh and new through successive books, Patricia McKillip is the master.