To Hold the Bridge: An Old Kingdom Novella and Other Tales by Garth Nix
The novella of the title starts the book and was the most appealing of the contents for me, likely because I'm a big fan of Nix's Old Kingdom fantasy series. In the novella, Morghan, a teen boy arrives at the Bridge Company, hoping to use the one item he owns, a share certificate, hoping to use it as a way to becoming a cadet for the organization. The Bridge Company has been building a bridge over the Greenwash, the wide and dangerous river that is the northern border of the Old Kingdom, for nearly a century. As the story begins, the company has a cable-drawn ferry, a castle on one side of the river, a fortified bastion in the middle of the river, and several foundational parts of the bridge itself. The employees of the company are grouped into four seasonal shifts, with a change in shift imminent. As Morghan passes the tests set for him to be accepted as a cadet, we see more of his past and his character. As he joins in the shift as they travel to the bridge, he finds his place and gets to know his superiors and guard members. Once at the bridge, he has the time to learn more skills necessary to his work, and he faces a unexpected test that has him drawing on the magic he knows as well as the physical skills.
Following the novella are short stories separated into five sections, each having three to five stories in them. Many of the stories involve magic, some in a world similar to ours and some in our own world in another time. The first section has stories of magical creatures that appear in our world. The second section has four coming-of-age stories. The third section has stories of struggle with magic working against a dark force. The fourth section has lighter tales, one of which plays on Sherlock Holmes stories. The last section is science fiction and has three stories that take us beyond our known world.
A nice collection overall. I enjoyed the fantasy and magic realism stories the most.
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