I loved this fantasy book — I think that I first read it in omnibus form when I was around 8 or 10 years old — and recently had a chance to re-read it. It's one of the first books that really made me think about male-female relationships, though it's not about that at all. One of the most important passages in the book (to me, anyway) explained rape and sexual assault, in a fantasy setting, to a young boy with no experience of sex, and it was (and is!) masterful writing.

(for context [SKIP THIS IF YOU PLAN ON READING THE BOOK!]: Mavin is a Shifter, who can shift her body into almost any physical form. Handbright, her sister, was for years the only woman in Danderbat Keep, and was driven mad by the abuses that she suffered. Handbright has flown Danderbat Keep, quite literally; and Mavin has taken her brother Mertyn, disguised herself, and escaped as well. Mavin and Mertyn are now talking about Handbright's relative, who recently came to see them from a different place, and visited Mavin and Mertyn as well)

“He was at Assembly. He gave me a thingy.” The boy rummaged in a pocket, coming up at last with a tiny carving of two frogs grinning at one another on a leaf. It was the kind of intricate handwork which the shifters loved, tiny and marvelous, done with fanatical care and endless time in the long, dark hours of the keep nights of the cold season. “He told me he had brought it for Handbright, but that I looked as though I needed it. What did he mean by that, Mavin?”

“He meant that he thought you were still young enough to be tickled by it, child, and to keep it in your pocket forever. He could see that Handbright was beyond such things, beyond hope, beyond saving, perhaps. Perhaps not.”

He looked questions at her, started to ask, bit his lip and did not. Mavin, sighing, took up the story. He would need to know, after all, child or not. “You see, Mertyn child,” she said, “this was the way of it with Handbright….” So she told him, everything, he flushing at the harsh telling of it but knowing well enough what it was she meant. Once in a while she said, “You know what that is? You understand?” to which he nodded shamefaced knowledge.

When she had done, he whispered, “You know, the boys … they say … the ones like Leggy and Janjiver … they say the girls like it. That’s what they say. They say that the girls may say no, but they really like it.”

Mavin thought a time. “Mertyn child, you like sweet cakes, don’t you?”

He nodded, cocking his head at this change of subject.

“Let us suppose I put a basket of sweet cakes here, a big one, and I held your mouth open and I crumbled a cake into your mouth and pushed it down your throat with a piece of wood, the way the crones push corn down the goose’s neck to fatten it, so that your throat bled and you choked and gasped, but I went on pushing the crumbled cakes down your throat until they were gone. You could not chew them, or taste them. When I was done and your throat was full of blood and you half dead from it all, I would take the stick away and laugh at you and tell you I would be back on the morrow to do it all again. Then, suppose you came crying to someone and that someone said, ‘But Mertyn, you like sweet cakes, you really like sweet cakes….’ ”

The boy thought of this, red-faced, eyes filling with quick tears. “Oh, Mavin. Mavin. Oh, poor Handbright. I hope she has gone far away, far away….”

Mavin nodded. “Yes. She was bruised and the blood had spotted her skin, Mertyn. She had had no joy of the granders, nor they of her except the ugly joy of power and violence and the despising of women that they do. So. We have run from Danderbat keep, but they do not know that we are gone one way and Handbright another. So, we will stop going as boy and horse and go as boy and something else. For I am a shifter, Mertyn, and shift I will to keep us safe and fed and warm of nights.”

...rest in peace, Sheri S. Tepper (1929-2016). What an author you were.