THE SHATTERED STONE

From a forest utopia where even the animals can talk (the carnivores go abroad to do what killing is necessary, which hardly seems cricket) Neva and Ivo are sent forth into the ""real"" world to bring peace between the warring kingdoms of Andor and Brunn. The mission is accomplished through Ivo's considerable skill at swordplay, Neva's knowledge of tree language and a journey to piece together the parts of an ancient prophecy--which Ivo and Neva then fulfill by marrying as it turns out they're not brother and sister after all. Those who enjoy the pseudo-medieval trappings and successive challenges will find this garden variety fantasy satisfactory, but Newman succeeds in making peace and war equally abstract and perfunctory without even the off-beat chronological allusions of Merlin's Mistake (1970) and the Testing of Tertius (1973).