I first met Carolyn Cherry in 1976, when I was a young librarian in Dallas and she was still teaching Latin in the Oklahoma public schools, and had just published _Brothers of Earth,_ her first novel, She attended AggieCom in College Station (her first con, too, I believe), and was startled at being mobbed by a horde of enthusiastic new fans. I was one of them, and I’ve read and enjoyed everything she’s written in the nearly half-century since then. Of course, she’s now a Grand Master and is regarded as having inherited the mantle of Ursula LeGuin when it comes to alien worldbuilding. Cherryh’s coauthor on this, as well as several other recent novels, is Jane Fancher, her partner for many years and her wife since 2014. You won’t really be able to tell which of them was responsible for which parts of the book, though, their joint effort is so seamless.

This series has been organized since its beginning into three-volume plot arcs, within the larger story of what one may think of as “The Saga of Bren Cameron,” and this is Vol. 22, so it’s the beginning of a new section of the story. Cherryh doesn’t do big info dumps at the beginning of each installment to remind you of what you read in the previous book maybe a year ago, but this time -- since it is a new three-volume section -- she spends the whole first chapter summarizing recent events. She also includes some reminders of how very different things are psychologically between the native atevi on their earth-like world and the unintentionally immigrant humans, who live on their legally isolated island of Mosphera, and also what Bren's role is as paidhi-aiji to Tabini-aiji, head of the aishdi'tat (which amounts to a confederation of clans). It won’t take you long to get up to speed, though, as the narrative begins to open up and new crises develop.

Many of the earlier volumes have focused on the Dowager, Ilisidi, the aiji’s grandmother and a true force of nature, and that continues here. She rules the eastern part of the continent in her own right and served as regent for extended periods in the past following the early deaths of first her husband and then her son. She has enormous personal and political power and is extremely canny, but now she’s also very old. That didn’t stop her from attempting to solve the aishdi’tat’s centuries-old problems with the Marid, a desert region to the south, both diplomatically and militarily, as detailed in the previous volume. The remnants of the Shadow Guild (a thoroughly venal and very dangerous spin-off of the legitimate Assassin’s Guild who had attempted Tabini’s overthrow a few years ago and came appalling close to succeeding) are now on the run, having escaped the Dowager's clutches, and are now attempting to reestablish themselves farther up the coast, not far from Bren’s own estate. And Ilisidi seems to have fallen gravely ill at the worst possible time.

The second focus of the story is Tabini’s son, Cajeiri, the equivalent of a human teenager (he’s about to turn ten, but this world’s years are longer), and who (two books ago) was announced as his father’s official heir-designate. We’ve watched him grow up from early childhood in this series, under the strong influence not only of his great-grandmother but of Bren -- and, through him, has become connected to a number of young humans his own age -- the result being an intelligent young atevi unlike any that world has seen before. He just thinks differently than any others of his people, and he takes his position very seriously, but he’s also still a kid. (I will be very interested to see how things change when he eventually comes to power, if the series continues that long.) The thing is, Cajeiri has been in space (with the Dowager and Bren, a very tense story which occupied several volumes), has met and dealt with two powerful alien species that are far more different from himself than he is from the humans, and he understands certain things better than his father would be able to. Cajeiri unstands that one must sometimes take chances, and events this time are necessarily going to accelerate his progress to maturity.

This entire series presents a great many parallel plotlines over a lengthy period of time, all of them complex and interwoven. (In a Cheryh novel, everything is always closely connected to everything else.) To a reader like me, this whole world, and the people in it, and the way they interact, is deeply fascinating. I know the extended observations of the characters’ thought processes as they deal with events will probably be off-putting to readers who prefer their space opera to be heavy on zap-guns and starship battles -- and indeed, there is always some of that in every book, too. But I prefer a more intellectual sort of science fiction adventure, and this saga may well be the best work of that sort every produced in English.