Madouc

Princess Madouc of Lyonesse is a fifteen-year-old nuisance at the court of King Casmir: red-haired, insubordinate, forever in trouble, and, unknown to almost everyone, a fairy changeling substituted in the cradle for the boy who grew up as Prince Dhrun. When the taunts about her parentage become intolerable, Madouc sets out to learn who her father actually was, a quest that takes her into the fairy shee of Thripsey, into the company of an amiable and unreliable young man named Sir Pom-Pom, and, because Casmir has cynically set the price of any royal favour at the Holy Grail, into the further quest for that as well. Around this Vance runs the endgame of the whole Lyonesse sequence: Casmir's designs on Troicinet, the magician Shimrod, Melancthe, and the machinations of Tamurello. The prose is Vance at his most pleasurable, all elaborate courtesy, exact insult and characters who negotiate their way out of danger by pedantry. Madouc herself is among the best heroines he wrote, and the novel manages to be a comic picaresque and the conclusion of a very dark family history at the same time.