Beguilment by Lois McMaster Bujold

The Sharing Knife, Volume One: Beguilment by Lois McMaster Bujold. New York: Eos (HarperCollins), 2006. ISBN: 978-0-06-113758-7

A great post-holocaust story by a great storyteller, Lois McMaster Bujold. You won’t go wrong with this one. Our young protagonist, Fawn Blufield, 21 years old, but looking younger, because she's small, stature-wise, not necessarily emotionally or character-wise, is running away from her farmer family and friends, having inadvertently gotten pregnant by an attractive but obnoxious young man in the neighborhood when she runs smack dab into a Lakewalker.

What are Lakewalkers? Well, they're a kind of itinerant clan of patrollers, resembling Native Americans in some ways, who are out to locate and destroy the seemingly supernatural entities known as malices before they can grow strong enough to threaten and destroy entire regions. Lakewalkers generally despise and look down on the sedentary farmers that they protect, while farmers think Lakewalkers are necromancers, practitioners of black magic.

So they have no business falling in love, but that's what happens, of course. Especially after they almost accidentally end up cooperating to destroy the malice that's invaded the area near where they meet, saving each others' lives in the process. So can a farmer's daughter marry a Lakewalker? Will the relationship be accepted by either side?

Some of those questions still remain to be answered in Volume 2, which from the author's website I see is already available. Title of Legacy. Volume 1, Beguilement, is highly recommended!