The Forgotten Beasts of Eld

The Forgotten Beasts of Eld was illustrated by Peter Schaumann in its first edition, which Atheneum published in 1974; Magic Carpet Books issued it again in 1996, with illustrations by Alicia Austin. It won the World Fantasy Award for best novel in 1975.

Sybel is sixteen and lives by herself on a mountain, in the company of the mythical beasts that her dead father, Ogam, used to call to him. She looks after them, and she has a form of telepathy with them that lets her understand what they want and what they are thinking.

One night a man called Coren of Sirle arrives and leaves a baby with her. He believes the child to be the son of Sybel's niece Rianna, who is dead, and he makes her promise to love it before he goes. She raises the boy, Tamlorn, with help from Maelga, a witch who lives nearby, and the years that follow take her out of the solitude she has kept to and into the world of Eldwold. The novel is about what happens when someone who has deliberately cut herself off from other people is made to care for one of them.