2017 fantasy, first of a pair. A disgraced paladin, an assassin, a
forger and a scholar ride out on a suicide mission…
Eventually, but this is (as one might expect from Kingfisher)
much more a story about the people than about the quest—especially in
this first half. It's mostly learning about our protagonists, their
varied backgrounds, and a lot of smouldering not-quite-romance.
Her mother had warned her about men with eyes like that. Granted the
line of work her mother had been in, it had been very specific
advice: "Get the money up front. They're fine in a brothel, but
don't go out to his house, whatever you do."
Meanwhile the kingdom is under attack by a power which seems to have
an unlimited supply of mechanical soldiers, and the last party to be
sent out to learn more (who disappeared without trace) took with them
the only good copy of what little information had been gathered… so
the criminals are set up with carnivorous tattoos that'll eat them if
they think too hard about deviating from the mission, and off they go.
Of course it's never as simple as it looks. The paladin has the dead
remains of the demon that possessed him lodged somewhere in his soul,
as well as the memory of what he did when that demon was alive.
Indeed, I got a certain feeling of The Curse of Chalion while
reading this, with both books featuring broken lead characterss and
attempts to remove demons.
It occurred to Slate that, suicide mission aside, she was almost
certainly going to die right now because no horse could run
through dark wet woods without slipping or putting its foot in a
hole or breaking a leg in some fashion.
And this caused her to make quite an unexpected discovery—namely
that she didn't want to die.
Ohmygod I want to live I want to live I don't care I want to live!
And hard on the heels of that thought: Well, this is a helluva time
to figure that out!
Some of it of course is people with disparate backgrounds and skills
learning to pull together as a party; and the primary inspiration,
revealed in an afterword, is annoyance at the depiction of paladins in
D&D-derivative media, particularly the tendency to self-loathing and
terrible secrets.
It's fun. It's got snappy dialogue between interesting people, mixed
with thoroughgoing peril. Perhaps it's too glib in places? But I read
this very quickly, with great enjoyment, and look forward to the rest
of the story.