2016 fantasy novella in the World of the Five Gods (formerly known as
Chalion). This one follows directly from Penric's Mission; the
demon-ridden sorcerer tries to get a discredited general and his
widowed sister to the safety of a foreign court. But Penric is
injured, and the minimal funds they had for their escape have run out.
This volume is largely Penric's, and falls perhaps too
conveniently into three parts: struggling across country, an incident
in a town, and the end of the journey. That incident has the trio
hiding out in a brothel, and for perfectly good plot reasons Penric
disguises himself as a (female) courtesan, using the demon's memories
of her former host Mira (who was a courtesan) to carry off the
impression. Which is all very well until someone important falls for
the image…
There's some farce here, but the characters keep their dignity and are
handled with sympathy; that's a fine touch, and shows real skill on
Bujold's part. Nikys, on the other hand, has become strangely passive;
in Penric's Mission she had ideas and goals and skills of her own, a
forceful personality that could match Penric's and made the potential
romance plausible, but here she's much flatter and without apparent
motivation. One might regard this as the delayed effects of extreme
stress, but it feels unjustified by events.
There's not a great deal of magic, and (apart from Mira) little
interaction with Desdemona. The ending, while it feels more like the
end of a book than Mission's, is still somewhat rushed and unclear,
and evidently there's more to come.
This is still a good story and I enjoyed it, but it's weaker than the
previous volumes. Followed by The Prisoner of Limnos.
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