2017 short fantasy novel in the World of the Five Gods (formerly known
as Chalion). This one follows directly from Penric's Mission and
Mira's Last Dance; Penric, and the exiled general Adelis and his
widowed sister Nikys whom Penric was escorting, are safely in their
new home, but it turns out that Nikys's mother (it's complicated) has
been imprisoned in order to get leverage on the general.
That motivation is actually the weakest point, because one simply
can't see it working. First, the people who locked her up aren't
doing anything about it; the message telling our heroes about it is
smuggled from Adelis's former fiancée (from before his exile etc.).
When were the bad guys planning to act? Second, if they eventually did
do something about it, it couldn't possibly have the desired effect:
if they told Adelis something like "come back to be executed and we'll
let her go", after what they've already done to him, he couldn't
possibly trust them, and he'd probably end up leading an army against
them.
Which is unfortunate, but it's only motivation; the point of the
book is Penric's and Nikys' journey back into the Empire to rescue
Nikys' mother from what in our world would be called a convent, a
temple and pilgrimage centre high on a rocky island. And the book is
back on form after the slight disappointment of Mira's Last Dance:
Nikys finally gets her gumption back, and at long last there's plenty
of Desdemona as well as of Penric.
There are also three very interesting new characters, whom I'd like to
see more of in future: Nikys' mother, Adelis' fiancée, and her
body-servant, a eunuch forcibly "retired" from the Imperial civil
service. Perhaps they're all a bit too good to be true, but I do get
tired of reading about nasty and broken people all the time and it's
pleasant sometimes to meet grown-ups who are capable of working out
what might make them happy and then trying to do something about it.
The actual action is almost secondary: yes, there are plans, and some
of them go wrong and require improvisation, but the opposition here is
basically non-magical and major threats are somewhat lacking. Penric
starts to feel quite like Miles Vorkosigan at times, particularly in
the reactions he generates in those round him. But none of this is
bad; I've read Bujold I wasn't impressed by (the Sharing Knife
series), and this isn't it.
I am not aware of any plans for further books, and it would be
reasonable to bring the sequence to a close here – though there's an
obvious narrative gap between Penric's Fox (when he's just going to
start serious study of medicine) and Penric's Mission (when he's
burned out on medicine and has been shuffled to a different patron).
What exists now comes to roughly 230,000 words, which while it's
longer than any of Bujold's novels is well within the
tolerances for a single-volume publication.
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