Orpheus meets A Natural History of Dragons in a tale of death, honor and true love's embrace.
It seemed the afterlife was bustling.
Cursed by the previous practitioner in her new role, and following an... incident... with a supremely powerful dragon, High Mage Saralene visits the afterlife with a boon to beg of the Bloodless Princes who run the underworld.
But Saralene and her most trusted advisor/champion/companion, Sir Maddileh, will soon discover that there's only so much research to be done by studying the old tales, though perhaps there's enough truth in them to make a start.
Saralene will need more than just her wits to leave the underworld, alive. And Maddileh will need more than just her Fireborne Blade.
A story of love and respect that endures beyond death. And of dragons, because we all love a dragon!

My Review:

The road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions – it isn’t paved at all. Instead it’s a dropkick off of a VERY high bridge into a pit that the evil exilarch from The Fireborne Blade is trying to avoid by dragging his successor, Saralene, into the afterlife in his place.

This follow-up to The Fireborne Blade is a book that this reader never expected at all. Because at the end of The Fireborne Blade it seemed like the story was all wrapped up.

The dragon was dead, to begin with.

The dragon was dead, the disgraced knight Maddileh was redeemed, the Fireborne Blade was restored, the evil exilarch was dead, Maddileh’s betraying, body-stealing squire was dead – in exchange for Maddileh herself – and the true High Mage Saralene is back on her throne and in her office, with Maddileh as her bodyguard and captain.

All is right with their world – or would be if all of the above were as true as Maddileh and Saralene believed them to be at the end of that first book.

The adventures of this second book are necessary because those things are not true. In fact they are mostly not true. Especially the parts that have the worst potential outcomes.

The dragon is not really dead – only hibernating. The evil exilarch is dead – but he’s scheming from the afterlife to take Saralene’s body and her position and go right back to being the oppressive tyrant he was when he was alive. Because he will be. Again.

Unless Maddileh and Saralene can stop him – with the surprisingly willing assistance of the dragon they believed they killed.

All they have to do is convince the ‘Bloodless Princes’ who control the Underworld to let Saralene go – before she’s dead forever.

Escape Rating A-: The pattern of the way both books in this series are written is fascinating and more than a bit different. This story – as did The Fireborne Blade – works on two tracks that feed into each other in ways that the reader does not initially expect.

A piece of this story is told through tales that are myths and legends to Maddileh and Saralene – and then the actions they are actually performing move the story forward. Then it circles back to more legends – which inform the action to come.

What made the tales part of the action work was that those tales are told from two perspectives, the human and the dragon. Those points of view permeate these stories that talk about the same basic event but come to rather different conclusions and teach different lessons beyond the obvious one that whoever controls the recording of history sets the agenda for what history is believed to be – as opposed to what it really was.

All of which comes fully into play when Maddileh, Saralene and the dragon Mienylyth reach the Underworld, because the legends of the ‘Bloodless Princes’ have conflated order with good and chaos with evil, when in truth a LOT of time has passed, both princes’ attitudes have become set in very hard stone and either condition taken to extremes is no good for humans or other thinking creatures.

The whole, entire story kicks off with Maddileh and Saralene learning that the righteous ending they believed they’d earned at the end of their first adventure wasn’t an ending at all. This second adventure takes that fruit-basket upset and turns it into a story of adventure and upended assumptions that crosses the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice with Lady Trent’s memoir, A Natural History of Dragons (by Marie Brennan) and turns it into a romance of longing and unfulfilled hopes and dreams that can only become an HEA if all the characters hold true to their oaths and their promises.

As much as the story is told from Maddileh’s and Saralene’s perspectives – as much as their human hopes and dreams drive the narrative forward – it’s the lonely dragon Mienylyth who steals the story and the reader’s heart.

I think this is the end of this saga – but then I thought that last time. If we get to see more of Maddileh and Saralene after all, I really hope that Mienylyth flies back as well. Because she was absolutely chock full of awesome – even when she was pretending to be a cat.

Kill the dragon. Find the blade. Reclaim her honor.
It’s that, or end up like countless knights before her, as a puddle of gore and molten armor.
Maddileh is a knight. There aren’t many women in her line of work, and it often feels like the sneering and contempt from her peers is harder to stomach than the actual dragon slaying. But she’s a knight, and made of sterner stuff.
A minor infraction forces her to redeem her honor in the most dramatic way possible, she must retrieve the fabled Fireborne Blade from its keeper, legendary dragon the White Lady, or die trying. If history tells us anything, it's that “die trying” is where to wager your coin.
Maddileh’s tale contains a rich history of dragons, ill-fated knights, scheming squires, and sapphic love, with deceptions and double-crosses that will keep you guessing right up to its dramatic conclusion. Ultimately, The Fireborne Blade is about the roles we refuse to accept, and of the place we make for ourselves in the world.

My Review:

The story of The Fireborne Blade initially appears to be a more traditional, or perhaps I should say scholarly, account of dragons and the slaying thereof by knights who generally think too much of their own prowess – after all, they are reporting on their own exploits and they slew a dragon!

But then even more scholarly, and slightly SFnal or at least technomagical aspects come to the fore. Because the knights have recorded those exploits, and the mage council gets to watch those recordings and critique the process – which ends in the knight’s death more often then the knights would care to admit.

Then the story shifts, not to reports of dragon-slayings past, but into the middle of what one disgraced knight is hoping will be a dragon-slaying present. With, hopefully for the knight, the acquisition of the titular Fireborne Blade, the redemption of her disgrace and the consequent reinstatement of her good standing.

So we follow along with that disgraced knight, Maddileh, as she wends her way through the dark and dangerous caverns that lead to the dragon’s lair, along with her mysteriously magical and not at all trusty squire, while in the background we learn how Maddileh ended up in her present predicament and why it is unlikely to achieve the result she desires.

Because in contests between knights and dragons, all those stories about previous dragon hunts show us – and should have shown her – that the odds ALWAYS favor the dragon. Which does not prevent the knight from doing their damndest to stack the deck in their favor.

Unless someone else has beaten them to it.

Escape Rating A-: Initially, this seemed like a rather traditional knight vs. dragon story, with one of two inevitable endings. Either the knight dies or the dragon does. Or occasionally both in a blaze of mutual glory. So there’s three inevitable endings.

But I knew it couldn’t be nearly that simple – and it wasn’t, and not just because the knight in this particular story was female. That may not be the way these stories used to always work, but it has been done before, and done well if not nearly often enough, for the past 40 years at least. (Tamora Pierce’s epic Song of the Lioness quartet began in 1983. For a more recent example, take a look at Spear by Nicola Griffith.)

Those weren’t the only stories it felt like this was calling back to, as the detached, pseudo-scientific nature of the critiques of previous knight’s performances and the cataloging thereof gave me hints of the Lady Trent series by Marie Brennan although I’m not sure that’s completely accurate. Still, it felt that way.

As we get the history of dragon hunting in this world, we get to understand that it’s even more dangerous than our own legends tell it, because it’s not just fire that the knights have to worry about. In fact, fire is pretty much the last thing they have to worry about, if it all, because for the dragon to breathe fire on them they have to get relatively up close and personal. Most don’t make it nearly that far.

Instead of being a story about killing or being killed by a dragon, this is a story about forging your own path against seemingly impossible odds, over and over and over again, no matter how much that deck is stacked against you. And has been, over and over and over.

And in the process of telling its story about the knight and the dragon, it asks some surprising questions about change vs stability and striking that balance, and makes that discussion personal in ways that change every single thing we thought we knew going in.

Which made for a completely fruit-basket-upset of an astonishing ending.

One final note, and a bit of a digression. If you remember the plot of the video game Final Fantasy X fondly, or at all, although the ending is very different, from a certain slightly twisted perspective Maddileh is Auron and the evil hierarch who turns out to be the villain of the piece is Maester Mika with all the same questions and a not all that different set of answers.

Which is really messing with my head a bit, because I was expecting that The Fireborne Blade was a standalone. It’s not. The second book in The Fireborne Blade series, The Bloodless Princes, will be coming in October – and I’m really, really curious to see how this manages to continue.