The smooth men mystery that surfaced in the previous book, Paladin’s Grace, comes to its conclusion here in Paladin’s Strength, but not before a multitude of side quests and the adventures. The fun starts with Clara, a nun-turned-slave of the Arrals, offered as a blood-satisfaction in a fight that Istvhan didn’t even know he was part of.
Of course sparks will fly, but not for a while. There are a multitude of obstacles in the way of our lovers. Clara is a captive with a mission and a secret; Istvhan (and Galen) are paladins pretending to be mercenaries, traveling guards to an eccentric barrel-maker, but in reality are following the scent of the smooth men’s trail. Clara, now recovered from a dreadful fever, is determined to follow the wagon that holds her kidnapped sisters, taken when marauders burned her convent. They have to travel through the mountains together, and each keeps their secrets from the other. Only one of those secrets is large and furry. And Istvhan and Galen, like all paladins, are utterly cowed and terrified when nuns are involved.
Kingfisher has fun here, which means that we have fun along with her. One of her unique strengths as a writer is her ability to capture authentic-sounding dialogue that manages to capture character even as it conveys background or advances the plot without feeling like information dumps. Or conversations that continue despite, or even because of, crisis.
Also, dare I say that in this outing the romance is stronger because the obstacles that the lovers have to overcome are more urgent (or at least less rooted in lack of confidence) than the ones that our previous protagonists face? And most of the obstacles lie on Clara’s side, anyway: she’s beside herself with worry about her sisters, wracked with guilt over falling in love during a crisis that she’s almost certainly not going to survive, and undone by Istvhan’s consistently subverting her expectation. She expects him to disappoint her, she expects him to fail her. He doesn’t. Oh, and yes, there’s the shapeshifting thing, which mortifies her. She’s not used to being vulnerable, and she’s not used to a man who understands consent, and how to wield authority.
Then again, she was enlisting his help to chase down her fellow nuns, so she was likely to put up with a great deal from him in return for his help. Which means that I must be doubly careful that she is not tolerating things because she feels she must... He rubbed his forehead. The larger part of power was understanding the power you had over others, even if you would rather not have had that much power in the first place. (p. 32)
This awareness, and his determination to not exploit his power (along with his amusing fear of nuns) makes for an interesting romantic dynamic, and offers us a new paradigm in Romance, not fueled by lust (primarily) but by respect.
Across the breadth of Kingfisher’s work, when you think about it, there’s a consistent theme or, if not a theme, a world-view, one of humility in work and the power of leaving things better than you found them. In her worlds, in all her worlds, the heroes can’t fix everything. But in doing what they can, they leave things better than they were. It’s the philosophy of the Temple of the White Rat, one that grounds the lawyers, the priests, the paladins, and the pragmatists, that you might not be able to fix everything, but you can at least make things better.
This is exemplified in Morstone, the very paragon of a failed state, and the Rat Temple doing its best to keep its head above water and under the radar. In keeping with that theme, I suspect that the nuns’ escape and Istvhan’s encounters with the Sealords will prove to be destabilizing to their tyranny, and may well lead to a better future for the region, especially in connection with the salt monopoly….?
Related to the nature of faith in the White Rat, there’s also the question of faith itself. The paladins had their hearts and guts ripped out, their souls seared when the Saint of Steel died, and they’ve lived with that lack every day — the loss of their certainty of righteousness, their knowledge that their actions were moral and good. Now, when they act, they act as humans, fully aware of their own fallibility. This makes Istvhan’s question to Clara about whether she feels her god’s touch poignant, and Clara gives him an honest, fully human and, I have to believe, consoling answer:
“Perhaps I feel it all the time, and have nothing to compare it to. That’s why it’s faith.” She snorted. “I talk to Her in my head. I pray. If I didn’t have Her, I suspect I’d pray to someone else. Perhaps She’s just the name I put on that which I pray to, and it’s easier to picture the divine as a saint who understands the beast.” (p. 142)
Istvhan understands, answering for himself and his brother paladins, “We were born a certain way, and the god took it and make it holy” (p. 143). As long as the god existed, the paladins didn’t feel the moral weight of their actions, but now they’re just men, men who are berserkers and live “always on the edge of this terrible violence, and [maybe] the Saint was no better than we were” (p. 144).
In stark contrast to Istvhan’s doubts and Clara’s uncertainties stands Brant, the weird little man with his barrels of Emperor Oak and his pockets full of acorns. Just planting an acorn is an act of faith, as Kingfisher knows well, faith in the earth, the seasons, and time itself. Brant believes that, with his little plantings all the way to Morstone, maybe the Emperor Oak will not go extinct.
That’s a pure kind of faith.
One of the pleasures of Kingfisher books is that the author is also an anthropologist and keenly observes social interactions and the nuances of custom, as well as the universal rhythms of life, like with Clara in the market with the Arral women:
The conversations drifted to other things. Nothing else attracted her attention, mostly complaints about the weather and the harvest, a well that was inexplicably not filling with the recent rains, a child down with spots. It reminded Clara of being back in the convent, surrounded by the small sounds of practical things, the motions of drop spindles, the sound of women’s voices. (p. 37)
Of these mundane details are worlds made.
And finally, for those of us taking notes, there are some easter eggs:
Brindle makes a reappearance with mules, not oxen, and reassures Clara that he’s fine with her secret: “A gnole has traveled with a human who lived in a damn sword. Bear-lady is nothing” (p. 112).
Learned Edmund gets a callout:
….then one day some priest of the Many-Armed God with no healer training had figured out that it wasn’t even a plague, it was a severe allergic reaction to something or other. (p. 88)
Grace and Stephen are still together and being useful:
Stephen took the weight of the world on his shoulders and never complained, which could occasionally be annoying but was also useful when things were spiraling out of control. On the other hand, he was terribly bad at talking to women. Fortunately, he had fallen passionately in love with an odd little perfumer, the same one who had mixed up the scent vials to help track the smooth men. Istvhan quite liked her. (p. 157)
And, let’s see, we can add to the catalog of odd beings a warren of rabbits with a hive mind and shape-changing nuns. One of those is creepy; the other is awesome.
READERS & BOOK LOVERS SERIES SCHEDULE
If you’re not already following Readers and Book Lovers, please go to our homepage (link), find the top button in the left margin, and click it to FOLLOW GROUP. Thank You and Welcome, to the most followed group on Daily Kos. Now you’ll get all our R&BLers diaries in your stream.
