Sky of Swords enjoys the distinction of being the third novel to be proclaimed as "A Tale of the King's Blades" and set in a certain fantasy world during the same era, with some characters having speaking parts in each volume, but it is not (strictly speaking) the final novel of a "fantasy trilogy." Author Dave Duncan made a real point of arranging it so that each of these three linked novels could be the one you read first, without completely ruining the major surprises concealed within the plots of the other two. Under the circumstances I would say that he did the best he could, although I am happy that I played it safe and read the novels in the order of publication - something which I have long since learned is the preferable way to handle a series even if the author swears it isn't really necessary.

The major viewpoint character of this novel is the princess Malinda of the House of Ranulf. The daughter of King Ambrose IV of Chivial, a prosperous realm that seems to be loosely modeled on Merry Old England of Medieval-to-Renaissance times. Malinda, the oldest living legitimate child of King Ambrose, but not the oldest living child. There is at least one illegitimate son who is so strikingly cast in the image of his father as a young man that there is no doubt in anyone's mind that his mother's husband was not young Granville's biological father. This presents certain complications in the succession issue.

If you did read the other two Tales of the King's Blades first, you may recall that Princess Malinda only made a single on-stage appearance in each book. We never learned much about her view of the world, and I really had no idea what to expect her personality to be like when I read this book, beyond the bare essentials of knowing that as her father's daughter, she was presumably both very intelligent and very stubborn. That leaves a lot of blank space to be filled in. There had been hints that King Ambrose had at least once cast aside a wife who failed to provide him with a male heir to secure the succession, but few details had been provided. This book finally straightens out a lot of details about the genealogy of the royal family that we had previously not known. There is a family tree at the very start, which gives us most of the essentials, but naturally we don't know anything about a personality just from reading the name and seeing how he or she is related to the King.

We start out with Malinda as a little girl on the occasion on her ninth birthday. For years she has been living in the remote island castle to which her mother, (former) Queen Godeleva, was exiled seven years ago when Ambrose found an excuse to cancel their marriage. In his defence, we should note that one of Godeleva's ladies-in-waiting claims that Godeleva's marriage to Ambrose included "Eight miscarriages, six stillbirths, and twelve years of tyranny." It appears that Ambrose gave her numerous chances to provide him with a legitimate heir before giving up on her if one healthy daughter was all she could manage. I suspect that from his point of view he was extremely generous in waiting twelve years before he gave up. I might note that Chivial does not seem to contain an analog of the Medieval Roman Catholic Church claiming ultimate authority over spiritual affairs including marriages and the annulment thereof, so Ambrose probably found it considerably easier to set aside one wife in favor of a new one than King Henry VIII of England did under similar circumstances - just in case you were wondering. (You or I may not agree that the lack of a son was sufficient moral justification for a divorce or annulment, but we aren't stuck in a dynastic marriage in a medieval feudalism, are we? At least I'm not!)

Malinda has no memory of her father and follows her mother's example in commonly calling him by the loveable name of "the Monster." Her mother, meanwhile, has clearly lost some of her marbles. Not violently insane in such a way as to menace the life of anyone else in this obscure castle, but obsessed with the idea that someday her husband will come to his senses and invite her back to the capital. This, Malinda's ninth birthday, is the start of a new life for her because a royal messenger arrives with a letter from the king summoning Malinda back to his side to be raised as befits a princess. The total failure to mention any change in the status of ex-Queen Godeleva pushes that lady completely over the brink, right before her daughter's shocked eyes.

The result is that when Malinda is brought to court to spend the next several years learning all the proper graces of a princess, her opinion of her father stays remarkably low. Something which she apparently manages to conceal from him, possibly because he never thinks to worry about it. After all, she's only a girl and princesses of Chivial almost never inherit the throne (or any other important title - we learn later that there have been two Queens Regnant but neither of them made a great name for herself in the history books, unless you count tragedy as being "great" from the dramatic point of view.)

I'll skip ahead eight years. King Ambrose dies. We are no more than a quarter of the way into the book at that point, so I'm not ruining any surprises that were gradually being built up to. (Especially not if you picked up the book in hardback and read the first and second paragraphs of text inside the book jacket - I suspect it's referred to on the back cover of the recent paperback edition as well, but I havent actually checked.)

And there is a succession crisis shaping up. The new king is the only living legitimate son of the previous one: Ambrose V, commonly called Amby by his sister and others in the palace. However, he is only three years old and he is a sickly child. For various reasons, many people consider it unlikely that he will live long enough to reach adulthood and start ruling in his own right, even if we assume that he receives the very best medical care and no one makes any effort to cut his life short by treacherous means.

Lord Granville, the renowned illegitimate son of the King and a successful general in crushing a recent rebellion in Wylderland, is named in the royal last will and testament as regent, should a regent be necessary. Many people fear this was a bad mistake on the part of Ambrose IV - to offer temporary royal authority to his full-grown war-hero ambitious son, but not recognition as a heir in his own right.

This is the only Tale of the King's Blades which contains no scenes from the viewpoint of a character who has attended the five-year training program at Ironhall and been turned into a master swordsmen. Possibly Duncan was afraid of falling into a rut. Instead, by getting Malinda's viewpoint, we get a better look at how a really conscientious aristocrat in this world must deal with the responsibilies of controlling the lives of several Blades who have been bound to protect her.

For those of you who suffer under the terrible burden of never having read my reviews of the first and second novels in this series, I'll reprint a few paragraphs from one of them to clear up the question of just what "the King's Blades" actually are.

Ironhall takes in adolescent boys (ideally about 13 or 14 years of age) and spends five years turning them into lean mean fighting machines. For centuries, Ironhall graduates have been renowned as the finest swordsmen in the known world, the known world essentially being a continent called Eurania which seems to resemble Medieval Europe, at least culturally. I can't gauge the geographical resemblance, because we never see any maps of it.

Anyone who completes the training at Ironhall with flying colors is then ready to be bound in a sorcerous ritual to the current monarch of Chivial or anyone he chooses to give one or two high-quality bodyguards to. (As a rule of thumb, the monarch takes at least half of the graduates in any given year for himself, as members of his Royal Guard.) Once bound to his ward, the Blade finds that the most important thing in his life is to protect his ward from physical harm no matter what the cost, i.e. a Blade would not hesitate to make a suicide charge against odds of twenty to one if he thought it was the best way to distract those twenty attackers long enough to give his ward a chance to run in the other direction and possibly escape. (Blades are not mindless berserkers, however. They greatly prefer to survive their battles and would only do the kamikaze thing if it were obviously the only tactic that stood a decent chance of success.)

One thing I didn't mention in that passage was that any Blade who is bound to someone other than the current monarch is required to insert a safety clause into his oath of loyalty, in which he asserts that his loyalty to the lawful ruler of Chivial will always come first. This is done to prevent Blades from being able to commit regicide during civil wars. Of course, sometimes there is room for argument as to just who is the proper successor (or Heir Apparent) to a monarch and should thus receive their loyalty, as we will see in this book. Malinda is able to bind four young men as her Blades following her father's death: Sir Audley, Sir Abel, Sir Winter, and Sir Dog. She also falls in love with one of them, and in what was probably not the most brilliant maneuver of her life she commenced an affair with him, but I'll leave it to you to find out which one. (Now that I've warned you if you shock easily.)

Political intrigue is at the heart of the book. There are several different people who are connected to the royal family in some way and who might conceivably assert a strong claim to the throne if appropriate circumstances arose. Particularly if those circumstances involved a claimant having managed to get a large army lined up to loudly endorse his claim - it's funny how often that particular political maneuver has been known to make a difference throughout history.

We actually know from the start that one of those claimants has eventually made good, because the very first scene in this novel has Malinda being dragged before a tribunal (called a committee appointed by Parliament) where she is warned that unless she can satisfactorily answer various charges of treasonous and murderous actions she allegedly took over the last few years, Parliament will vote to chop her head off. There is no doubt in her mind as to how this is going to turn out.

Parliament must be shown evidence of some sort before it could pass the bill. Then its members could go home to the shires and towns of Chivial and report that the ex-queen had been a monster and her execution just. Nor was Chivial alone. Rulers of other lands would greet the execution of a monarch with screams of outrage. In the shadows behind the commissioners sat a hundred or so lesser folk: clerks and flunkies and certainly more inquisitors to detect falsehoods, but among them she recognized men she had seen in attendance on ambassadors and consuls. So at least part of the reason for this mock trial was to convince other lands in Eurania and perhaps win foreign recognition of the Usurper.

Who is the Usurper? We don't know; we only gather that Parliament has accepted him as a king of Chivial. The trial serves as a framing sequence for much of the novel; the chapters in between each brief trial scene being flashbacks as Malinda reflects on her young life (about nineteen years old, I calculate, and already she's been coronated and then deposed). You might call the story a whodunit in that sense. We are never quite sure who will end up running the show after all competition has somehow been eliminated.

Malinda is presented to us as a strong and sympathetic character, albeit not a perfect one. Her misfortunes were not entirely her fault, but she was still a teenage girl who had never been expected to end up trying to run a country at such a tender age (if ever) and she made some headstrong blunders. As to how things turn out in the long run, during and after the treason trial . . . I'll leave that for you to discover. Suffice it to say that having read the previous two books, I felt Duncan did a satisfactory job of wrapping up some loose ends and making everything fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. His vigorous writing style naturally helped, since a good plot alone cannot not turn mediocre storytelling into a five-star performance.

Note: For those of you who are historically minded, I might point out that Malinda's struggle to become queen after the deaths of her father and little brother is reminiscent of what happened upon the death of King Henry I of England when he had declared his daughter Matilda (or Maude - I've seen her called both, for some reason) to be his heir. After he kicked the bucket, there was a long civil war over that issue, what with her being a mere woman and all, and a cousin claiming the crown for his own. A good fictional treatment of that war can be found in Sharon Kay Penman's novel: When Christ and His Saints Slept. In the meantime, it's too much of a strain on my imagination to believe that the similarity of Malinda and Matilda is pure coincidence.

My reviews of the other Tales of the King's Blades can be found at
http://www.epinions.com/content_19401969284
and
http://www.epinions.com/content_30942858884


Recommended: Yes