The King of the Crags

December 13, 2010
This bleak sequel to 2010's The Adamantine Palace holds up a dark mirror to companion animal fantasies. The aristocrats treat their dragons as prized pets, little knowing that the creatures are intelligent, capable of speech, and only controlled with harsh drugs and brutal training. As the escaped white dragon Snow plots to free her imprisoned fellows, the usurping Queen Zafir and her equally amoral lover, Prince Jehal, take power and immediately turn on each other. An array of conspirators rises up against them, led by exiled Princess Jaslyn and the veteran dragonmaster Hyrkallen. In this cold world, alliances are formed for revenge, comfort, ambition, and religious revelation, but never true affection. Fans of grim epic fantasy will find these intrigues engrossing.

January 15, 2011
The brutal scheming continues in Book II of The Memory of Flames series (The Adamantine Palace, 2010), set in a world where king and queens enslave dragons with alchemical potions that deaden the creatures' intelligence, telepathy and memories of their past lives.

Thanks to Prince Jehal's employment of poisons, drugs and a few judicious murders, his lover Queen Zafir has been named Speaker, the influential arbiter of the nine realms and a title that Jehal hopes to eventually claim for himself. Zafir's rule is none too secure, as she's ineffective and tyrannical; plus, many nobles don't believe in the guilt of Queen Shezira, whom Jehal's framed for assassinating the previous Speaker. Zafir and Jehal's alliance crumbles, due to her mistrust of his political motives and murderous jealousy of his pregnant wife (well deserved on both counts). Meanwhile, Snow, the white dragon awakened to her true nature, seeks to free the others of her kind, pursued both by her former masters and Semian, a vision-crazed dragon-knight who believes he's destined to ride her. Keeping track of the players' shifting allegiances is a full-time job and few characters are wholly likable, but teasing out their motivations is an intriguing puzzle. Who will be left standing (or flying) at the end of this series is anyone's guess, and everyone is so busy setting fire to everyone else's stronghold, it seems as if there won't be much left to rule over when the ashes finally cool.

A fairly successful stab at viciously political fantasy.

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