I was given an ARC of The Fires of Vengeance by the good people at Orbit, which was my motivation for finally getting to The Rage of Dragons after being aware of it for a good long while. I’m happy to say that I burned right through this.
This book is a great entry in the “member of an oppressed lower class embarks on an intensive training regime to obtain vengeance” subgenre. Red Rising is probably the best example of this from recent years, but there’s countless others.
This hits many familiar notes. Our protagonist, Tau, goes to join the military in order to learn to become a good enough swordsman to gain vengeance. He trains obsessively. He has a mentor figure, a heroic older soldier of his own oppressed class who cautions him about being so driven that he loses himself. He initially disdains his fellow trainees like the lone wolf he is, but eventually he comes to like and respect them and vice versa. There are war games that are meant to be training, but are much more violent than they are supposed to be. He discovers that rules that should apply to everyone somehow never get enforced on the nobles. The ragtag unit of lower class soldiers, trained by the heroic older soldier mentor and led by Tau, fare much better in the war games than lower class guys usually do and actually have dreams of winning the Queen’s tournament, something that no non-noble group has ever done (it’s been a generation since a lower class unit was even able to compete, and they finished last). Tau finds out that one of the guys on The List might not actually be a bad guy deserving of bloody vengeance. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It sounds like I’m dissing this book, but I’m really, really not. This was an exciting read from start to finish. It’s been said that there’s no such thing as tired tropes, only boring authors; Evan Winter exemplifies this. There’s a reason the Hero’s Journey crops up so often in literature from all of time and all the world - it’s the bones of a truly awesome story, re-invented endlessly. Winter carries on that tradition very well. And even when writing in that tradition, he managed to throw any number of unexpected twists at me.
Stepping out from Tau’s journey for the moment, I also want to address the world that Winter has created. This book is built on the stories and culture of the Xhosa people of southern Africa, and as always I’m a sucker for books built off of cultures I’m unfamiliar with. It’s something very new to me, and was certainly an intriguing read.
Tau’s people fled from their homeland about two centuries before the book began, fleeing something called “the Cull” (about which we know very little - I’m betting that’ll be a sequel trilogy). They landed on their new homeland, and were able to carve out a homeland with the help of their military and the magics their people wield - of which the most spectacular is the power to control dragons. They’ve spent the two centuries since fighting an endless war against the native people, who are determined to drive the invaders away.
In other words, much as I like Tau as a protagonist, and care about him and his friends and loved ones, there’s no getting around the fact that his people are the baddies here. They’re the colonizing invaders who came and stole the land. It’s a good change of pace that many authors would have difficulty pulling off. Tau’s particular caste may be unjustly oppressed, but they’ve still spent several centuries enjoying the fruits of genocide. That’s not a hugely important part of this particular book, as Tau is so tightly focused on his own vengeance that he’s not really thinking about anything else, but I suspect it’s going to figure prominently in future volumes.
On to The Fires of Vengeance!