Do you like dragons? What about bad-ass women warriors? Do teen sorcerers and death magic get you giddy? How about spycraft and revenge? Or high stakes adventure and intense action sequences? Then I’ve got just the book for you. Blood of the Old Kings, the first book in the Mersia trilogy from award-winning South Korean speculative author Sung-Il Kim, is finally out in English through the translation work of the great Anton Hur.
Blood of the Old Kings centers on three protagonists: Cain, Arienne, and Loran. These nobodies may not be the chosen ones, but their destinies are great. They all live in the Empire, Cain and Arienne as Arlanders (a conquered people) living in the Empire’s capital city, and Loran still in her Arlander homeland. In this world, the Empire runs on Power generators, the corpses of sorcerers that function like magical batteries and run everything from street lamps and factories to multi-story war mechas. These generators make the Empire impossible to defeat, or so the Empire believes.
Not long ago in Kingsworth, the imperial seat of the province of Arland, Loran watched her family be executed by the state for a tiny act of resistance. Now she faces down a dragon in a simmering volcano asking for a boon. In exchange for eventually freeing the bound dragon, the dragon gives Loran a flaming sword made from one of its scales, as well as other gifts she discovers over time. Loran must use her new power to free her people and unseat the Empire. Stylizing herself as a princess but meant to be a king, Loran comes face to face with the imperial machine in all its metallic horror. Yet her battles aren’t always so grand. Sometimes her obstacles are petty men with outlandish ambitions and inflated egos, from the pathetic prefect trying to save his own skin to the wannabe king taking advantage of a weakened Arland.
In the imperial capital, Cain investigates the murder of his closest friend. As a child, his parents shipped him off to the city in a last-ditch effort to save his life as they were hunted by imperial forces. The more Cain digs into Fienna’s death, the more tangled in conspiracies he becomes. Powerful and dangerous revolutionaries are plotting the downfall of the empire, even if it means their own compatriots die in the aftermath. Meanwhile, Arienne is trying to escape the capital. After helping a dead sorcerer escape his confines, the sixteen-year-old sorcerer realizes she’s in way over her head. As she tries to stay one step ahead of the imperial forces chasing her down, she also has to manage an increasingly active sorcerer trying to break free of his prison. Cain and Arienne play their parts, but it’s Loran who will bring the fight to the Empire. “Victory or defeat matters less than the fact that we fight. For there to be a next time, Arland must survive, but our spirit must also.”
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Blood of the Old Kings
Much to my pleasant surprise, there was no romantic subplot. Romance is pretty much part and parcel of fantasy nowadays in Western fiction, for better or worse. I personally find it exhausting to have so much romance in fantasy, and I say that as an avid romance reader. So it was a nice treat to get through an entire fantasy book where no one hits on anyone else. I can see some relationships that might turn into something else later in the trilogy, but no one will mistake Kim’s book as romantasy. I don’t know enough about the Korean speculative market in 2015 when this was published to know if this was on trend or unusual, but for the state of publishing in the US in 2024, it certainly stands out.
For me, the only real disappointment was how typical the bulk of the story felt. If you read a lot of second-world “take on the empire” fantasy—and I do, albeit mostly in young adult—then Blood of the Old Kings will feel very familiar. It takes a while to pick out the unique and innovative elements, of which there are plenty, but the bones of its plot and the character arcs I’ve seen before. In and of itself, familiarity isn’t a bad thing—I just wasn’t expecting it. I think it ends up being hampered by the vaguely Western European trappings. There’s only so much you can do in that old sandbox that feels fresh and exciting unless you’re actively deconstructing tropes. What kept it interesting was the ending. I won’t spoil it, but it wasn’t what I anticipated; it twisted the familiar into something much more compelling, and it did a great job setting up the rest of the series.
When Blood of the Old Kings was originally published in South Korea, Sung-Il Kim was unable to get more than this first installment released. Now, almost a decade later, Tor Books is finally giving him the opportunity to do the full trilogy. Pairing Kim with Anton Hur, a highly respected translator with an impressive bibliography under his belt, was a genius move. Given that ending, I’ll definitely keep reading. Fans of high fantasy and underdogs battling an oppressive empire will get a kick out of this.
Blood of the Old Kings is published by Tor Books.
Read an excerpt.
