A second visit to a city is never the same as the first. In last year’s Age of Ash, Daniel Abraham introduced the storied, complex city of Kithamar through the eyes of two young street rats, Alys and Sammish, whose tale took them from the warrens of Longhill all the way to certain halls of power. Immersive and intimate, Age of Ash was a story about grief as much as anything—and Abraham plucked many threads in its telling. The first Kithamar book hinted at big, mysterious secrets even as it told readers so much about how a city—this particular city—works.
Blade of Dream takes place over the same span of time, and it levels everything up. Abraham’s main characters are now the eldest son of a merchant family and the daughter of the prince; his concerns spread outward and upward from Alys and Sammish’s humble roots (but, importantly, without leaving said humble roots behind). If the first book was an introduction to Kithamar, this one is an immersion in it.
It’s also a very sweet romance between two young people whose once-predictable lives are entirely upended by two things: their meeting, and the movement of various unseen powers in the city. Garreth Left has had a fairly comfortable life with his merchant family, but that changes when his parents decide that, for business reasons, he’s going to marry a girl from a distant tribe. One does what the family asks, and Garreth is going to go along with the plan until he winds up spending a night with a mysterious girl after he helps her evade the city guard.
Before long, Garreth also winds up joining the guard, where several of his friends have found their place. The girl goes back to the palace, because she is Elaine a Sal, the daughter of Byrn a Sal, the current Prince of Kithamar. Her father has become secretive and strange since ascending to the role, and Elaine is left to her own devices, with plenty of time to visit her troublemaking friend Theddan, and to find inspiration in odd reading assigned by her tutor.
Like Age of Ash, this book begins with Byrn a Sal’s death, then rewinds to a year earlier, when he takes the throne upon the death of his own father. Everything leads to the same place Age of Ash ended: the palace on the hill, the burning Daris Brotherhood, the uncovering of at least a few mysteries. This time, though, Abraham takes a very different path through the city, one with much greater access to power, and knowledge, and a different kind of street-level experience.
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Blade of Dream
Elaine and Garreth are much closer to the things that power the privileged histories of the city: trade, power, knowledge, secrets, a bloodline, a story. Things Abraham only teased in the first book are much clearer here, to the point that it is somewhat difficult not to get ahead of myself and just crow about the graceful way he introduces characters, then slowly expands their stories; about the way that these books layer on themselves, their true colors coming into focus only as each precise detail is added. It’s an earthy kind of storytelling, solid and vivid, but it’s also kaleidoscopic; multifaceted and different when you tilt your head just so. No matter how you view it, though, Blade of Dream is also a story about shaking—and changing—foundations.
And Abraham manages to tell this story while sticking close to young and relatively self-absorbed characters having a very intense coming-of-age-moment. Their missteps and occasional bouts of self-centeredness are important; what’s more, their desires are important. Abraham matches generosity with wisdom the way he matches plot with setting: The balance is a work of art in itself. It has to be, in order to make the whole concept of this trilogy keep spinning, a globe on the end of a pin. To paint three pictures of the same year requires a powerful bird’s eye view that sees not just how this fictional city works, but how the little coincidences turn, how one thief’s actions influence the future of another young man; how dropped hints and small secrets turn into the very things that fuel the city. These books are like seeing what’s on the stage and what’s behind the curtain at the same time.
Kithamar’s is a mythology of hope, and of change—change that comes from people and the things they believe in. Which is to say: the things they create in order to believe in them. At its most powerful, Blade of Dream reminds me of Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous line about how capitalism seems inescapable, but so did the divine right of kings. Abraham’s novel is a reminder that humans invented those concepts. Humans invent every concept we believe in. And humans can invent new ones, too—and we do just that all the time. It’s just that not all of them get elevated to the level of divinity. And not all godlike beings are good, after all. “Anything can become a god if you let it fester long enough,” the crime-lord-and-much more who goes by Aunt Thorn says. “Kithamar began with the city.”
What this story is about is nothing less than what Kithamar (or any city, or a land, or a world) is: what creates it, what runs it, what hungers within it, and how the people who live in it shape and create it in their own image. It is unexpectedly, affectingly hopeful—hopeful, generous, rich, and a reminder that we all make the world we live in. “We can be faithful to something different,” as Garreth’s mother tells her son.
What all of this means for the third book, the story of the “lone, bearded man” mentioned in the prologue, I cannot begin to guess. But it’s going to be a joy to read this story all together, all at once, all its rich layers and crooked alleys and yoked gods.
Blade of Dream is published by Orbit.
Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.
