L.R. Lam is a writer with a wide range. They’ve written low fantasy and cyberpunk, near-future science fiction and (co-written with Elizabeth May) space opera that takes Star Wars as a model for its breadth and scope. Emberclaw is the second and concluding volume of Lam’s Dragon Scales Duology, after last year’s Dragonfall, a fantasy that mixes epic, caper, and romance in an odd but compelling tale of secrets, lies, and worlds colliding.
Dragonfall took place from the point of view of the last male dragon, Everen Emberclaw; the human thief Arcady; and Sorin, whose point of view we see least often but who, in service to the chief priest who appears to run the country of Loch as the power behind the public triumvirate, gave the reader plenty of hints that more was going on than either Arcady or Everen were able to realise.
Long ago, the long-lived dragons were betrayed by humans—the ones with whom they’d partnered most closely—and exiled out of the world. In their exile, trapped on an island and constantly threatened by the prospect of volcanic annihilation, they dwindled. Everen, son to the dragon queen and brother to her heir, was thought to be the last hope of dragonkind to bring them back to the human world. When he fell through the veil of worlds to Loch, he met Arcady and started a partnership based on lies, attraction, mutual self-interest, and the certainty of eventual betrayal. But when matters came to a crux, Everen couldn’t bring himself to betray Arcady to their death, and failed his duty to dragonkind. So, at least, the other dragons believe—and Everen is back among the other dragons, imprisoned for his failure, while Arcady believes him dead.
Arcady has long sought to prove that their grandparent was not responsible for the plague that said grandparent was convicted of unleashing. To this end, they’ve schemed all their life to have access to the university and its archives, where their grandparent did their work. They didn’t come out of Dragonfall as rich as they’d hoped: They have enough money to enroll in the university for a year, and hope in so doing that they’ll get closer to the truth. (They’re also conflicted about Everen: Betrayer and betrayed, they miss him and have the most vivid dreams about him, while also resenting his actions.)
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Emberclaw
Sorin, once the Head Priest Magnes’s assassin, is now his spy, enrolled at the university to keep particular watch upon Arcady, on account of his former bond with Everen. She’s wracked with doubts about her role. What she does not remember (but the reader does) is that Magnes isn’t human. He’s the second last male dragon, once known as Ammil, believed dead as far as dragonkind goes for the last three hundred years, and building his magic and power in secret in the human world for all that time. Magnes knows something no one else knows: Something else lives in the space between worlds, something wounded, and if it wakes fully it may be everyone’s ruin. Magnes’s solution for this is to solidify power, magical and otherwise, into his own hands. As long as the world’s still standing afterwards, who cares about the other costs, right?
As Arcady works to fit in with their new aristocratic classmates, learn what the university has to teach them about magic, and investigate their grandparent’s history, and as Everen struggles with self-belief and his new, much more fragile position in dragon society, they learn that their bond isn’t as severed as they thought it was (and Arcady learns that Everen isn’t as dead as Arcady’d believed). Drawn back together, the pair agree to work together—honestly, this time—to achieve Arcady’s goals and the survival of the dragon species. Also, they find each other very attractive. Along the way, Sorin reveals herself, and reveals that she wants to get out from under Magnes’s thumb. Their three-way alliance is tentative and full of mistrust. But together, perhaps, they can rise to their challenges and, under all the secrets and the dangers and the lies, build a bridge to a world that lets both dragons and humans survive and thrive.
Emberclaw is a novel that feels a little short for its length. Usually I come to the opposite conclusion—usually I think most books could stand to be a bit shorter—but it made sense to learn that Lam had originally envisaged this as a trilogy. It’s a satisfying narrative regardless, but there are points where the pacing feels compressed.
Much of Emberclaw is set in the environs of a university, which emphasises the ways in which the novel as whole has a thematic interest in the concerns of early adulthood: in coming to terms with who you are when your environment changes, with navigating a new peer group full of young people wealthier or more skilled or better acculturated to the environment than you (Arcady), with deciding who you are when you appear to have failed at what you were always supposed to do and your parent throws you out of the family (Everen), or when you can no longer trust and indeed want to escape the parental/teacher figure you’ve obeyed, even worshipped, most of your life (Sorin).
As with Dragonfall, Lam uses slightly different styles of narration for the viewpoints of the major characters. Everen’s sections are told as though he was speaking or writing directly to Arcady, I addressing you, lending a peculiar intimacy to the text while also enforcing a sense of alienation: The reader is aware that we are never the you he’s so specifically addressing. Arcady’s sections are told in a more conventional yet still very immediate first-person perspective, their bravado layered with vulnerability, while Sorin’s sections are different again, recounted in the third person, a distance that goes well with her colder, quieter, more dissociated personality. Parts of the narrative are told from Magnes’s point of view, also in third person perspective. Though the style in which Lam writes Sorin and Magnes is similar, Magnes is given far less interiority: He’s not without interest as a character, but his role is primarily that of a threat to the protagonists.
Emberclaw is a fast, fun read, set in an interesting world. It’s a satisfying conclusion to the story begun in Dragonfall. I’d definitely read more stories set in this continuity and hope Lam has the opportunity to publish more of them.
