War! What is it Good For? Lots of witty banter
Synopsis
Don’t kill the messengers.
As a bodyguard for the King’s Envoys, Gen is content with her life of traveling, drinking wine, and hitting things with her sword. It’s the perfect job. Until the King sends her and her friend Cordyn into war-torn enemy territory on a mission to deliver vital military intelligence to an allied nation.
The problem? The mission is a sham.
Gen is tasked with determining if Cordyn is a spy who is selling information to the enemy. Cordyn is the worst kind of libertine: brash, arrogant, and on the run from half the husbands in the kingdom, but Gen can’t imagine him betraying her or their nation.
With obtuse bandits, vengeful mages, and a resolute lutist, they embark on a daring rescue mission, complicated by Cordyn’s increasingly complex schemes. As ominous enemy plots surface, Gen and Cordyn must decide what matters most. Their nation or their friends.
Review
Sometimes books surprise you. The Envoys of War is one such book, a tome that led me down one path and then spun me onto another altogether different journey, which is fitting as that’s what consistently happens to the characters in this gloriously twisty yarn.
After the first few chapters, I felt I knew what to expect. A witty side-quest diplomatic fantasy of spies and banter and secret missions, part Blackadder, part Scarlet Pimpernel. A bit of mystery, a bit of politics, a bit of action and an entertainingly memorable central character in the form of the charming, cynical envoy Cordyn Tallen (more of whom in a moment).
And while all this stayed true, this is book is also a deep character study with tonnes of heart whose central message (or one of them at least) is that the ones you hate are more complex than you realize.
The book begins with Gen, a bodyguard for the King’s Envoys of the nation of Piran, who must escort her endlessly frustrating friend, the flamboyant envoy Cordyn Tallen, on a mission to deliver military intelligence to a friendly nation about to be invaded by another. Only problem? Cordyn might be a spy, and Gen is tasked with establishing whether her friend has betrayed their nation.
In these early on-the-road chapters it’s the classic double act: Gen is the straight-talking skilled fighter (also asexual, Ace rep an interesting and still under-explored character trait in fantasy) and Cordyn is the charming, creative intellect who is as reckless with his women as he is with his witty put downs, lovable yet equally frustrating. Cordyn’s dialogue is a genuine joy; Lawson has trained hard at the school of badinage, banter and bloody good gags and his dialogue stands up to the classic jokers of modern fantasy such as Nicholas Eames and David Wragg.
But as their mission and journey starts to get more complicated and more characters come into their fray, the book really comes alive. The question of how cynical and heartless Cordyn is and whether there is a moral beating heart in there somewhere is explored through the foil of a potential romantic interest who starts off loathing him and a nemesis with a long-held grudge seeking to kill him. The latter was for me one of the unexpected joys of the book. Lawson chose to make Cordyn’s nemesis a complicated character, blinded by a hate reinforced by Cordyn’s tendency to provoke with his barbs (his fragrant dickishness, in other words) yet also a good man at heart. Their relationship and the shades of grey it provokes asks questions such as whether the wrongs done to us blind us to people’s real traits, and I found it a pleasingly meaty set of twin character arcs amongst all the political backstabbings and rescue scenes.
As for the overall plot, things get very messy and twisty and thick with betrayal in the best tradition of these political mission fantasies, and Lawson arranges the players with all their various motives in satisfyingly chess piece ways, all coming together well at the end. This is helped by some interesting worldbuilding and magic systems in the form of mages who control water in all its forms – from lethal ice shards to manipulating the water in a person’s brain so you can sneak away while they stand there none the wiser (could be useful in the real world to escape boring conversations I feel).
As for the various countries and their allegiances, with the exception of the Wynn, an intriguingly stubborn yet noble race of mysterious island mages, nowhere jumped out as particularly distinct; but that didn’t matter for me as this is a book whose joy is found in the politicking, the twists and the characters, not detailed country-building, and the world is sufficiently sketched out to make me want to revisit some more of it in future books.
Overall, the Envoys of War is twister than a drunk python, gloriously witty and features more unexpected heart than dinner with cannibals. A surprisingly deep and deeply surprising side quest fantasy.
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