Jeff Wheeler returns us to the kingdom of Ceredigion with The Thief’s Daughter, the second book in the Kingfountain series.
It’s been ten years since the end of The Queen’s Poisoner, and they’ve been some of the happiest years of Owen Kiskaddon’s life. The terrified little Fountain-Blessed boy has now grown into a capable young man, training every day to become a fighter and tactician. Even better, he’s been able to spend most of that time living with the kindly Duke Horwath and the Duke’s granddaughter, Evie (that’s Elysabeth Victoria Mortimer to you.) Owen’s best friend – and possibly the love of his life – has grown into a beautiful and devastatingly intelligent young woman who’s just as determined to marry Owen as she was when she was nine.
But a nearby kingdom plans to attack Ceredigion, and there are rumors that one of the King’s deposed nephews is still alive and returning to reclaim the throne. Owen and Evie will have to thread their way through plots and assassination attempts while trying to prove their loyalty to a king who will do anything to protect his kingdom and his crown, even at the expense of everyone around him.
It’s the same characters, but an entirely different book in many ways from The Queen’s Poisoner. I missed eight-year-old Owen and the constantly-talking Evie, but I found the young Duke of Kiskaddon and the young Elysabeth exactly as appealing in their own ways. Evie has become a little more demure than she used to be, but exactly as fearless. And Owen has put his training with Duke Horwath and everything he learned from Ankarette to good use; his first act in this book is to win a battle without losing a single soldier, so you can imagine how well he’s thought of by everyone close to him.
Yet for all that they’ve both grown up a lot, Owen and Evie still have a relationship that has a lot of irreverence and in-jokes, and they’re not too old to, say, jump into an ice-cold cistern to look for treasure and then sneak back inside the castle and collapse with laughter. The two of them have become very close, and they know each other better than anyone else. It’s very natural that they would fall in love.
The problem is that in a medieval society like Ceredigion, love is the least important factor when arranging marriages.
King Severn, the one who has an iron grip on everyone’s happiness, is a surprisingly complex character. This is someone who had to claw his way to power, and he found out fairly quickly that sometimes the only way to be an effective king is to be a truly awful human being. He’s had to lie, to order the death of innocents, to condemn those in the line of succession – even people he likes – to a loveless existence because if they ever married then their children could challenge Severn for the throne. He’ll never have the love of his people, because everyone thinks he ordered the death of his brother’s two sons, and he can’t convince everyone otherwise because having people think he’s that ruthless means fewer people will try to overthrow him.
It’s no wonder that Severn is bad-tempered, prone to violence, and has next to no sympathy for anyone. Despite this (or maybe because of it) Owen has to wonder if he’s going to turn into someone just as bad. Owen is learning that your enemies are not always bad people, and it’s very easy to take advantage of a good person who thinks they’re on the right side of history but isn’t willing to do horrible things to get what they want.
The author is still using events in English history as inspiration for this world (the story is set in a sort of alternate universe where Richard III won instead of Henry VII, if that helps), and you’ll have to pay very close attention to all the names and families and titles to keep track of who’s aligned with whom. The history is balanced out with magic as well, since in this book Wheeler is drawing on English legends as well. We learn a lot more about how the magic of the Fountain works, and I was intrigued by the differences between Severn’s magic and Owen’s, and how the types of magic and how they drew it to them was a reflection of their different characters. (Owen still stacks tiles when he needs to replenish his store of magic, which is still rather cute.)
There were a few times when I wished that the Fountain magic didn’t step in quite so directly; if you have a godlike power do too much you might make readers wonder why the power has to use human instruments at all. And as long as I’m being nitpicky, I wish Wheeler’s editor had exercised a little godlike power and replaced a few of the twenty or so instances where the author used the work “smirk”. But those are relatively minor quibbles, since the author still has a talent for gradually unfurling the settings and letting the story flow through all of the political machinations and magical battles, along with the occasional bit of fun dialogue or dramatic escape.
And the title character? She was another nice surprise. I was expecting Ankarette’s replacement to be a one-dimensional enemy for Owen, but she stands on her own as a somewhat mysterious but likable ally. And that’s something Owen will most definitely need. Like a lot of trilogies, the first book draws you in, and the second one breaks your heart and leaves you with a cliffhanger.And while I would have liked for Wheeler to wrap up Owen and Evie’s romance with a predictable ending complete with rainbows and kittens, it’s nice to have no idea where the author will take the story next.