Middle-aged Halla has just inherited her great-uncle’s entire fortune, and now she has to seek legal help to defend her inheritance from her in-laws, who are contesting the will.
And if you don’t think that’s enough peril to set a fantasy story around, then you haven’t met Halla’s in-laws.
Deciding that suicide is the least-worst option (and yes, the situation really is that bad), she tries to figure out how the whole “falling on your sword” thing is supposed to work. The sword she uses happens to be enchanted, and with a flash of blue flame Halla is suddenly standing in her cramped bedroom with her blouse open to her waist while the immortal swordsman who was imprisoned in the blade is shouting at her to put some clothes on.
This is the point where a bad situation becomes really weird…
Swordheart takes place in the same world as T. Kingfisher’s Clocktaur War series, but several years on and with brand new characters. You don’t need to have read the previous series to follow what’s going on (although you really should, because they’re a hell of a lot of fun), you just need to know that this is set in a fantasy world where everyone understands that magic is a thing that exists – although they may not have much experience with it – and there are a lot of different gods and wide variety of sects who cater to those gods.
“How many gods do you have in this accursed land?”
Halla had to think. “Um. Well, there’s the Rat, and the Four-Faced God and the Dreaming God and the Forge God and the Lady of Grass and St. Ursa – although she’s a saint, not a god – and the Saint of Steel, but he’s actually a god, not a saint, which is very confusing…”
His initial reaction to the site of Halla’s breasts aside, Sarkis isn’t a prude, or a thug who thinks women need to know their place. Before he was imprisoned in the sword he’d already spent a few decades as a warrior, one who’d been very protective of the men and women warriors who served under him, and he’s remarkably blasé about being a magical servant for several centuries to whoever owned the blade. (Owners who could either be kind, tolerable, or deeply, deeply unpleasant. Being able to return to the sword and heal from any injury – even death – is not always a good thing.)
It’s just that Sarkis is in a completely different part of the world from where he was born, many years separated from anything he’s familiar with, and he’s traditionally solved problems by hitting it with a weapon or setting it on fire. He doesn’t understand a lot about how this “decadent” society works, and he’s now magically bonded with a woman who knows more about housecleaning than she does about fighting mercenaries and bandits.
My great-uncle died three days ago. His wretched family descended on me a week ago. I vowed to kill myself this morning. And I have just drawn a magic sword with a man inside and now I am discussing whether my fifteen-year-old niece can slaughter Aunt Malva’s guardsman.
What in the name of all the gods is going on?
And then there’s Halla, a delightful character in a long line of delightful Kingfisher characters. Halla’s spent most of her life close to poverty, doing what she was told (mostly), and trying to help out her nieces anyway she can. She’s also cheerful, shockingly quick-witted, talks all the time and asks questions about everything. Sarkis spends their first few days together trying to keep his temper with a wielder who thinks an escape attempt is a good time to ask how big dragons are (“They’re dragon-sized! They’re as big as a house!” “All right, but a big house or a small…”). She was also married to a man who was only interested in spending maybe two minutes a month performing his “duty,” so she has all kinds of ideas about how uninteresting she is, and how she’ll just have to live out the rest of her days being a miserably “respectable” widow, alone.
So of course Sarkis and Halla spend most of the book dancing around their instant romantic attraction, and how it would be a terrible idea for many, many reasons. The scene with Sarkis lying on the floor of Halla’s room, bemusedly watching her blither away about how it is and isn’t a good idea for him to share the bed and why he should and shouldn’t take that to mean she’s interested is just one of the many fun bits in this very odd meet-cute situation. You might not think of threatening to kill a nosy neighbor is a romantic gesture, but Sarkis manages to pull it off. Repeatedly.
The urge flared again to go after the people who had done this and kill them. Or possibly just burn the entire world that was so unkind to people like Halla.
It should come as a surprise to no one that the book is filled with Kingfisher’s usual mix of comedy, fantasy, and the mundane mixed in with the out-of-nowhere bizarre. Halla’s quest for a lawyer to protect her inheritance is the main through-line of the plot, but along the way there are bandits, paladins, priests, and relatives (all with their own motivations, not all of them very honest). The characters who stick closest to Halla and Sarkis end up being a taciturn gnoll (one of the badger-like creatures from the Clocktaur series) named Brindle who is very serious about his job, and a lawyer-priest named Zale, whom I absolutely adored. Their travels along an inescapable road take them across some very interesting landscapes; it’s hard to have an uneventful journey when you have haunted sections of the mountainside that won’t stay put.
“I cannot believe that your people have rogue mountain ranges roaming about and have not dealt with it!”
Zell gave him a wry look. “How do you propose we ‘deal’ with it? Various churches tried to burn out bits of the Hills ages ago. It didn’t go well. There are songs about it.”
“They aren’t happy songs,” added Halla.
Sarkis grunted. After a minute he muttered, “You should have used more fire, then.”
Kingfisher was apparently inspired to write this story out of sheer irritation that nobody writing Elric stories seemed to care about the sword’s opinion its owner, so the plot takes a pause every now and then while the characters (mostly Halla and Zele, with Brindle and Sarkis rolling their eyes) try to figure out exactly how this whole immortal-swordsman-trapped-in-a-sword thing works. There are quite a lot of hilariously prying questions about what returns to the sword, whether Sarkis needs to pee when comes back out if he drank a lot of water before going in, and various things like that. It’s exactly what I would have done in their situation, I mean come on, Sarkis goes into the sword when it’s sheathed, and comes back out instantly when it’s unsheathed, of course someone’s going to play with it.
What’s lurking in the background all the entertaining dialog and magical monsters, the pet bird that is definitely not demon-possessed, and will-they-or-won’t-they romance, is Sarkis’s history. Specifically, why he was imprisoned in the sword in the first place. He has nightmarish visions of his “making,” made worse by the fact that he knows he deserved it, and worse. He also knows that he can’t tell Halla the truth while she’s still depending on him, but the longer he waits the more betrayed she’ll feel, and if you want to understand why Halla could be personally hurt by something that happened six centuries ago then you have to understand Halla.
And that’s a big theme of this novel, Halla’s vulnerability, which oddly enough she’s turned into a kind of power. Halla is trusting, and instinctively kind, and in just about every dangerous situation she’s the weakest person in the room. And yet…you can turn that into an advantage if you know that the people you’re dealing with assume that you’re stupid, or silly, or just a poor naive widow who’s easily distracted and obviously isn’t the droid you’re looking for. A merchant that won’t lower their price, or a bully of a cleric, or a bandit with a whole pack of underlings, none of them stand a chance against a self-aware woman who’ll keep nattering on until they decide to back away and go deal with someone who won’t ask them any more questions.
“Hardly anybody kills stupid women,” said Halla, starting down the road. “They kick us out of the way, they smack us occasionally, but nobody thinks we’re a threat.”
It’s a lovely idea of strength that doesn’t have to be physical, and I’m sure Kingfisher will be able to expand on it even more in the next book. Did I not mention there’s going to be a next book? Oh yes: a sword that’s also an immortal warrior is far too valuable an idea for there to be just one.