“We are but fevered stars. Here a little while, bright with promise, before we burn away.” – Obregi Book of Flowers
Rebecca Roanhorse returns us to Meridian, the fantasy version of Pre-Columbian Americas in the second book of her “Between Earth and Sky” series.
Book 1 ended with the slaughter of the entire ruling body of the city of Tova. At the start of Book 2, the former Sun Priest Naranpa has survived a coup and finds herself back in Coyote’s Maw with the mob-boss brother she thought she’d left behind years ago. Okoa the crow-rider finds himself in the presence of Serapio, the returned Crow God who might bring the clan of Carrion Crow back into power (or get them all killed by the other clans. Again.) Xiala the Teek is far from home in a strange city and heartbroken at losing Serapio. And other cities are moving ahead with their plan to conquer the crown jewel of Meridian and are just now finding out that the Crow God’s human vessel – who was supposed to die killing the Sun Priest – is very much alive.
And everyone is asking themselves the same thing: now what?
I reviewed Book 1 back in August 2021, but here’s a quick-and-dirty summary of the world that Roanhorse has created. The Watchers are made up of the rulers of each of the Sky Made clans (Carrion Crow, Water Strider, Golden Eagle, and Winged Serpent), with the Sun Priest as the final authority. Everyone in Tova who isn’t a member a Sky Made is a Dry Earther, usually living in the mostly lawless and almost subterranean Coyote’s Maw. A faction of the clan of Carrion Crow has spent years plotting revenge for the slaughter at the Night of Knives. The outlying cities of Meridian are under the rule of Tova and are forbidden to worship other gods after signing the Treaty of Hokaia, and the Teek people live on their islands and mostly keep to themselves.
Did you get all that? Good, because it’s all about to change.
The fate of the city rested in the hands of a vengeful god, and the Watchers legacy had died in one fell swoop on a single day.
I thought the first installment of the series did all of the heavy lifting of introducing the world of Meridian, but it turns out there’s still a lot more for us to learn. Roanhorse showers the reader with more beautiful images of life in Meridian, the dazzling fashion, the dreamlike magic, the unique description of what each city looks like from the back of a crow, or an eagle: cliffside buildings in Tova, tangled jungles of Cuecola, the blazing grasslands of Hokaia. But more than that, the story is spreading out further and further, both outward to reveal more of the land, and backward to the history of the clans, the relationships between the different clans and between all the people inside them.
And those relationships have gotten really complicated.
Mother waters, these people! Xiala thought. She had always considered Teek politics an entanglement, but Tova and her Sky Made clans were raveled in their own nets.
Everyone is hiding something, and almost everyone is willing to throw someone else off a cliff. Some members of the Watchers council were plotting against other members, and the death of their leaders hasn’t put a stop to the intrigue between clans. There are clans conspiring with armies from Hokaia and Cuecola to take over Tova now that the Watchers are dead. The clanless of Coyote’s Maw are trying to convince the Sky Made to give them a seat at the table in exchange for their support against the advancing armies. And Carrion Crow is caught between embracing the returned Crow God, or having him quietly “removed” to avoid even the chance of another Night of Knives.
With some exceptions we’re still seeing everything through the eyes of Okoa, Naranpa, Xiala, and Serapio. Naranpa only survived Convergence because the Golden Eagle clan threw her off a bridge and appointed someone else as the Sun Priest. She’s had to adjust damn fast to her new surroundings, to having to beg the Dry Earthers for help in fighting the Crow God, and to the fact that she seems to have brought some kind of power back from the Sun God when she literally crawled out of a grave.
Okoa Crow-rider in the meantime is still trying to figure out who murdered his mother, the matron of Carrion Crow, all while trying to convince his sister that their mother was murdered, and could she please not arrest Serapio or do anything else to piss off the growing crowd of fanatics outside the gates who are ready to follow their returned god into battle?
And Xiala isn’t having any luck returning to her old life of drinking to forget whatever it was that drove her out of her island home. We do (finally!) find out what it was she’s been running from since she was fifteen years old, but before then she spends most of the book finagling a way to get back to Serapio, with some help from Naranpa’s old friend and former lover, Iktan, the former Priest of the Knives.
Side note, Xiala and her zero-fucks-to-give attitude remains my favorite character in these books, but Iktan’s a close second. Both Xiala and Iktan think they’ve lost the person who’s closest to them in the whole world (and who also happen to be each other’s nemesis. It’s complicated.) so there’s an almost instant connection between them. Iktan is also sardonic, fairly amoral, and an assassin so terrifying that xe routinely makes people cringe right out of the room in terror. It’s always entertaining, especially now that xe dosn’t really think there’s much left to lose.
“So if you are no longer a priest, what are you?”
“Now I am a person with an enviable skill set and an exciting amount of indifference.”
And last but not least is Serapio. Raised from childhood to basically be a sentient bomb, he’s thrown everyone’s plans into chaos by surviving. Failing to kill the actual Sun Priest means his job isn’t done yet (illustrated by the fact that – just in Tova – the sun is permanently stuck behind the moon), but there aren’t any scriptures or stories from his teachers to tell him what that actually means. He goes back and forth between the terrifying Crow God who can turn into a flock of corvids and kill with shadows and, and the earnest young man who found out he likes music and stories and chocolate with spices, and could actually imagine a life with Xiala, the one person who never treated him like a god or a weapon.
All of the characters are a long way from where they were in Book 1, but in an odd way they’re all in similar place in their lives. They went from having to act on what they knew was best for themselves, their clan, the world, to being dropped in what’s basically an alien situation, trying to figure out who they can trust. Which, unfortunately, is almost no one. There are betrayals everywhere. Some of the time I could see them coming; most of the time I couldn’t. And we’re not talking about minor issues or petty disagreements here. None of these betrayals are small. None of them are forgivable. And the fallout is only going to keep building until the end of Book 3.