The King’s Sword – C. J. Brightley
A disillusioned soldier. A spoiled, untried prince. A coup that threatens the country they love.
When retired soldier Kemen finds the young prince Hakan fleeing an attempted assassination, he reluctantly takes the role of mentor and guardian. Keeping the prince alive is challenging enough. Making him a man is harder.
As usurper Vidar tightens his grip on power, Kemen wrestles with questions of duty and honor. What if the prince isn’t the best ruler after all?
Invasion looms, and Kemen’s decisions will shape the fate of a nation. What will he sacrifice for friendship and honor?
It’s enjoyable, and even fresh, these days, to read a book in which the cynical, selfish opportunist is the antagonist, and the protagonist is a straightforwardly decent man. This is such a book.
I very much enjoyed the first-person viewpoint character, an ex-soldier discharged after an injury who happens across a prince in distress. (That’s a convenient coincidence, but it’s the only one the plot relies on.) Kemen Sendoa is a big man from a dark-skinned ethnic minority, raised as a soldier as is the tradition with foundlings and orphans in his country. Women are scared of him. Men are wary of him. He’d really like to settle down and have a family, but that’s not going to happen, he’s pretty sure. He’s lost friends, he’s battered by injury (and becomes more battered as the story progresses), but he retains a powerful loyalty to his country and its people.
His mentoring of the young prince is firm, but not harsh. When he’s hailed as a hero for fighting off raiders, he’s genuinely modest about it. He’s not without his secret shame, though, and he does have a character arc as he confronts it.
The prince is less fully rounded, but definitely has a lot of development in the course of the book, under Sendoa’s guidance. Rather than giving us a training montage, the author spends considerable time on the process of his training, which I welcome as more realistic than the usual “Chosen One is whiny and won’t put in the work, succeeds anyway when put under pressure” trope.
I did occasionally feel that I was reading a geography textbook about the setting, and although it was relatively interesting and didn’t go on and on, I did feel that the background information could have been incorporated into the narrative more smoothly or left out altogether. It wasn’t quite what I would consider infodump, but it was headed in that direction.
The language (apart from a few common errors which I will pass on to the author) was smooth and competent and didn’t distract from the story.
Overall, enjoyable. On my 0-9 subscale within the 4-star range, this scores a 3, but it shows enough potential that I’m anticipating a 5 from the sequel.
The author gave me a review copy in expectation of an honest review.
This book review is by Mike Reeves-McMillan and originally appeared on Goodreads.. Mike writes the Gryphon Clerks novels, a series featuring heroic civil servants and engineers doing their best in a difficult world; the Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series, about underpowered magical practitioners stepping up to defend their city when nobody else will; and the Hand of the Trickster sword-and-sorcery series, in which a servant of the trickster god exalts the humble and humbles the exalted. His short stories have appeared in a number of professional and semiprofessional venues, including the Terry Pratchett tribute anthology In Memory.
