Queen's Hunt

The perfect balance for a middle book

This is the second book in the River of Souls series and is very much a “middle book”. Not in any negative sort of sense. In the same sense that the "set" in volleyball is the middle step in a pass-set-spike sequence. Queen's Hunt takes the plot-ball that has been put in motion in the previous book and positions it ideally for the conclusion.

In a secondary world that evokes but does not mirror certain cultures of Europe’s past, magic and politics drive the plot in a setting where memories and souls—and the relationships they’ve developed in life—can carry over across many lifetimes. The first volume, Passion Play, introduced our two central characters, Ilse and Raul, and plunged the reader into the intricate politics both within and between kingdoms that are spinning the setting toward inevitable war. Magic is the key, and especially a powerful magic that was distilled into a gemstone that gave its wielder a nearly ageless existence. But in ages past the gem was split into three parts which were lost in Anderswar, the liminal space between worlds. Now one of the gems has been reclaimed by the ageless wizard-king and the hunt for the other two will determine the balance of power. Except that the gems themselves have their own goals and desires.

This story is broader in scope than the first volume, adding several new viewpoint characters and a great deal more geography, but in pacing is more…I don’t know, leisurely? That’s not quite right. The events are much more focused on the hunt of the title. The world is already built for us. The characters and their concerns have already been laid out. And the historic stakes of the events are already clear. This leaves Queen’s Hunt the space and time to develop other aspects of the setting, and in particular I came to understand more about how reincarnation works in this world and just what the extent of carryover from previous lives can be.

I love the detailed world-building of this series and the way it’s been enriched by drawing on historical source material, in particular language. The only aspect I had a little trouble with was following the large-scale geographic layout. I kept realizing that I’d gotten certain relative positions and compass directions mixed up in my head and eventually gave up on trying to visualize any sort of map. Another thing I love about the setting is the way that the inherited connections between past lives aren’t played out in a simplistic “one true soul-mate” fashion, but intertwine across genders and relationships to create a complicated and conflicted “spiritual family”.

The resolution of the quest for the gems sets the reader up for a grand final conflict in the third book (Allegiance), where the new alignments and power balances created in Queen’s Hunt will precipitate an entirely different struggle than the one hinted at in the first volume. This is not a stand-alone book, and the way in which it continues the story suggests that the series as a whole is probably best thought of as a single work, not a sequence of independent volumes.