The March North

This is a delightful dream stretched around a solid framework of military fiction, with a good mix of uncanny and physics-based magic. The author makes you work to figure things out from context but offers enough of a drip feed of clarifications spiced with delicious turns of phrase that it’s not a drag. Really there’s not a lot like it out there, and I wish there were more.

There's the good guys, who seem to be pretty good as humans go. They're the Commonweal. There's everything else, which is at best messed-up angry fauna and flora, and at worst run by mage-lords who are pretty keen on the equation of power = corruption.

(Some of the good guys used to be mage-lords before the formation of the Commonweal, which tromped on them somehow and made them behave.)

And now there's an incursion spotted from the neighboring country, probably a scouting party for an invasion. As no one in the Commonweal wants to go back to the Bad Old Days, the Standard-Captain in charge of the local military troops hauls everyone off to find out what's gone wrong & how to fix it.

Note: I don't think the Standard-Captain, our narrator, has been given a name. Nor a gender. (Which is one up from the other nameless 1st person narrator from Tanith Lee's "Don't Bite the Sun.") For that matter, almost *no one* gets a gendered pronoun, and I am really impressed with this, since I was nearly finished with the sample pages before I realized that. (I love a good stunt-writing!)

So the world is unfolding, and the characters, while this group of troops who are magically bound to the standard (willingly!) is marching through an uncanny wood against some pretty long odds.

I am very much partial to being thrown into the middle of some unique physics/magic and having most of it become clear in context, and am quite entertained.