I Read Books: Ironhand's Daughter

 

Ironhand’s Daughter

The clansmen of the Highlands live free, though their taxes go to the Lowlands and they are forbidden from wearing the crimson of their ancestors. Below in the lowlands the Baron has ambitions. By forcing a war with the Highlands he will have an excuse to form an army – an army he can take against the king or his other enemies.

When Sigarni, free woman and descendant of the last Highland King, comes to take part in the hawking, he recognises the hawk as a foreign one. He’d hoped to buy it from the owner but he wouldn’t sell. The baron takes it, Sigarni objects, fights and scars him. She is imprisoned, beaten, raped, condemned to die. But she escapes.

The Baron seeks revenge; the clans in the Highlands are forced to fight. Sigarni is the foretold leader. Yet as a young woman the clans will not follow. She will have to cross a gate to another world to prove her legacy.

Gemmel creates a new set of Highlanders under siege, this time unmistakably Scottish-adjacent. The other world is more weird fiction dark magic than usual, a new turn in his use of the gates that cross space and time and worlds. The first of a duology, it ties up many character stories while leaving other plotlines dangling.

Read This: Gemmell has a new setting, new villains and new heroes
Don’t Read This: Animals die, a woman is raped and the time and space shenanigans are inexplicable