I Read Books: A Man Betrayed

 

A Man Betrayed

At the end of The Baker’s Boy Jack, the eponymous baker’s boy, had fled the castle after learning he could do sorcery (blasphemous) having traveled for a while with Melli, he’s split off from her and taken in by a smuggler and his (unconventional) household. The good news is that there’s plenty of people wanting goods what with the war*. The bad news is he lies to Jack, claiming that Melli is dead and pointing him at the local guard captain as the culprit, to try and get both captain and Jack killed.

Melli meanwhile has been sold to woman-traffickers. The good news is that the trafficker has a woman who can do small magics and knows that Melli is a virgin. There’s a market for virgins, the Duke of Bren will pay for them. The woman also discovers that Melli has a great destiny – a luck stealer.

In Bren is a party from the Four Kingdoms seeking to arrange the marriage between Prince/King Kylock (he murders the king in the prologue, the news that he’s ascended the throne is an early plot point) and Catherine the Duke’s daughter. The party includes Melli’s father and Baralis, chancellor of the Four Kingdoms, who has been plotting to fulfill a prophecy and create an empire (and also doing sorcery and inadvertently bringing Jack’s powers to fruit). Also in Bren is Tawl, the knight who after sorcery tricked him into killing his mentor, is now a pit fighter. Destiny and his young thief friend Nabber will lead him to fight the Duke’s Champion.

All this and the Archbishop in the south is still plotting, and the two comic relief guards not only do some commentary on what’s going on but find themselves part of the story as well. This is a second volume of a trilogy, there’s a fair amount of wandering about and moving people into position. Jack in particular takes a lot of time getting into trouble, then spending time recovering afterwards.

Read This: The pieces of this fantasy adventure move together – sometimes satisfyingly, often unexpectedly
Don’t Read This: Lot of destinies being fulfilled and also broken and so on

* The smuggler is somewhat dishonest, adding filler to flour, painting fish with blood to appear fresh (?) and stuffing kidneys with lead to make them heavier. This last seems unlikely to me; even under war time conditions I would have expected lead to be more valuable than offal.