I would like to thank Tor Dot Com for an advance copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review

Publisher – TorDotCom

Published – 29/10

Price - £17.99 hardback £8.99 Kindle ebook

A tale of honor, dragons, and a love that endures beyond death

Come for the journey through the underworld. Stay for the suspiciously familiar winged cat.

After their dubiously successful quest to slay the White Lady and recover the Fireborne Blade, Sir Maddileh and Saralene set about changing their world for the better. But the cursed and newly-promoted High Mage Saralene must visit the afterlife to ask a favor of the Bloodless Princes who run the underworld.

But Saralene and Sir Maddileh will soon discover that the old tales only hold so much truth in them, though perhaps there’s enough to make a start on their new journey.

To escape the underworld alive, Saralene will need a lot more than just her wits. And Maddileh will need more than just her Fireborne Blade.

NB – This is a sequel to the excellent The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond there will be spoilers!

The power of folk tales is that they all seem to be in conversation with each other. Unsurprisingly they represent various cultures and beliefs from where the originated.  We can imagine Snow White passing Cinderella and not simply because we meet them in Disney stores and theme parks but because these stories fit with each other. We can have some where the stories are re-imagined with linking characters but there are also authors who clearly know their folk lore and have the ability to create a world that echoes those stories such as Angela Slatter’s excellent Sourdough tales. Charlotte Bond in the fantastic The Bloodless Princes shows they belong to that latter group with this sweeping story that creates its own world of folklore and magic but reminds us truth is always not quite the same as the fiction.

In The FireBorne Blade we met Maddileh a woman who decided to be a knight and needed to reclaim her honour seeking the famous Fireborne Blade from the tomb of a dragon. Things soon got complicated and Maddileh found that she was actually a victim of a ruse by the High Mage and her duplicitous wizard; and that she was actually a dead spirit bought back to life. Happily, Maddileh had by then met the powerful sorceress Saralene and together the two stopped their enemies getting the upper hand. This meant Maddileh was restored back to life and thanks to some quick-thinking magic where Saralene was mortally wounded she took the High Mage’s life force for her own and became High Mage as a consequence. Month s have passed Saralene is reforming the Mages to be a better force for good and Maddileh is starting to think dragons are not just evil creatures to fight. But strange events suggest the old High Mage may be trying to come back to the world of the living and our knight and her mage may ned to go to the mysterious lands of the dead to save themselves/

I love it when sequels in a series try to do something different and whereas the Fireborne Blade is a very dark mystery with touches of gore and horror here we enter the world of the dark folk tale. Bond cleverly takes the familiar idea of going into the land of the dead to save someone and gives both the story and the world of the fifteen Kingdoms a sense of real depth really fleshing out the world we started to see in the earlier tale. We get opposing folk tales of humans and dragons which perhaps explain why the two sides view each other with immense suspicion; and we may start to consider who we feel is right. Bond regularly though the novella weaves in folk tales within this larger folk tale that informs the plot and gets subversive. I also am really impressed that while you can perhaps see the bones and DNA of some folk tales everything here has a fresh new feel. This is very much Bond’s own creation not character x in a new story playing on a familiar plot. We don’t know where this story is going which really keeps us on our toes.

In The Fireborne Blade it was principally Maddileh’s story but this time we focus a lot more on Saralene as she is the focus of the not quite dead High Mage’s attacks. Bond makes these moments scary as the idea of losing yourself is always quite powerful and Saralene then has to herself visit the land of the dead; a place where her powers are not strong and indeed she is finding the two infamous Bloodless Princes who own the respective versions of heaven and hell are not quite as she expected and yet both realms are equally disconcerting for different reasons as we will see.

While Saralene must cope with that, Maddileh is searching for a way out meets the dragon from the previous story where the Blade was found. Now Bond creates a full on live, smart and funny dragon in the form of the awesome Mienylyth who acts as an advisor and is also seeking some peace for her own people. This neatly circles back to the opposing folk tales that we see. Can this become an opportunity for peace? Their tale takes the form of the magical quest using wits and warrior skills together, and it is refreshing to see a non-human character created so well.

Also, and I will give you no context for this as that would spoil the surprise but …. we get to meet a dragon-cat. Yes gentle reader you wants to do this.

I really enjoyed the way this story flows and changes form. We get action scenes with battling ghouls, the subtle and sinister horror of the lands of the dead, the mythic feel of Gods and magic at work moving things around;  and at the very human level Maddileh and Saralene realising they really are more than just friends…finally! This is story keeping you on your toes and you’re not sure which end of the coin Bond will land us on keeping us guessing all the way to the end.

Safe to say I strongly recommend The Bloodless Princes. It’s a highly rewarding read with excellent characters and fantastic storytelling. It also for me suggests these fifteen kingdoms have many more stories within them so I hope we visit them again in the future. But in the meantime, run and get this …and tell me what you think of the dragon-cat!