The bandits are dead in under a minute, and then the man who killed them sits down at the side of the road to wait. His new master is unconscious in the frost, badly beaten, and the magic that binds him will not permit him to build a fire or hold water to the man’s lips. It will only stop him doing harm. So he waits, and passes the time by holding both halves of a polite conversation about how inconvenient it is that this fellow is taking so long to die. Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher opens with a rescue conducted entirely in bad faith by a man hoping to be widowed within the hour.
He lasts perhaps forty minutes before he gets up and gathers wood.
The Sword Sits Down and Waits
The premise arrived, by the author’s own account, out of an argument about Elric and Stormbringer: somebody in that famous partnership has to listen to all the whining, and nobody ever asks how the sword feels about it. The first novel in this series took that joke seriously. The second one takes it somewhere considerably darker.
The man in the blade is the Dervish, one of three officers of a mercenary company welded into steel by a blacksmith five centuries ago. He is vain, restless, filthy-mouthed and enormously entertaining, and Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher is generous with him: he gets most of the good lines and all of the worst memories. By the time the reader meets him he is fourteen wielders deep, and the most recent held the sword for roughly a hundred years.
That wielder was a priest with a research interest. He had a subject who could be killed and would return, and a theory about the phases of the moon, and he applied one to the other with a net, a marked slab and a great deal of prayer. The metallic scarring that runs from the Dervish’s wrists to his jaw is the transcript.
The novel then does something quietly devastating with this. The scholar he is now bound to happens to belong to the order that produced the priest, and knows the theory, and tells him what it is: an idea that was comprehensively disproved a century ago. He was not sacrificed to knowledge. He was taken apart to prove something that was already wrong.
Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher and the Cost of a Wrong Idea
Edmund is the reason Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher holds together. He is twenty-seven, was handed to a temple at five, and has spent a decade trying to argue a brilliant, contemptuous, woman-hating institution into decency before finally admitting it will not happen and walking out with a borrowed mule.
He believes, without irony, that a discovery nobody records is a cure lost for a hundred years. And he explains it with sheep: a shepherd works out which plant stops their hooves rotting, tells no one, falls off a cliff, and the hooves rot for a century until somebody works it out again.
And he is concealing something. Seven years ago he identified the treatment for an illness that dissolved people’s skin in a day, and saved a number nobody has properly counted, and he mentions it to no one because in his view the healers did the work. He also knows what causes it. He cannot say. The cause implicates an entire species who live peaceably alongside humans in every city in the region, and the moment it is public they will be slaughtered. So the man whose creed is that knowledge must never be lost has personally buried the most consequential thing he ever learned, and keeps a private tally of the people it kills each year.
The two of them are therefore standing on opposite sides of the same question. One was destroyed by a man who thought all knowledge was worth pursuing. The other is being eaten alive by knowledge he refuses to pursue. The novel resolves this without a speech, in a single practical observation on a staircase in the dark: an immortal is an archive. What Edmund cannot write down can still be carried, by someone who is not going to die.
A Company of Unlikely Diplomats
Around this sits a road novel of real charm, and the company Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher assembles is its second-best argument. The travelling party accumulates a rag-and-bone gnole called Dog Violet, found chained by the ankle in a raiders’ kitchen because they had decided they wanted a cook, whose quiet ambition to be taken seriously as a handler of draft horses is handled with more restraint than most authors would manage. It accumulates a seven-foot pillbug named Large Francis Building, junior half of a scholarly delegation from a swamp nobody has ever recorded, sent out largely because her people had exhausted their supply of books. She speaks through a hand-cranked box of phonemes she built herself, travels with a banner announcing that she does not eat human meat, and is politely baffled to learn that some humans consider females inferior, given that in her species males are the size of a house cat and dead within the week.
And it accumulates Sweetness, a pack mule composed of stone and malice, who believes only in food that is directly in front of her and who causes, directly or indirectly, every disaster in the first third.
The best antagonist is not the cult that eventually drives the plot. It is Otto, a settlement leader who five years ago began feeding a dragon to keep it docile — livestock first, then a corpse, then a man everybody agreed was a drunk and a thief, then strangers. He is unfailingly reasonable. He does the arithmetic aloud. And he thanks Edmund with sincerity for saving one of his men’s lives, and then has both of them staked out at the den anyway, because the beast must be fed and two extra mouths cannot be justified. The novel lets him be right about the arithmetic and monstrous anyway, and does not soften either.
What Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher Cannot Quite Sustain
The reservations are all structural:
The middle is a chain, not an escalation. Bandits, raiders, a dragon, a village, a cult, one after another. Every episode is good and none of them raise the pressure on the one before.
The villain is a locked door. The false scholar who drives the last act has exactly one memorable trait — she fails to correct a wrong forging temperature — and no inner life whatsoever, and she exits well before the end.
The dragon is resolved offstage. Six paladins pass through an inn, are briefed over cold pies, and ride away to deal with a hundred pages of accumulated threat somewhere the reader will never see.
One joke is asked to do far too much work. The insistence that the scholar is not his type is funny early, mechanical by the twentieth iteration, and still going at the fiftieth.
The ending opens a door rather than closing one. The curse stands, the cult survives, and the third sword is still unaccounted for.
There is also the matter of entry. Two of the strongest scenes in Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher are reunions, and a reunion is only a reunion if the reader attended the first meeting. Newcomers get a pleasant married couple where returning readers get a payoff earned across an entire previous novel.
Readers who want this author at her most controlled should go to Wolf Worm, where the same voice is aimed at something with teeth, or to What Stalks the Deep for the horror register run at full strength. Anyone starting here should stop and read Swordheart first; it is shorter, tighter, and this book spends its emotional capital freely on the assumption that you have.
After the Last Page
What stays is not the dragon or the cult or the fortress in the cliff. It is a man on an endless flight of stone stairs at four in the morning, carrying a drugged scholar on his shoulder, keeping him conscious by asking him to name poisonous trees.
That is the register Daggerbound by T. Kingfisher does better than almost anyone writing fantasy now: exhausted, absurd, tender, and entirely serious about the fact that some injuries do not heal and the person carrying them is not obliged to fix himself before he is allowed to be loved. The book says so plainly, near the end, and then refuses to fix him.
Four hundred years of hatred, and what finally lances it is not a killing. It is being hugged by the man he came to murder.