This book is good from the first page and then takes off running. Fascinating stuff.
The territory of Ixia was taken over in a coup years ago, with the corrupt royals being killed off and the land being taken over by the tough-but-fair Commander Ambrose. Magicians are all killed off here and the rules are harsh, but everyone's got a job and a livelihood and things could be worse.
Our heroine, Yelena, has the "worse" going on big time. She's an orphan who was taken into an orphanage run by the general running one of the districts of Ixia (Branzell, I think? Don't have my copy here right now), and was experimented on cruelly by him and his son. Eventually she killed the son...and there's no excuse whatsoever allowed for murder in Ixia. But just before her number comes up for execution, she gets offered the job of the Commander's food taster. This is FAR more involved than you'd think, as her boss Valek insists that she learn what all kinds of poisons taste like...sometimes firsthand.
Oh, and the first thing Valek does is dose her with a poison called Butterfly's Dust that will kill her painfully within 48 hours if she doesn't take an antidote for it every 24. No hope of escape here...
Right off the bat, she's got problems. General Branzell and his men want her dead, and the General seems to be plotting against the Commander. Certain fellow employees are either suspicious or hostile. Then there's the magician from the neighboring country who wants her dead. And Yelena starts suspecting she might be a born magician after all...another thing that'll get her executed in Ixia.
In short, she's thrown into a deadly morass, and manages to work her way through. I also have to admire the various trickeries that go down within the book (and the Commander has a very interesting one that I wasn't expecting). I did manage to guess one of them fairly early on out of sheer logic, but that's kind of necessary given the plot. I also like how most of the characters are ambiguous, neither totally good OR totally evil. Very interesting to think about.
Awesome. I am SO grabbing the next book when it comes out. Four stars.
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