Russ Allbery: Review: Paladin’s Faith

Review: Paladin’s Faith, by T. Kingfisher

Paladin’s Faith is the fourth book in T. Kingfisher’s loosely
connected series of fantasy novels about the berserker former paladins of
the Saint of Steel. You could read this as a standalone, but there are
numerous (spoilery) references to the previous books in the series.

Marguerite, who was central to the plot of the first book in the series,
Paladin’s Grace, is a spy with a
problem. An internal power struggle in the Red Sail, the organization that
she’s been working for, has left her a target. She has a plan for how to
break their power sufficiently that they will hopefully leave her alone,
but to pull it off she’s going to need help. As the story opens, she is
working to acquire that help in a very Marguerite sort of way: breaking
into the office of Bishop Beartongue of the Temple of the White Rat.

The Red Sail, the powerful merchant organization Marguerite worked for,
makes their money in the salt trade. Marguerite has learned that someone
invented a cheap and reproducible way to extract salt from sea water, thus
making the salt trade irrelevant. The Red Sail wants to ensure that
invention never sees the light of day, and has forced the artificer into
hiding. Marguerite doesn’t know where they are, but she knows where she
can find out: the Court of Smoke, where the artificer has a patron.

Having grown up in Anuket City, Marguerite was familiar with many
clockwork creations, not to mention all the ways that they could go
horribly wrong. (Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it was an
explosion. The hundredth time, it ran amok and stabbed innocent
bystanders, and the artificer would be left standing there saying,
“But I had to put blades on it, or how would it rake the leaves?”
while the gutters filled up with blood.)

All Marguerite needs to put her plan into motion is some bodyguards so
that she’s not constantly distracted and anxious about being assassinated.
Readers of this series will be unsurprised to learn that the bodyguards
she asks Beartongue for are paladins, including a large broody male one
with serious self-esteem problems.

This is, like the other books in this series, a slow-burn romance with
infuriating communication problems and a male protagonist who would do
well to seek out a sack of hammers as a mentor. However, it has two things
going for it that most books in this series do not: a long and complex
plot to which the romance takes a back seat, and Marguerite, who is not
particularly interested in playing along with the expected romance
developments. There are also two main paladins in this story, not just
one, and the other is one of the two female paladins of the Saint of Steel
and rather more entertaining than Shane.

I generally like court intrigue stories, which is what fills most of this
book. Marguerite is an experienced operative, so the reader gets some
solid competence porn, and the paladins are fish out of water but are also
unexpectedly dangerous, which adds both comedy and satisfying
table-turning. I thoroughly enjoyed the maneuvering and the culture
clashes. Marguerite is very good at what she does, knows it, and is
entirely uninterested in other people’s opinions about that, which
short-circuits a lot of Shane’s most annoying behavior and keeps the story
from devolving into mopey angst like some of the books in this series have
done.

The end of this book takes the plot in a different direction that adds
significantly to the world-building, but also has a (thankfully short)
depths of despair segment that I endured rather than enjoyed. I am not
really in the mood for bleak hopelessness in my fiction at the moment,
even if the reader is fairly sure it will be temporary. But apart from
that, I thoroughly enjoyed this book from beginning to end. When we
finally meet the artificer, they are an absolute delight in that way that
Kingfisher is so good at. The whole story is infused with the sense of
determined and competent people refusing to stop trying to fix problems.
As usual, the romance was not for me and I think the book would have been
better without it, but it’s less central to the plot and therefore annoyed
me less than any of the books in this series so far.

My one major complaint is the lack of gnoles, but we get some new and
intriguing world-building to make up for it, along with a setup for a
fifth book that I am now extremely curious about.

By this point in the series, you probably know if you like the general
formula. Compared to the previous book, Paladin’s Hope, I thought Paladin’s Faith was much
stronger and more interesting, but it’s clearly of the same type. If, like
me, you like the plots but not the romance, the plot here is more
substantial. You will have to decide if that makes up for a romance in the
typical T. Kingfisher configuration.

Personally, I enjoyed this quite a bit, except for the short bleak part,
and I’m back to eagerly awaiting the next book in the series.

Rating: 8 out of 10