Juliet E McKenna's The Gambler's Fortune
is the third novel in the "Tales of Einarinn" series and switches the PoV back to Livak. She and Ryshad cooked up a plot whilst staying at Ryshad's home for the Winter Solstice following the events of The Swordsman's Oath; she's looking for a way of raising sufficient coin that she can give up being a gambler and be with Ryshad, since he's too honourable a man to agree to live off her gambling winnings (or the proceeds of her occasional thefts), and she's not prepared to wait 10 or 15 years for Ryshad to earn a Stewardship somewhere on Messire D'Olbriot's estates. Therefore, whilst Ryshad is making himself useful to Messire, Livak is travelling with Usara, a mage with mastery over the earth, and two friends of hers, the brothers Sorgrad and Sorgren. They are mostly mercenaries but having stolen a pay chest from one of the militias fighting in the endless Lescari civil wars, they've opted to head further west, away from suspicion. Livak has an old song book borrowed from Messire's library which she is hoping to get translated. It contains songs by the three original races of Einarinn: the Forest Folk (of which Livak is a "half-blood", since her father was a Forest Minstrel), the Mountain Men (of which Sorgrad and 'Gren (as he's usually known) are full blood members, and the now extinct Plains People. The four of them travel to the Great Forest and to the Mountains in search of translations for the songs which Livak is convinced contain instances of Artifice, the mental magic which the Elietimm (whom she encountered in The Thief's Gamble) use to devastating effect and which is hard to counter with the elemental magic wielded by Usara (and Shiv). Since the Elietimm are invading the east coast to devastating effect, Livak is hoping to find forgotten Artifice with which to counter their attacks - and she hopes to get paid handsomely for it - by both Messire and Planir the Archmage if at all possible. Unfortunately the trip isn't quite the pleasure jaunt she'd hoped as someone is stirring up the Mountain Men against both the Forest Folk and the "outdwellers" (as the Folk call those who live in the rest of Einarinn) whose pasturelands are beginning to encroach on Mountain Man territory. It looks like being a bloodier summer than Livak had been hoping for, and no safer than if she had remained in the East with Ryshad...
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My apologies for the lack of a review yesterday - I was poleaxed by a migraine (too little sleep, too much stress)...
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