In Which We Get Political Again

[bloodygranuaile]

For me, rereading the Protector of the Small quartet was a whole different kind of exciting from the first two quartets, because now we're into the books that came out when I was aging out of my reread-everything-I-like-a-billion-times phase (plus I had more things to read now that I was a big girl and could start reading books for adults), so I've only read these a few times before. I think Lady Knight I may have even only read once! So I'd forgotten a lot of things and frequently had only the vaguest idea of where the plot was going.

PotS is the story of Keladry of Mindelan, the first girl to openly train to become a knight in over a century, after Lady Alanna happening caused King Jonathan to change the laws. (It seems that there had certainly been an uptick in girls becoming fighters in the fifteen or twenty years since then, but most of them joined the Queen's Riders rather than becoming knights.) When I first heard this series was coming out, I was afraid it would be too similar to Song of the Lioness to really be fun, but luckily, I was wrong. As a character, Kel is way different from Alanna--she's tall, she doesn't have magic, her preferred weapon is polearms, her family were diplomats to the Yamani Isles (a fictional land totally not at all based on Japan) and she lived there for six years so she's a third-culture kid. Kel is very serious and stoic and has no temper at all, unlike Alanna, and (despite her skepticism about how useful it will be) she ends up being trained largely for command rather than for individual knight-erranting around.

One of the things I love about this series is that it really gets into the political tension within Tortall. King Jonathan and Queen Thayet have implemented all sorts of awesome progressive social changes, because they are so awesome, and... not everyone is happy with it! People are having all sorts of Political Opinions about stuff, and have started identifying as either progressives or conservatives. The monarchs are progressives, but monarchs do not, in practice, unilaterally control everything. Unfortunately for Kel, the training master for the would-be knights, Lord Wyldon of Cavall, is a conservative, and is very anti-lady-warriors. Even though the law says girls can become knights, Wyldon threatens to quit if he has to train her, unless certain conditions are met, and King Jonathan can't afford to have him quit because Politics, so he gives in to Wyldon's demands that Lady Alanna not have any contact with her at all (which was actually pretty sensible, if crappy) and that Kel have a year of probation before being allowed to be a proper page (not fair or sensible!). Most of the boys in her program avoid her at first but come around to being friends once they realize she's not an alien, but there are a handful of exceptions--the Crown Prince and a wacky guy named Nealan of Queenscove are nice to her right off the bat; and a small clique of hyper-conservative young men make it their life's mission to be maximally nasty to her and everyone else they see as "beneath" them, for years. (They eventually get a satisfying, if sadly inapplicable-to-real-life, comeuppance.)

The series continues as Kel becomes a proper page, conquers her fear of heights, becomes awesome at tilting, becomes Raoul of Goldenlake's squire (RAOUL IS SO GREAT I LOVE HOW MUCH RAOUL THERE IS IN THIS SERIES. YES THAT NEEDED TO BE IN ALL CAPS), temporarily adopts a baby griffin, fights big mechanical killing devices in Scanra (there's a war with Scanra), and gets a mission-quest-thing from the Chamber of the Ordeal to hunt down the elusive mage who is creating the big mechanical killing devices (and powering them with the souls of dead children omg). She also manages to earn the respect of the intractable Lord Wyldon, which I think are the emotional high points of the series in that they made me cry, which I'm pretty sure Lord Wyldon would have disapproved of.

While this series does not have the nostalgic place in my heart that the earlier ones do, I really think this is just one of the most perfectly crafted book series I have read, possibly ever. It is masterfully plotted, deeply political, never boring, and tackles a lot of series issues without being remotely preachy. The serious plot bits are absolutely terrifying. The new perspectives we get on Tortall are fascinating, particularly in the treatment of the characters that we've met when they were younger in the other series. The side characters are fabulous as always and the clever dialogue lightens the heavy subject matter without cheapening it.

I basically just really love the shit out of this series, is what I'm saying.