But she will also be betraying the ghosts past and present that live on within her heart.Ĭharm must choose. If she does this last thing, she will finally have what has been denied her since the fall of Inshil-her freedom.
Now-Charm is also the only person who can keep an empire together, as the Emperor summons her to his deathbed, and charges her with choosing which of his awful, faithless sons will carry on the empire-by discovering which one is responsible for his own murder. The wealthy and powerful of Borenguard come to her house to buy time with the girls who aren't real.Įxcept on Tuesdays, which is when the Emperor himself lays claim to his mistress, Charm herself. Charm tends the trees and their clattering fruit for the sake of her children, painstakingly grown and regrown with its fruit: Shame, Justice, Desire, Pride, and Pain.Ĭharm is a whore, and a madam. The last of a line of conquered necromantic workers, now confined within the yard of regrown bone trees at Orchard House, and the secrets of their marrow.Ĭharm is a prisoner, and a survivor. Hugely readable, I wolfed it despite the length.PoV: 3rd person past tense, multiple PoVsĬharm is a witch, and she is alone. She's a strong female character in the good way: she uses soft power all the time and manipulation where she must, she learns to fight but doesn't want war, and she learns to be laser focused on the good of the many, not personal ambition. It's very powerful, and really compelling, especially in Kaikeyi's dogged fuck-you defiance of gods and men. Let's not teach young men that they're gods. In particular, Rama is shown to be both an incarnated god and, simultaneously, the result of treating a young man like an incarnated god: without being a bad or ill-meaning person he's disastrously selfish, sucks the independent lives out of people around him, thin-skinned, destructive and wrecks the lives of women. Women lift each other up in a world where men at best fail to support, let them down, abuse them, ignore them, and in which the gods are manipulative for their own purposes and don't give a damn for the lives of individuals (so, kind of like men, then). Female solidarity is a huge theme here, between the queens, between Kaikeyi and her most trusted servants, and between the queens and the women their husbands rules. Kaikeyi is wonderfully drawn, as is the ancient Indian setting, a world of gods and magic and monsters and warfare and a lot of misogyny. This is a terrific, hugely immersive read. I only know the story as an outline, not in the kind of detail that would probably add a lot of richness to the retelling, but that wasn't a problem at all. A marvellous reimagining of the story of Kaikeyi, evil stepmother of Rama in the Ramayana.
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