Daggerbound is the long awaited stand-alone sequel to Swordheart, T Kingfisher's (aka Ursula Vernon's) fantasy romance series that deals with a trio of warriors who 500 years in the past were each cursed to live forever inside a trio of magical swords, which forces them to defend the wielder of said sword. Swordheart is one of the few books I've ever given a perfect 10 to and is one of my favorite fantasy romances of all time: an incredibly witty, fun, fantasy romance from beginning to end. That book focused upon two very different partners whom I really loved: Halla, a middle aged widow who was really smart but used a bumbling fool persona and constant babbling to disorient others, and Sarkis, a warrior stuck in the sword from ages ago who feels burdened by his sins and without the patience Halla possesses.
Daggerbound is a really great follow-up. The book features a similarly oddball pair: Learned Edmund (who was originally a character in T Kingfisher's Clocktaur Wars duology), a scholar despondent at the misogynist and prejudiced nature of his order trying to walk away from it all; and "The Dervish", the flirtatious dagger-wielding warrior in the sword. The two could not seem more opposites: Edmund is obsessed with knowledge and goes on long tangents about things that occur to him on the journey while the Dervish loves to fight, flirt, and f*** and has little patience for standing still or impractability. Yet when the two go on a very weird, strange, and dangerous journey together, well...this is a fantasy romance, you may get some of where this is going, although you'll be very surprised by how it goes down. As I'll explain in more detail below, it's a really really fun adventure/fantasy romance filled with Kingfisher's fun quirkiness that I have to highly recommend.
Note: Daggerbound is the sequel to Swordheart, but as noted above is also very much a sequel to the Clocktaur Wars duology. That said this book can be read entirely stand-alone, although I'd recommend reading Swordheart first. While references to the Clocktaur Wars books are not infrequent and readers who read that series will have a greater understanding of some matters than those starting with this series, everything you need to know about what happened there is explained herein so you can skip that duology to start here.
Plot Summary:
Learned Edmund is tired. He has spent the last 8 years, since his last adventure, working as a scholar of the Many-Armed God and trying, along the way, to fight the prejudices of the Order, particularly their prejudice against women. Now, he has given up any hope of reforming the Temple from within and has decided just to leave. And to do that, he undertakes a task to transport a bunch of books and an old ornamental sword in a sheath to other scholars and leaves with his trusty grumpy mule Sweetness, with the intention of never actually coming back after finishing the journey.
But when Edmund is beset by bandits on the road, the sword comes out of the sheath and unleashes a handsome warrior who goes by "The Dervish", who cuts down the bandits with his knives. The Dervish has been trapped in the sword for hundreds of years and is immensely angry about it....especially considering how some of his previous wielders chose to use and abuse having an immortal warrior required to defend them at any cost. The Dervish wants absolutely nothing to do with Edmund, a bookish priest who won't shut-up about facts of science or anthropology and seems to have no sense of self-preservation whatsoever.
Yet Edmund has a lead on a scholar who might know something about the Sword and be able to break the Dervish's curse. And as Edmund and The Dervish get into substantial and odd trouble along their journey the two begin to feel....feelings for one another, despite how different they are. But will those feelings lead the two of them together....or will it instead lead them both into lethal danger?
Daggerbound is told largely - a few humorous moments aside - from the perspectives of Edmund and the Dervish, as the two of them journey into and out of danger (and of course, into and out of romance). And what a journey it is. Without spoiling, as is typical for Kingfisher's books in this series and the related Paladin series, the Dervish and Edmund wind up getting into a bunch of dangerous and odd situations, meet some weird new companions (one is a species experienced readers will expect, one will surprise) and strange creatures that could only be thought of by Kingfisher's crazy amazing imagination. Moreover, this journey is filled with some incredibly well written and fun dialogue and descriptions, especially as Edmund regales the others with absurd often irrelevant information about the world and the beings in it (a frequent tic of his I'll get to in a second).
I'd like to add that this journey, while perhaps a familiar formula to that found in other Kingfisher books, also manages to subvert expectations quite a bit by not playing dumb for the reader. While our characters will blunder into bad situations at times, there are few situations in which the reader will know more than the characters simply because characters who do have knowledge refuse to spit out what they know. For example, it's established immediately that Edmund was a dedicate of the Many-Armed God and then shortly thereafter it's established that The Dervish hates priests...and Edmund doesn't hide who he is at all from the Dervish so as to create additional drama. Conflicts that do arise due to traumas of the past and misunderstandings are resolved relatively quickly and fluidly and there are very few plot points that come about due to one or another characters acting stupidly. And in one final instance, readers of Swordheart will expect that a certain antagonist faction awaits the protagonists at the end of their journey but rather than having them blindly step into it, the book features Edmund and the Dervish learning about the threat from a character from a prior book such that we don't feature the same last act plot twist that we did in Swordheart. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a super subversive book, but it avoids dumb twists that I hate and is always a really excellent adventure that is tremendous fun.
None of this would work if it wasn't for the superb character arcs and romance between Daggerbound's two main characters. When we last saw Learned Edmund in the Clocktaur Wars duology, he was a brilliant young man who had morphed from naive and misogynist due to his order's teachings to a bit less naive and more understanding of his biases, but still a little naive. Here, 8 years later, he's now a little naive, but at the same time he's a lot more jaded about life due to his years of failure reforming his order from within and the sacrifice he made with the secret he learned at the end of the last duology (I won't spoil, but this book will eventually). He's learned that knowledge and logic can't actually change many peoples' prejudices, no matter how irrational they are, and that hurts him, a young man who believes in the value of recording and spreading knowledge above all. And yet, he's still got a caring side in him and an exuberance towards the details of the world and learning more about it, which contrasts greatly with how the Dervish sees everything.
For the Dervish, even before he went into the sword, life was best enjoyed on the road fighting and fucking so that he never got bored and without responsibility towards others' lives, which the Dervish couldn't help caring all too much about. After going into the sword and dealing with a bunch of horrifying wielders, the Dervish is a man filled with traumas and rage at the world and peoples in it. He's practical and cynical and largely assumes the worst about others he encounters...and never really wants to dare hope. He still can't help flirting with pretty men, such as Edmund, even if he insists they're not quite his type and that his traumas make him unlovable for anything more than a quick fling. It's a depressing but real feeling to this character.
And yet as the Dervish and Edmund spend more time together, the two really begin to change how they see the world and each other. The Dervish begins to realize that, despite Edmund's long diatribes about history and science and biology being utterly weird and untimely, that he enjoys hearing them and wants to learn more and that he's genuinely enthralled by Edmund's positivity about the world, even if he can't share it. Edmund comes to realize that he is worth loving and that his own failures, and his own inability to live up to the perfection he strives to at the cost of some moral compromises, doesn't change his own worth. As with any romance, the pair's push and pull towards one another isn't without some bumps in the road and it is far from quick - their first romantic interaction literally happens 50% of the way through the book, so again this is a slow burn sorry, but it really flows and works well, leading to a very happy conclusion.
In short, Daggerbound is a really fun sequel to Swordheart that is well worth the wait and I'm super thrilled to have gotten an early copy of the audiobook. So good and highly recommended.
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