About a year and a half ago, I received The Tethered Mage as a review book. I was thrilled when I read it, and was even more thrilled when I received the sequel, The Defiant Heir, a few months later. The trilogy reaches its exciting conclusion in The Unbound Empire, coming out this April. I won’t share the individual reviews here – suffice to say that I like all three books and highly recommend them. Instead, I want to look at why I like these books as much as I do.
Let’s start with the world… you are either born a mage, or you’re not. Certain kinds of magic are favored over others, at least within the Raverran Empire. Raverran mages, called Falcons, are each bound to a Falconer with a jess, a magical bracelet that allows the Falconer to suppress the Falcon’s magic. This isn’t a big deal if your Falcon creates artifices – magical devices, like the jesses, that can be used by other people – but when your Falcon wields balefire, or can call and control storms at a whim, then their magic is sealed unless at training or desperately needed.
Neighboring Vaskandar has a different approach to magic, favoring vivomancers, who control different aspects of life magic. The Vaskandran mages, called Witch Lords, are intricately tied to the lands they govern, to the point where they can drain the life from their subjects to heal their own wounds. More subjects means more power for the Witch Lords, which is why Prince Ruven, a Vaskandran skinwitch, is looking to invade Raverra.
The protagonist, Lady Amalia Cornaro is heir to one of the ruling families of the Raverran Empire. Over the course of the trilogy, she evolves from a young scholar who defies her mother to sneak into the poorest district of Raverra in search of a book, to proposing a new law freeing the Falcons – the magicians of the Empire – from the archaic laws that bind them, and accompanying her Falcon, Zaira, into battle. Amalia is tasked repeatedly with saving the Empire, and put in the unfortunate position that leaders face of having to decide who is expendable to achieve that goal.
The twists and turns in this trilogy will keep you guessing as to who will survive, and they’re so well-written that you won’t want to put them down. When you finish, you’ll want to pick them back up to re-read the bits and pieces that connected the clues for Amalia, then back to each of those clues to see if you missed any others.