
The Bloodless Princes
by Charlotte Bond
Genres: FantasyPages: 151
Series: The Fireborne Blade #2
Rating:

Synopsis:A tale of death, honor and true love's embrace. Come for the journey through the underworld. Stay for the minacious dragon-cat.
It seemed the afterlife was bustling.
Cursed by the previous High Mage, and following an...incident...with a supremely powerful dragon, newly-promoted High Mage Saralene visits the afterlife with a boon to beg of the Bloodless Princes who run the underworld.
But Saralene and her most trusted advisor/champion/companion, Sir Maddileh, will soon discover that there’s only so much research to be done by studying the old tales, though perhaps there’s enough truth in them to make a start.
Saralene will need more than just her wits to leave the underworld, alive. And Maddileh will need more than just her Fireborne Blade.
A story of love and respect that endures beyond death. And of dragons, because we all love a dragon!
Charlotte Bond’s The Bloodless Princes is a pretty immediate follow-up to The Fireborne Blade, so definitely start by reading that. It took me a little bit to get myself back into the world and characters, especially as I experienced the end of the first book as being rather dark and ambiguous, and all signs point here to Bond not… having intended that, and thinking of Maddileh and Saralene as unambiguously “good guys”, totally justified in what they did, without any hint of darkness about it. But… sorry, no matter how awful someone has been, using weird dragon/blood magic to take over their body and thus kill them isn’t morally neutral.
Once I got past that dissonance, it was still a fun enough read, but I wasn’t expecting as much from it, since it kind of retroactively edited The Fireborne Blade to be more straightforwardly heroic than I’d originally thought it. Maddileh and Saralene become a romance plot with more than a hint of Orpheus and Eurydice, and it’s kind of predictable. There’s some fun lore, and it’s nice to understand more about the dragons and how they view their relationship with humans.
It ticks along at a good pace, and I enjoyed it for what it was, but depending on how you felt about The Fireborne Blade other than “ooh, female knight! girl power!”, it might be rather disappointing.
Rating: 3/5