Skullsworn – Brian Staveley

At the beginning of the year I set myself the goal of reading as many books as possible, and at least a book a week. A fairly straightforward task, but when you have a predilection for epic fantasy, a vanity project website to maintain, a full time job, children to care for, and hopefully at some point in the very near future a social life to enjoy, that target begins to looks a bit more challenging. To help myself out, I decided that for every full series I read, I’d allow myself a novella to balance things out a little. There’s plenty of authors who supplement their main series with shorter stories featuring interesting side characters or specific historical events, that further expand the world they’ve created.

After finishing the Paternus series, which was reasonably sizeable, I thought that a nice little novella would set me up nicely for the next big series. Unfortunately, I chose Skullsworn, I use the word ‘unfortunately’ only because this thing is a full-blown novel. Hands up, my bad, that’s on me, I should have known that any prequel to The Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne, would in all likelihood be of a similar heft as the main series.

In Annur, Ananshael is the god of death, his priests and priestesses are the Skullsworn. Years of training, in their mountain stronghold, Rassambur, are required to become Skullsworn. This is followed by a test with two possible outcomes, fulfil the requirements of the test by making seven ‘offerings’ to Ananshael, or fail, and be ‘offered’.

Pyrre is worried about her ability to complete the trial successfully, not because seven people have to be killed, but because one of the offerings has to be the object of her love, she isn’t even close to being in love and the test has to be completed within 14 days. Pyrre has a plan though, return to Dombâng, the city of her birth, ferment an uprising against the unpopular Annurian Empire and in the ensuing chaos, fall in love with the charismatic local leader of the Empire’s forces. There’s just one problem with chaos, it can be a little unpredictable, and Pyrre is soon caught on the wrong side of the revolution she instigated.

Pyrre is something of an enigma in the main series, not a main character, her purposes and allegiances are unclear, is she an impartial/uninterested observer or a motivated party to the events? All that said, her occasional interventions result in fairly significant consequences, the series would have been a lot shorter, or just about different characters without Pyrre. This novel helps to unwrap some, but not all, of the mystery.

Cards on the table, Chronicles of the Unhewn Throne is a series that I’ll definitely include in my Top Tomes list of recommended fantasy reads (if I ever get around to writing it), so I have a predilection for the work of Brian Staveley. Here’s the thing though, that leads to high expectations and the opportunity to feel let down when subsequent releases don’t live up to the standards of predecessors (second album syndrome in the music world, although Skullsworn is probably more of an EP if we’re classing CotUT as Mr Staveley’s first album). Look at me, trying to inject some dramatic tension into this review, where there really isn’t any, Skullsworn is a fantastic, enjoyable, and extremely readable book. I probably enjoyed it more than the main series (or maybe my favourite Brian Staveley book is just the last one I read), both contain the same high standard of writing, but for me, Skullsworn benefits from a laser tight focus on a solitary plot and character. I felt myself getting swept along by the narrative from a very early stage of the book, when I wasn’t reading it, I wanted to be. There’s no higher praise I can give to a book than that.