Having read and reviewed the first book in the series, I was looking forward to finding out where Morgan Rice might go with this story. This one seemed to me to be better written, to have been planned better, and to be more cohesive with a logical outplaying of the characters’ personalities within their circumstances. (If you have not read the first book, “Slave, Warrior, Queen”, please note there are spoilers below.)
The story picks up with Ceres in the Stade, fighting for her life. Berin, Ceres father, comes back from the foreign country where he had been hoping to find work only to find his family gone, except for his wife who is bitter at him for ruining everything by going away. Berin's younger son, Sarn, is in the army, having been conscripted,but is determined not only to survive, but to escape to the rebels to fight with them.
Ceres's father finds her in the cells under the Stade but she resists his attempts to rescue her, telling him that she is exactly where she needs to be, but that her younger brother needs his help more than she does.
The machinations of the Royals continues as Ceres becomes more and more popular with the people. They try to remove her in a number of ways, until they finally learn that in order to escape from slavery, she killed the slaver who had bought her. She is sentenced to hard labour on the Isle of Prisoners until she dies.
Meanwhile Thanos, of the larger royal family, has survived the assassination attempt on the battlefield and joined with the rebels who found him to help them defeat the massed army of the king, and then returns to the capital to pursue a fifth column campaign against the Royals and to find out who had tried to have him killed. He discovers an unlikely ally in the form of Stephania, the young noblewoman with whom the King and Queen had arranged a marriage for Thanos before Ceres had arrived on the scene.
And likewise, Berin discovers an unlikely ally as he is trying to find his son in the woman whom his daughter helped to escape the slaver.
The book once again covers a lot of ground, taking the reader deeper into the world and pulling them into the lives of the characters. Once again, it ends on a cliff-hanger, waiting for the next book to answer the questions of what happens next.
As I mentioned before, it is a much better story with the characters being allowed to grow, and more thought being put into the world-building and the outworking of the characters.
I will probably look to finish this series at some point as I have grown curious about the characters and their lives and predicaments. I would like to see how Morgan Rice resolves their stories.
The third book in the series of eight is “Knight, Heir, Prince” and deals with Thanos’s story more closely.