Marla must navigate a political landscape filled with secrets, treachery, sorcery, adultery, kidnappings, and assassinations. Together they will attempt to save Marla from this disaster, but the plan they come up with will have terrible consequences for almost everyone involved. Elezaar has his own reasons for keeping Marla happy. She has another strong ally in a clever dwarf named Elezaar who she has recently purchased from the slave market.

Fortunately for Marla, there are several people in Hythria who don’t want her marrying the Fardohnyan king either, including many of the nobility and the head of the Sorcerer’s Collective. When Lernen decides to marry her off to the king of the neighboring barbaric country of Fardohnya, Marla is devastated, especially since she thinks she’s in love with the younger son of a Hythrin warlord. She is more interested in the romantic idea of marrying a handsome warlord than in how her status as mother to the next High Prince gives her (and her husband) political power in Hythria. At the beginning of the story Marla is immensely silly. Since Lernen doesn’t seem to be interested in begetting a son, his heir will likely be any future son of his sister Marla Wolfblade, a beautiful teenage girl who Lernen can basically sell off to the highest bidding potential husband. Some are content to wait him out, some want to kill him, and some want to take his place. All of the nobility agree that Lernen should not be running the country, but they disagree about how they should take care of the problem. Lernen, the current High Prince (a Wolfblade) cares nothing for his country and is not respected by his people because he spends his time in the pursuit of unusually decadent pleasures.

This story takes place in Hythria, one of the kingdoms in Fallon’s world. These are fat epic fantasies with lots of characters that are focused mostly on political drama but also contain plenty of magic and romance. Wolfblade is the first book in Jennifer Fallon’s WOLFBLADE trilogy which is a prequel to her DEMON CHILD trilogy which I read several years ago.

Wolfblade jennifer fallon