The exciting sequel to the gunslinging, dragon-riding world of The Mountain Crown
Sephihalé ele Janan sits in a prison cell in the southern island of Mazemoor, dreaming of escape. After months in a provisional prison for fighting for the imperial Kattakans, Janan is sponsored by another refugee who was once a part of his scattered family. Yearning to build a life on his sister’s land with the dragons their people revere, the peace Janan seeks is threatened by a ruthless dragon baron who covets both Janan’s connection to the earth and the battle dragon to which he is covenanted.
The conflict may drive Janan to acts of violence he hoped to leave behind in the war, and bring more death to the land Janan now calls home.
THE DESERT TALON is a story of two groups of people who, despite a common ancestry, have diverged so far in their beliefs that there appears to be little mutual ground—and the conflict may well start to unravel the burgeoning hopes of a country, and a man, still recovering from the ravages of war.

My Review:

I picked this up because I enjoyed the first book in the Crowns of Ishia novella trilogy, The Mountain Crown. Which is not, at all, about the sort of crown that one wears on one’s head. In this case, ‘crown’ is the collective noun for a group of suon, who are what we would call dragons.

What the enemies of the land where the suon thrive call them as well. Because dragons are animals, but suon are people – for large and winged and deadly definitions of ‘people’. And the Ba’Suon, the people who live in harmony with the dragons, fully acknowledge that fact.

Their enemies, conquerors and exploiters do not. Because it doesn’t suit their narrative of events. And conquest. And exploitation.

In the first novella in this trilogy, Meka received diplomatic immunity to come to the heart of their enemy to ‘gather’, meaning bond with, one and only one suon. Of course, their enemies have other plans, which enmesh Meka with others of her people, Raka and Lilley and by extension Janan, all currently imprisoned or enslaved along with Janan’s suon Tourmaline. But Janan is imprisoned elsewhere and Raka seems destined for the ‘dark side’.

This second book takes place partly simultaneously and partly in the wake of the events at the end of The Mountain Crown. This is Janan’s half of the story, imprisoned in a neighboring country because he deserted. He does not know the fate of his partner and lover, Lilley, all he knows is that he left Lilley in grave danger.

That first story was more than a bit of a tease, in that it clearly started in the midst of the long-running feud/war/conquest between the Ba’Suon lands and their enemies. I left that first book wanting more and now I have it. And I still want more, because this middle story asks as many questions as it answers.

But I was absolutely glad to continue down this path with Janan and his suon Tourmaline, in spite of the danger, heartbreak and tragedy he faces along the way.

Escape Rating B: That first book was very much an ‘in medias res’ story in that it started in the middle, both of Janan’s and Lilley’s stories and in the middle of the long running conflict/conquest of their land by the enemies that surround them. The Desert Talon is even more so, as its still in the middle of that mess plus we’re now in the midst of Janan’s story as well.

But in the hours after I turned the last page on The Desert Talon, I realized that this book, in addition to being part of ITS series, was also in dialogue with my two previous books this very week, The River Has Roots and One Message Remains. Because all three stories are wrapped around the axle of war and conquest, especially around the greed and concupiscence that fuel those desires and disrupt the natural forces and powers of the world in terrible ways with horrifying long term consequences.

In The River Has Roots the overarching conflict wrapped itself around the endless debate between science and logic on the one hand, and nature and magic on the other, embodied, literally in Esther’s choice to marry the fae Rin instead of the greedy human villain Pollard. He dismissed magic as a force but it was magic, in the end, that brought him down.

The overall theme of One Message Remains is about the blind logic of conquest that begins with presuming that everyone is your lesser and they have nothing to teach you. That in the end the land has power of its own and it is greater than yours – at least for now.

In The Desert Talon the desire to capture and subject the dragons, the suon, out of greed for both money and power results in a loss of life and agency so frightening that even the conqueror’s own people are terrified. Some gifts really do come at just too high a price.

But in all of these cases, while the current conflict resolves on the side of conservation and preservation, the terrible handwriting is clearly on the wall. And that’s the saddest part of all three books.

Howsomever, Janan’s and Lilley’s adventures with their suons has one more chapter to be revealed in A Covenant of Ice, arriving just as ironically at the height of summer as this story set in the heat of the desert came out in the depths of winter.

Méka must capture a king dragon, or die trying.
War between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor has left no one unscathed. Méka’s nomadic people, the Ba’Suon, were driven from their homeland by the Kattakans. Those who remained were forced to live under the Kattakan yoke, to serve their greed for gold alongside the dragons with whom the Ba’Suon share an empathic connection.
A decade later and under a fragile truce, Méka returns home from her exile for an ancient, necessary rite: gathering a king dragon of the Crown Mountains to maintain balance in the wild country. But Méka’s act of compassion toward an imprisoned dragon and Lilley, a Kattakan veteran of the war, soon draws the ire of the imperialistic authorities. They order the unwelcome addition of an enigmatic Ba’Suon traitor named Raka to accompany Méka and Lilley to the mountains.
The journey is filled with dangers both within and without. As conflict threatens to reignite, the survival of the Ba’Suon people, their dragons, and the land itself will depend on the decisions – defiant or compliant – that Méka and her companions choose to make. But not even Méka, kin to the great dragons of the North, can anticipate the depth of the consequences to her world.

My Review:

This story feels like it began LONG before the book does. This story reads like it has been years in the making, and that the slice of it that we are getting is a bit in the middle in a world that has been going to hell in a handcart for quite some time, and has now reached a level of FUBAR that STILL isn’t anywhere near as bad as things are likely to get before the end.

And that’s a fascinating way to write a story, because worlds generally DO exist before a particular story in them gets told, and go on existing after the last page of a particular story in them gets turned.

Méka has returned to the land where she was born. A land that once belonged to her people, but no longer does. Even worse, a land that has been conquered by a rapacious empire that has chosen to act as if her people aren’t people at all – merely slaves for their use.

Including the dragons that her people, and only her people, have the capacity, not to control, but to bond with. A bond that the greedy, rapacious Kattakans exploit in order to use both Méka’s people, the Ba’Suon, and the dragons, the Suon, to strip mine the land for gold.

The Kattakans have turned a beautiful place into a steaming, belching wasteland on a par with Mordor. (Auditions for the part of this world’s Sauron are possibly ongoing – I jest but not nearly enough.)

Méka has come to this once-home for a right of both passage and preservation. It is her time to bond with one of the Suons that still live free in the mountain crowns far to the north. Both to refresh the dragons in her adopted homeland and to prevent a single king dragon from taking over too many herds and reducing the genetic diversity in the crowns.

Of course, the powers that be to rape and pillage interfere with her quest – even though it has been sanctioned by her adopted country and the court of the, shall we say, greedy bloodsuckers.

She is duty bound on a quest to bond a dragon. She is being coerced to retrieve a dragon for a criminal’s nefarious purposes. But control of any dragon is illusory at best – and a dangerous illusion at that. As the greedy bloodsuckers are about to discover in fire and blood.

Escape Rating B: The Mountain Crown is an ‘in medias res’ story. In other words, it feels like it starts in the middle of things. It’s a method of storytelling that CAN get the reader caught up in the action from the very first page. Howsomever, it can also give the reader the feeling that they’re missing something, or a whole lot of somethings, and not feel like they have what they need to get stuck into the story.

The Mountain Crown read like it straddled that fence, where the problem with straddling a fence is that one gets splinters in the ass. I had a difficulty time, at first, getting into the story because I didn’t feel like I had enough to figure out how the situation reached this pass in the first place. It does not help at all that the primary characters of this story, Méka and her companions Lilley and Raka, are all parsimonious with their words – even when they are speaking to one another.

There’s a LOT that doesn’t get said – even when something is being said at all.

All of which led to my brain attempting to spackle over the bits that were missing with analogies to other stories and other places. The ramshackle mining monstrosity where Méka first arrives sounds a lot like the gold rush encampments of the Klondike, including the weather conditions. The nomadic nature of Méka’s people read like an amalgam of many nomadic cultures around this globe – even if this story isn’t set on any version of our world.

In the end, what brought the story together was the way that it reflected on colonialism and empire, shone a light on cultures whose fundamental principles are greed and acquisition and then explored the possibilities of another way – a way of stewardship and community.

And took the problem of might making right to a whole different level by adding dragons into the mix in a way that both put a temporary check on the ‘evil empire’ AND sowed the seeds for further contention between peoples who were once one.

I have to say that by the end, I really did enjoy The Mountain Crown and that I’m looking forward to the next book in the series, The Desert Talon, coming in February, as well as the third book, A Covenant of Ice, arriving in June. (There’s an irony that the desert book is coming in the depths of winter and the ice book is coming as summer heats up.)

I’m hoping that the rest of this novella trilogy will not just continue this fantastic story but also fill in the blanks and answer my many, many questions about this particular world came to this particular pass – because it has to be a doozy. I can’t wait to find out ALL the answers