From the breakout SFF superstar author of Murderbot comes the remarkable sequel to the USA Today and Sunday Times bestselling novel, Witch King. A fantasy of epic scope, Queen Demon is a story of power and friendship, of trust and betrayal, and of the families we choose.
Dahin believes he has clues to the location of the Hierarchs' Well, and the Witch King Kai, along with his companions Ziede and Tahren, knowing there's something he isn't telling them, travel with him to the rebuilt university of Ancartre, which may be dangerously close to finding the Well itself.
Can Kai stop the rise of a new Hierarch?
And can he trust his companions to do what’s right?
Follow Kai to the end of the world in this thrilling sequel to the USA Today-bestselling Witch King.

My Review:

The first book in this Rising World series, Witch King, was a ‘how it started/how it’s going’ kind of story. It takes place in two timelines, sixty years apart. Because the character at the heart of the story, the character whose perspective we follow, is immortal – and so are the members of his found family – the story centers around the same people in both timelines.

From a certain perspective, it’s all Kai’s fault. Kai is the ‘witch king’ of the first book’s title, but the term ‘witch’ doesn’t mean the same thing in Kai’s world as it does in ours. Kai is also a ‘demon’ and that doesn’t mean what we think it does, either. (That the author invented different hierarchies and gave different meanings to terms we only ‘think’ are familiar is occasionally a bit trippy for multiple meanings of THAT word as well.)

Back to those two timelines. The earlier timeline, Kai’s past, is a story of rebellion. A vast, powerful, all-consuming empire built on pain and death magic had taken over most of Kai’s known world by feeding the deaths of whole, entire cities into their death-magic power wells.

Kai, a witch AND a demon, didn’t merely break himself out of one of the Hierarchs’ ‘pain, torture and death’ prisons, he broke the whole prison. Among the prisoners he freed were the noble hostages held captive for the good behavior of their countries. Those nobles – at least some of them – had enough vision or pragmatism to realize that if they banded together along with Kai and his allies, they had a chance to break the back of the Hierarchs’ regime.

The story in Kai’s past, the one that he is remembering as parts of that history are repeating themselves right before his rueful, regretful eyes, is the story of that ragtag rebellion as it picks up allies and enemies – sometimes the same people – and desperately tries to get half a step ahead of the Hierarchs so they can cut them off from their wells of power before those wells are used to wipe the rebellion out en masse. It’s a desperate race across an entire continent, filled with enemies within and doubts on all sides.

In Kai’s present, he’s chasing across the same landscape, pulling the pieces together after years of oblivion caused by an assassination attempt that only semi-failed. It’s difficult to kill an immortal like Kai, but it’s possible to get them out of your way for a long while if you plan very meticulously. His would-be assassin didn’t count on the power hunger and greed of his employed agents.

Now Kai is free, he’s been reunited with his found family, he’s found more people to add to that family. He’s haunted by his past, both in that many of his enemies are still as alive as he is – and that the power he once fought is still out there for the taking – if only he can figure out where to find it – and how to eliminate it once and for all.

That he has the kind of friends that mean one doesn’t always need enemies to get in one’s way makes this second book in the series another fast-pace race to an equally uncertain finish. A finish that feels only partially accomplished in both the past and the present. It’s the perfect ending for a middle book, as things are darkest in both timelines, and Kai is avoiding letting himself remember the rest of the earlier story because he knows that the situation is about to turn completely black.

And so do we. But in a way that leaves the reader salivating for more, because we also know that Kai and most of his companions survived. We just don’t know how. Yet.

Escape Rating A-: I occasionally found myself wishing for a glossary as well as a list of dramatis personae AND more of a summary of the action from the first book than was included in the eARC. (Witch King was published in May 2023, and that’s a lot of books under the reading bridge ago.) This is a hint to start with Witch King. Queen Demon is an absolutely compelling read – more so than the first book as we know more about what’s going on – but the story does NOT start here at all. It’s also more heartbreaking, as we know there’s a tragedy coming and we can see the outline of it and a bit of the shape, while the consequences of that tragedy are falling on Kai and his allies thick and fast – and the identity of at least some of his enemies is clearly a part of the collateral damage from it.

And yet, Kai is doing his damndest to remember around the terrible thing that he’s trying not to remember, which is frustrating for the reader but in a way that literally drags the reader along and compels them to keep going, because for a demon, the whole avoidance thing is just so terribly human. And just that much more heartbreaking because of it.

The politics of the various countries are all wildly different from the history we know, AND they are all dealing with their world having been decimated and their countries almost completely destroyed. A huge part of the political shenanigans in the creation of the ‘Rising World” involves figuring out where to go from here because the old world is GONE and there’s no getting it back – no matter how many people who think they should be powerful because their families USED TO BE back in the ‘olden days’ wish they could.

But they can’t rebuild until they deal with all the messes left behind – and they’re definitely not there yet. Which is what has made this series so fascinating so far. I’m looking forward to seeing what happened next – and what happens next – in each of Kai’s timeliness the next time the author takes a break from Murderbot. Not that I’m not looking forward to the next book in THAT series, the ominously titled Platform Decay, coming in May, because I absolutely, definitely AM!