“Outside the city, a somehow boundless quality to the very air struck him, echoed in the rising scent of grass and flowers, the vastness of the sky too. How very above it seemed now, that crucial sense of space. How stunning. The world was a stretching place after all.”

I really enjoyed Knee-Deep in Cinders by Ashley Capes, which is a strange thing to say about a novel whose main theme is genocide. But Cinders played its hand of epic fantasy tropes expertly. Fast-paced and entertaining, it nevertheless had a lot to say about war crimes, revenge and reparation, and the banality of evil.

Vilas, a warrior nicknamed “the Beast of Khiya” for his terrifying magical abilities, is the last of a long-lived people called Maelohas. For the past 50 years, he’s been imprisoned by his enemies, his magic negated by a collar he must wear constantly. Then one day the monotony of incarceration is broken when he’s offered a deal by the queen: help her solve the mystery of the giants who have been attacking her people and he’ll earn his freedom. Of course, there’s a catch: the wily Queen knows he’s vowed to destroy her city in repayment for the genocide of his people, which was carried out by her grandfather, and Vilas takes the job knowing that there will be more to it than meets the eye. The Queen puts an idealistic young magic-user in charge of Vilas and assigns a magical woman warrior (a Steel Maiden) to be the muscle of the group, then sends this motley crew out on their mission.

It is, admittedly, a somewhat generic set-up—the mismatched team given an impossible task. But Cinders is saved by its worldbuilding, which is deep and original, and by Vilas himself, who is snarky, determined, defensive, conflicted, and at his core—fundamentally and unyieldingly moral. The story is narrated in a tight and well-done third person, so we are right there with Vilas as he experiences the world and its changes fifty years after being locked away. To a great extent, this means acknowledging his grief; he entered prison with the war still fresh and raging, but when he is finally allowed to leave his cage, the war that forms his present is ancient history for many of Onath’s citizens, who were born in the years after it ended.

I thought Capes did a great job of feeding us the worldbuilding we needed as we needed it. This cascading drip-feed of details built suspense and horror until finally, the reason for the genocide of his people is revealed. And I have to say, the reason is pretty horrific, but I also felt like it was horrifically credible. This is not an epic fantasy with vague “save the world from the dark lord” stakes. Instead, Capes has built a world where it feels like, evil is like this because people are like this.

That’s a pretty heavy theme for what is basically a sword and sorcery adventure story. But I think the story does what really good SFF does: it’s not an escape so much as it feels like a safe place to grapple with these issues. In fact, I felt that it dealt with a surprising breadth of humanity for such a short work. While it remained laser-focused on Vilas and his promise of revenge, it also managed to touch on much of the complexity that affected that promise and ultimately began to work on Vilas himself.

That said, I did feel like there were a few missed opportunities along the way that could have made a strong book even stronger. I felt like there were a couple of events in the last 25% of the book that deserved to be much tenser, including the climax, which wrapped up a little neatly for me. And I felt like more could have been squeezed out of Vilas’s relationships, particularly with the idealistic and innocent Radiant, Tano, but also with some of the side characters, who occasionally came off feeling a little one-note.

But mostly, I really liked this one. It was a fast read I couldn’t wait to get back to when I was forced to put it down. If you’re looking for short, character-driven epic fantasy, definitely give this one a try!

What remained in his hand had obviously been shielded from much of the ravages of time by both rubble and white webs in the sandy earth, but for whatever reason the pile had shifted, exposing the garment – a woman’s scarf. The silver thread would have once made a pattern of a flute. A musician lay buried somewhere within, her bones only.
. . ..
Vilas lifted the cloth a little closer. “Do you know what I was before the invasion?”
Tano frowned. “No.”
. . ..
“I was a poet,” he said with a flat chuckle, replacing the scarf. “Something beautiful yet utterly useless.

Having previously judged Ashley Capes’s The Amber Isle for SFINCS, I knew going in to Knee-Deep in Cinders that I could expect polished prose and (most likely) an action-packed story. Knee-Deep doesn’t disappoint on either front, while also throwing in a dash of mystery and some meaty character work. A tightly-focused secondary world fantasy, Knee-Deep isn’t epic in the clash-of-empires sense, but it is set in an epic world. Right away, I felt that I was in safe hands, easily able to trust the author and eager to learn more about the story, its world, and its characters.

Knee-Deep‘s protagonist, Vilas, is the last remaining survivor of a powerful magical species, and has been imprisoned by his people’s conquerors for many years. His acerbic wit is matched only by his bitter hatred for his people’s oppressors–the Onathians. Yet when the Onathian queen, Ima, offers Vilas a chance at freedom in return for investigating a series of brutal murders committed by a giant-like species that was believed extinct, he takes her up on the offer (albeit with some caveats of his own).

One of the things that most impressed me about Knee-Deep is how it handles Vilas as a character. Much like The Amber Isle, there’s a pulpy quality to certain aspects of the story (a cheesy, fun raciness to Vilas and the queen’s interactions, for example), yet beyond the camp elements of certain parts of the story, Vilas and his struggle come off as fundamentally true and fundamentally human. Passages like the one quoted above showcase some of the tension this creates within Vilas. He’s a man committed to a nearly theatrical jocularity–an ease of temper that disguises something much darker and more painful–and beneath his surface resides a profound pain. A less skilled writer might find switching between these two tones–the goofy and the elegiac–their undoing, yet Capes manages it with seeming ease. The action and adventure elements of the story sweep you along, even as you’re terribly aware of the thirst for vengeance brewing beneath Vilas’s surface. Moments like that above drive home that what fuels his vengeful quest is a raw woundedness. All of it adds up to a complex protagonist who remains sympathetic even as his choices prove self-destructive.

The first half of the book did work much better for me than the second, although the second has its share of powerful moments. My main issue as the story progresses is that the solutions to the various mysteries rely a lot on backstory the audience doesn’t fully have, leading to some uncharacteristic as-you-know-Bobbing between Vilas and the baddies. Nonetheless, Vilas’s central motivation is powerful enough on its own to provide a compelling story, and I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the mystery of the giants. The central motivation of the MC is emotionally compelling enough on its own to serve as the heart of the story and the force propelling the narrative, but much of the mystery’s resolution makes me wonder whether Capes maybe misunderstood a little which aspects of the story are its strongest. Still, Knee-Deep is well worth the read and I recommend it, particularly to fans of The Witcher 3, as it has both a similar tone and a comparable appreciation of its monster characters.