Which reader among us hasn’t fantasised about owning a little bookshop of their own, with perhaps a built-in cafe to boot? Even the vision it conjures up in our mind’s eye oozes all the cozy comfort we could wish to bottle for our forever personal use. But anyone who has actually worked in or owned their own place will tell you that, while cozy moments aren’t exactly thin on the ground, the stress factor is far more than the daydream will allow us to believe.
However, this reality, as valid as it is, is not usually something that is explored in a novel that claims to be cozy, at least not with any real stakes. And yet that’s exactly the direction in which Travis Baldree takes Brigands & Breadknives, technically the third book in the Legends & Lattes universe, but the second in terms of chronology, if Bookshops & Bonedust (2023) is considered as “ground zero.”
“It seems like relaxing work,” famed ancient immortal Elven warrior Astryx says, making a seemingly casual observation to her semi-accidental drunken stowaway, Fern. “Easy. Calming. Not the sort of thing to drive anyone to drink.” In response, an indignant Fern—the foul-mouthed, kind-hearted rattkin bookseller we met in Bookshops & Bonedust—sputters:
”I have spent my life convincing people to buy blocks of paper with marks on them for more money than they want to part with. I fill a room with them and pray to the Eight that I filled it with the right ones, and that I can get them into the right hands, and I never get enough of that right. It’s like tossing fistfuls of fucking silver up a hill and hoping enough of it rolls back down that I have more silver to throw. I bet on odds that any self-respecting dice player would run screaming from, and half the time, I lie awake wondering whether I’ll be able to keep at it for another week, or a month, or a year.
[…] “I only do it, because I’m stupid enough to think it’s important.”
“So it’s important. Then why did you run from it?”
“I … no, I mean I … loved … it.”
This, in a nutshell, is the existential struggle at the core of this novel. It puts centre stage not Viv, the orc mercenary and star of Legends & Lattes (2022), but Fern herself. When we meet her again, she is, along with her pet gryphet Potroast and their carriage driver, being rescued from a pescadine by Astryx One-Ear, the legendary Blademistress and Oathmaiden. The immortal elf makes easy work of the creature, retrieves the carriage’s horses, and melts away before Fern can so much as thank her. The rattkin, we find out, is en route to a new life in the city of Thune, where her old friend Viv has been living a happy, domestic existence running her own coffee shop since hanging up her sword. The property next to Legends & Lattes awaits. (“A new start. A new bookshop. The embers of an old friendship to fan. Perhaps even something she might one day call family.”)
Amidst the excitement and nerves this naturally engenders, a careful reader will sense immediate doubts, a certain unease, flowing underneath. Fern seems aware of this, to an extent—she is desperate to find comforting, logical explanations (which she does), from nerves to hunger to the fatigue of a long journey and the butterflies of a new start; but whether they reassure her longer than a few breaths is another matter. Initially engrossed in getting the space in shape for the opening, and then in getting the various systems of a working store set up, it is much easier for her to keep kicking these increasingly gnawing worries into the next day.
But then, when everything settles into an easy rhythm—the bookshop is flourishing and she can tell that it belongs in the building, the neighbourhood, the city—she can no longer ignore the “hollowed-out feeling of dissatisfaction that had steadily eroded her center for the past few years.” Nothing seems to matter.
“I wasn’t supposed to feel this way,” she confides in the steady hob carpenter Cal, whom the readers of this series already know and love. “Who says?” he challenges. He listens to her detail the emptiness she feels, the nagging feeling that somehow, somewhere, she took a wrong turn, without knowing what it was or when—and, more importantly, having no clue about the solution—and tells her to open up to Viv. After all, Viv—who has been through a similar dilemma in her previous warrior life—would understand better than anyone how it feels to not belong in an old life, and what it means to figure out what a new one could look like. But Fern had thought that a change of scene, an old friend, and new acquaintances would be akin to “a fresh breeze in a stale room”: “I leaned on the kindness of others to get here, it didn’t fix what I wanted fixed, and now I’m ungrateful to boot.” How can she face her old friend while wrestling this grief and guilt, how can she admit she wants something more, something different, but has no idea what that could be?
A drunk Fern, armed with her cloak and a battered leather satchel filled with her parchment, quills, and current reads that used to belong to an old friend (just in case), sets out, with a book as an apology, to cross the few yards between her bookshop and Viv’s coffeeshop before deciding that a walk first might clear her head. Said walk leads her to a cart parked under a streetlamp, and to Astryx One-Ear tying up the tarpaulin before disappearing into another alley. Fern wonders whether bumping into a legend twice is coincidence, or “maybe a sign.” At this point, she has her bearings and could easily trace her footsteps back to Viv’s. But something has her moving to hide under the tarpaulin—and then, even as she debates the mad decision and decides whether to get out, Astryx comes back, and Fern’s stuck waiting. Until she falls asleep, and the rest of the decision is made for her.
This passivity, it seems to me, is a deliberate move by Baldree: Fern, at this point, is scared to make any decision, even though she knows she must, for fear that it will be the “wrong” one—and also for fear that she doesn’t actually know what she wants. Her choice here becomes another almost-unconscious means of letting someone else make a decision for her, so that she won’t be responsible. In this context, letting her guard down and falling asleep almost becomes a challenge to the universe.
It turns out that Astryx is travelling with a bounty in tow (an enigmatic red-haired chaos goblin named Zyll) who has to be delivered to the city of Amberlin halfway across the Territory. Fern understands a handful of goblin swearwords, and manages to convince Astryx that she’d be useful as a translator—at least until they reach the next big city, where Fern can buy passage back to Thune. But a series of incidents later, and our intrepid bookseller is accompanying the duo (with their two sentient weapons, known as Elder Blades, and the best horse ever) to their final destination.
Now, I understand the argument levelled at Legends & Lattes: famously, about “high fantasy and low stakes,” about its lack of forward narrative momentum (though it was a story I still thoroughly enjoyed, I might add). But I’d also argue that its prequel, Bookshops & Bonedust, actually both set the stage and paved the way for Brigands & Breadknives. It existed between the cozy (what’s more comforting than books and bookshops and the restorative and transformative magic of reading?), the adventurous (a dangerous necromancer with powers of osseoscription), and the existential (a lack of mobility through injury, suddenly thrust upon Viv in her fighting prime and necessitating compulsory rest). The new novel takes this even further by not only eschewing the comforting elements, but also raising the question of what happens when those once cherished elements—that comfortable, cozy life—start to feel stifling. What happens when you can recognise the worthiness of your old purpose and even believe in its importance, but it’s not enough anymore? Where does that leave you, who even are you without this thing you’ve done for a quarter of a century?
In the prequel, by helping Viv discover parts of herself she never knew existed, and want things she never knew she wanted, Fern rediscovered her life’s purpose, why she did what she does, rekindled a dream inherited from her long-gone father. But what if that was not a permanent fix, just a small piece of something bigger?
“It’s like I can see what I loved—still love?—about it, but it’s behind thick windowpane. I can’t feel it or smell it or taste it, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be on the other side of that glass again.”
Fern was a wonderful supporting character in Bookshops & Bonedust; here she makes an equally sympathetic protagonist. Baldree supplies her with her own supporting troops, each a capable, well-fleshed out character on their own, and—in this out-and-out adventure story with lots of swordfights, chases (on account of Zyll’s considerable bounty), and yes, blood—we get to traverse much more of the diverse Territory with them than in the other books, in which we were only in Thune and Murk, respectively. Fern’s dynamic with Astryx is different from hers and Viv’s, but equally compelling, and watching the two rub off on each other for the better—despite the often frustrating and frictional nature of their at-odds conversations—was all kinds of lovely.
There was even a surprising, but welcome, narrative side thread involving Astryx—about heroes and legends, responsibilities and covenants, and how stories can be shaped and reshaped. Fern, her own life still in shambles, helps the ancient warrior come to the realisation that, after a thousand years of doing the same thing, she is allowed to deviate from what she has always done, without anything falling apart. Later, Fern wonders—a little guiltily but not for long—whether she’s responsible for turning Astryx into less of a legend but more of herself.
The book manages the balance between Fern’s external and internal battles well, and as a reader we get to live the journey with her, not knowing until she does what the ending is going to be. At one point early on, Fern notices a “painful tearing in the very center of herself, like a sapling being slowly peeled apart down the middle [...] an aching growing tension that would either snap back together and resolve itself, or split forever into something unrecognisable.” She carries this split in her through the course of their journey, trying to shine light on what it might be telling her, and getting no closer to an answer even as Amberlin approaches: “I feel a dreadful anticipation, like unbelievable possibilities lie ahead, if only I say the precise magic word required [...] but I don’t trust myself to recognise it.”
The answer when it arrives isn’t perfect or permanent, nor is it fully voiced, but it makes sense for Fern, just as it must for many others.
“Does anyone [even] want a ‘cozy’ story about the grief of disappointing your friends, and the agony of saying ‘no’?” the author asks in his acknowledgements. He describes how much longer this book took to wring out of him than anticipated. “Would readers be okay with Viv taking a backseat to Fern for the story I wanted to tell?” Baldree explains that, while he didn’t have the answers to his anxious doubts, he also didn’t want to write the same story over and over. He didn’t want to pretend that fantasy small-business ownership is the answer to all of life’s woes. The solutions for every challenge are not the same for everyone, nor are they neatly resolved (not to mention, they don’t always stay resolved), and he wanted to reflect that.
Brigands & Breadknives is a brave book to write, a cozy fantasy novel that acknowledges the hard, the messy, the jagged, and the wrenching bittersweet, while simultaneously advocating for hope and belief in an essential goodness. It’s a book that’s all the stronger, more beautiful, and more emotionally resonant for its messiness and vulnerability, and nobody embodies this complexity better than Fern.
“Always remember, although the unimaginative see life as a thread stretched from one point to another, birth to death, a life truly lived is a glorious tangle. One is never lost. And if one is lucky, one is never found, either.”