Even as a child, when I read The Lord of the Rings I struggled to understand how evil was synonymous with absolute destruction. Exactly what were the orcs going to munch on after Sauron won? Tell me about the nutritional value of cinders and ash. I kind of get it if the plan is to farm man flesh, though I doubt we taste like chicken. But what was the plan to fatten their livestock? Although the fantasy genre evolved beyond Tolkien many years ago, it often remains a space in which authors come to explore stereotypical good and evil, to which I can run away to watch the unambiguous triumph of good over evil. In the Magic of the Lost trilogy, which The Sovereign concludes, C. L. Clark bins my escapist aspirations without remorse, and demonstrates what courageous, adult fantasy can achieve.
In the first few pages of the first book, Clark throws me into a colonial tableau. The opening scene is an assassination attempt on the heir to the throne of the Balladairan Empire, as she visits the colonial territory of Qazāl. Clark puts me in the perspective of Touraine, a young imperial conscript. She is one of the hundreds, maybe thousands, of children kidnapped from conquered lands and trained to be soldiers for Balladaire. She is a capable young soldier, the first conscript to make the rank of lieutenant, and committed to her military career.
But the echoes of genocidal campaigns past and present are quickly brought into the center of the story. The descriptions of how the conscripts are taught to be “civilized” conjure images of the Native American boarding schools run by the US and Canada, and China’s current campaigns against the Uyghurs. The conscript schools are designed to break their victims’ bonds with their birth cultures. Of course, there are no serious plans to make space for them in the conquering culture. The familiar objective is to produce a disenfranchised pool of second-class citizens willing to subsist on the margins without protest.
The conscript corps also evoke the Nepalese Gurkha legions in the British Imperial Army and the many iterations of “colored” troops that fought in every American conflict from the Revolutionary War right on through to WW II. In other regards the presence of the empire in Qazāl feels more like the Spanish in South America—as long as the population remains docile enough for unlimited exploitation, the locals are allowed to go about their business and speak their language. Everyone knows that the subjugated people practice “the old ways” in secret.
Clark has set the table, then, for an anti-colonial treatise. They give me plenty to hate: violent repression, cultural persecution, exploitative economic systems, and entitled overlords. I even get hints of noble rebels fighting back. Good rebels, evil empire; I can already see George Lucas cueing up to buy up the rights. I even get hints that Touraine may be able to overcome her imperial brainwashing. Ah the sweet lure of personal liberation and political liberation all in a single text. Bring it on! I am happy to wallow in righteous indignation.
The first mark of authorial courage that I note is how Clark lets Touraine fully inhabit her warrior identity. She, and her fellow conscripts, have suffered abuse in the imperial system, but Clark does not reduce them to victims. They are warriors—good and proud ones. Touraine aspires to overcome the bias that surrounds her and move up the ranks because she is a capable fighter and an effective commander; her competence and ambition are the driving force of the first few chapters. The complications that arise from her returning to the land of her birth as leader in the conquering army are effective plot devices that dance around the core power of her character.
Clark introduces a couple of other interesting twists that keep her evil empire theme from becoming predictable. First, the haughty blonde princess, Luca, and the brawny, brown Touraine have a thing for each other. Second, the aspiring queen believes that she can help her people, and secure her claim to the throne, by reviving the magical practices that her ancestors banned a few generations back. She is thus prepared to remove the colonial yoke in exchange for the locals sharing the secrets of their healing magic. Her self-conception as an earnest reformer is convincing. The rebels’ refusal to cooperate gives room for more modern concerns about cultural appropriation and exploitation, and the effectiveness of their resistance reveals multiple levels of the princess’s naivete. My empathy with her sincere desire for change keeps me engaged with her character and pulls in my own messy nobility. It is the reader’s privilege to know how quickly Princess Luca charges towards disaster, and this reader’s burden to wonder what her naivete says about me: a white American male in 2026 trying to resist the oppression of contemporary fascism. Uncomfortable glimpses in the mirror are signs that I am reading a good story and good writing.
Touraine is no less ambitious than Luca and equally naive. When pushed, she discovers that her deepest loyalties are to her fellow conscripts. These are the only people who understand what it is like to build a culture out of the experience of being robbed of one. They share the bond of always being treated as outsiders and less-than both by the empire that stole them and the people from whom they were stolen. The young warriors with whom she serves are either traitors or pawns, but always expendable. She loves them fiercely. This bond with a fellow soldier, or more generally with people who have stood by us through trauma, also touches the kind of deeply human truth that defies easy stereotypes about right and wrong.
In book one, the naivete and conflicted motivations of the two principal protagonists ensure that a lot of people get hurt, and in some very ugly ways. The violence is neither noble nor predictable, but still, somehow, produces a liberated colony. Throughout it, that lure of Qazāl’s “uncivilized” magic lingers in the background. Here, Clark creates an interesting polarity: At first, I am inclined to treat this sub-plot as a lesson in how colonial practices oppress traditional belief systems; but then she reveals that surrendering one’s self to an ill-defined god is the only way to unlock the healing powers. Rationalism is now aligned with the forces of oppression and faith is the path to healing and absolution. As an atheist, I don’t usually find my belief systems stacked against other people’s freedom.
I stuck with the book partially because this reductionist formula of magic = faith = good was a background note in a world of complex, powerful (mostly) female warriors. Also, the narrative complexity hinted that the larger polarities might not resolve into convenient stereotypes. I was happy, then, to find that book two opens into a much more complicated world. As tends to happen in stories at this scale, the narrative splits to follow the paths of different protagonists. Clark takes advantage of these parallel paths to unravel any of the remaining shallow polarities that lingered.
Spiritually, Clark introduces us into darker dimensions of the lost magic. Secondary characters find themselves allied with cannibals and violent shape-shifters while they explore the wilder edges of their own magics. For a time, the main protagonists, Tourianne and Luca, continue their search for the wholly benign healing magic banished by the Balladairan empire. That is, Clark gives me that little Tolkienesque corner of pure good and evil in which to hide—until Touraine and Luca discover evidence of child sacrifice to the gods. Maybe Luca’s ancestors in fact took the moral high ground when they banned such magic.
Politically, the rebel alliance proves more fragile than imagined, and more dependent on the good will of their former colonizers than they would like. Liberation of a neighboring colony threatens to turn a former freedom fighter into a warlord. The subdued but independent rival to the Balladairan empire turns out to be just as bloody and ambitious as the Balladairans themselves. Meanwhile, the oppressive Balladairan empire just might be amenable to reform. Within the kingdom, Clark draws us into the clash between the enlightened crusade of Princess Luca and the Machiavellian rule of her uncle. Luca is outnumbered, but not hopelessly alone.
Here, I find myself in a world that makes sense to my adult sensibilities. Good people make uncomfortable trade-offs. Any expression of power has moral costs, and those costs escalate quickly as the power scales. Personal ambitions run up against morality, and the principal characters are forced to confront how their own demons drive them to betray people they love and values they cherish. In my head, all of the characters become richer and more relatable.
A particular highlight of Clark's craft in book two is their introduction of a rebel movement within the Balladairan empire. She introduces The Fingers through the character of a young girl angry at how Princess Luca has treated her mother. Clark captures, beautifully, the way that a child’s anger at parents or family can be projected onto political figures. The leader of the group turns out to be a callous braggart who thinks nothing about sacrificing his supporters in the name of the cause. As is the case with many of the opposition leaders I see around me, it is hard to see how this man would be a better alternative to current rulers, particularly when compared with the high-minded and principled Luca. The Fingers are a convincing portrayal of a resistance organization that fights against current injustices without any real plan for how to prevent new, and potentially worse, problems emerging from the wreckage of the institutions they want to dismantle. The injustice is clear. The solutions are not. In an especially brilliant twist, this young girl, Fili, is gifted with the Balladairan magic that eludes princess Luca.
Book two closes with Luca and Touraine married and Luca on the throne of the Balladairan empire. Her aspirations to enlightened rule have been compromised by both the violence required to win the throne and the nobility’s reluctance to step back from privilege or power. A dashing dandy reveals herself to have formidable bravery, and a former rebel has given herself over entirely to vengeance. Plague and invading armies hover on the horizon.
Book three is an irresistible page-turner. Instead of the abstract morality play about empire and resistance hinted at in book one, I found myself completely immersed in stories of people taking control of their lives, as best they can in the contexts of plague and political upheaval. While a lot of people die in book three, I had to look hard to find true victims. Even those who fall to the plague or inhabitants of villages sacked by marauding armies are not trivial plot devices exploited to demonstrate the cruelty of empire or the savagery of the uncivilized. Queen Luca squeezes concessions out of the nobility and her besieged empire struggles to protect its people with limited resources. The Fingers stage theatrical and largely pointless seizures of nobles’ property, but also organize effective treatment centers and mutual aid networks. The invading armies are a loose coalition united only by their desire to crush the dwindling power of the Balladairan empire, but they stay on task. This is now a world rich with protagonists, each tragic in their own way, and each driven by a complicated mix of motivations. They move through a world that is largely indifferent to their dreams.
By the middle of book three, I find that I do not trust the author to give me a happy ending. The grand army is marching toward the castle, and I find myself doing that thing where I look to see how many pages are left. It looks like I am coming up on the genre’s obligatory final battle, but there are still way too many pages for that. There has to be a wrinkle, but I can’t see what it might be. There can be no higher compliment to the craft of a storyteller than this: I, a jaded veteran of the genre, writhe in suspense.
There are a couple of particularly masterful plot lines that I would like to call out. They give away nothing of the ending, but say a great deal about Clark’s craft. First, Luca’s uncle is a power-hungry, imperialist operator who will stop at nothing to keep himself in power. He was also her greatest mentor and a father figure after her parents’ deaths. For most of book three he is a prisoner who taunts Luca. He is an external voice for her self-doubt, and a constant reminder of just how ruthless she has been in her own reign. For several hundred pages, she refuses to eliminate this malignant force. The stage is set for grand drama, but her uncle’s attempted coup is surprisingly anticlimactic and easily suppressed. She has already ordered him returned to his cell when she realizes:
All this grief she had wasted. All the chances she’d given him, denial. She hadn’t been able to fix it, only to delay this moment. When she was no longer here, she didn’t want him to claim what remained in the ashes.
“Let’s have done with this, Nicolas. Commander Perrot, shoot him.” … She met her uncle’s eyes across the length of the bridge. … Commander Perrot shot Duke Nicolas Ancier in the head. (p. 408)
Clark lets me peer through the obvious political melodrama to see the internal war in Luca’s head, which allows me to see the wars I have waged in my own head against cruel parental voices that demean. Fortunately, offing the voice generally improves my relationship with the person (living or dead) whose face I had stapled onto the demon.
I also appreciate the authorial restraint of this scene. It would have been tempting to indulge in a Hollywood-type struggle, in the pouring rain of course, in which he attacks her and she plunges a blade into his heart. But this would have cheapened the story. At the most basic level, it would have been completely out of place in the political structure of the empire. More importantly, the scene as written highlights how Luca needs to take initiative. This is not self defense; it is a long-over-due execution. The most common, and often tragic, mistake made when dispatching demons is to wait for the right moment. Luca’s action is dramatic enough without further embellishment.
The other tidbit I will offer from this exceedingly rich table is Touraine’s relationship with the empire. She was stolen as a child from the desert colonies and has now been reunited with her mother. She has learned some degree of her native tongue and is one the few people who can practice multiple forms of its magic. Despite these things, Clark gives us moments when Touraine longs for the green hills and icy winters of Balladaire. This was the world of her childhood when she was in the imperial training camps. She came to love parts of it. Clark brings this simmering subplot to a full boil as Touraine marches towards the final battle:
It was new, this wholeness, and maybe Touraine only felt it because she knew she would die today, but she felt a certainty: home was as much about claiming a thing, a place—a person—as it was about being claimed. Touraine could claim Balladaire, and there it was—hers. All its faults, all its beauty—hers, and no one could take it away from her. She was part of it; one of its darker parts, aye, but she was woven as deep into the fabric of this empire as it was in her. (p. 503)
No person is just the victim of the political or economic forces that shape their lives. It is remarkable to find a single fantasy trilogy that moves from the kind of abstract and easy dialectics of my childhood into such a rich world inhabited by people dearer to me than I ever would have imagined. Clark takes me beyond hordes of orcs racing through Sauron’s no-man’s-land into the crushingly complicated, global world that we all actually inhabit. Perhaps it is in better understanding the agency of others that we can best see how to resist the resurgent forces digging new trenches in our backyards.