The Coward
The Quest for Heroes series, Book 1
Stephen Aryan
Angry Robot
Fiction, Fantasy
***+ (Okay/Good)
DESCRIPTION: Ten years ago, eleven heroes and one determined, untested boy rode forth into the northern wastes to save the Five Kingdoms from the dreaded Ice Lich and the eternal winter she sought to spread across the world... but only one rode back, the boy Kell Kressia. The scars on his body slowly healed, but the ones on his mind linger and fester to this day, leaving him a broken and lonely man. Worse, there is much about his journey he was ordered never to speak of, in order to preserve the reputation and legend of the fallen heroes: their posthumous ability to inspire the masses mattered more than the cold, often ugly truths about them that Kell discovered in his travels. He settled in at last to a quiet life farming his late mother's land, content to be mostly ignored by his neighbors. At least he'll never have to live through anything that terrible again.
Then the royal message arrives... and the soldiers, after he burns the letters.
The seasons are turning unnaturally cold again. It may be nothing, but it may be that something has picked up the fallen Ice Lich's mantle in the far north. As sole survivor of the last quest, Kell is "requested" to investigate. But Kell has other plans: once he's out of sight of the capital city, he's going to cut and run for a port city and a distant land where nobody's heard the bardic tales of the eleven fallen heroes. Surviving the north once was luck - good or bad, depending on how one looks at it. A second trip is sure to be his doom, and surely he's sacrificed enough. Let someone else play the hero this time.
Fate, however, has other plans. It seems that the coward Kell isn't done being a hero... and no matter how much he's lost, he can always lose more...
REVIEW: On the surface, this is a decent tale of questing and adventure and the truth about heroism, how behind every story of a brave warrior is often a man or woman haunted by regrets and post-traumatic stress and secrets that they dare not reveal, and nobody would understand even if they did. It also delves into the propaganda angle of heroism, how political squabbles factor into whether a hero is to be elevated (and in what way) or defiled... or even allowed to survive. As one kingdom stands behind Kell, a neighbor sees the entire quest as a means to garner popular support. Meanwhile, the aging head of the dominant church of the Shepherd dreams of forging a unified theocracy via torture and blood (in the name of her loving and peaceful deity), one that rejects any notion of magic or the supernatural or heroes whose mere existence lends legitimacy to either blasphemy, while a princess plots to become something far more shrewd and powerful than the toothless political pawn and brood mare of heirs she's expected to be. These subplots initially add more breadth and depth to the world, but soon start feeling like a distraction (and a repetitious one at that) as they are clearly intended to resolve in future volumes and therefore feel annoyingly incomplete.
Meanwhile, on the quest, the journey reawakens some of Kell's darkest demons. When a teenager just as deluded and stubborn as he himself was a mere ten years ago turns up, Kell despairs of seeing the cycle of his life repeated, but cannot shake his new shadow. He picks up a handful of other adventurers in his journey, each of whom have their own reasons for joining him. Sometimes the battles feel a bit drawn out, wallowing in the gore, but overall the quest arc is the strongest in the book.
It lost its half-star for some elements of exaggeration among the characters (especially the warped religion of hate preached by the head of the Shepherd church, which grew repetitious in its horror), a few moments of sheer implausibility, the sense of incompleteness among subplots mentioned already, and some elements of the climax that sort of derailed the whole plot into something it didn't need to be (but which would constitute spoilers to discuss in detail). Still, it does a decent job exploring the downsides of heroism.
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