I yielded to temptation and skipped way ahead in my TBR lineup, to a book that’s not coming out until December. Unfortunately for my self-discipline, my impatience was amply rewarded, because Call Me Traitor by Everina Maxwell is amazingly good! I had seen it described as a romantasy, so I was expecting something similar to Maxwell’s previous science-fiction romances, Winter’s Orbit and Ocean’s Echo, where it was easy to ignore the somewhat handwavy worldbuilding because the lovely longing feelings took center stage. In Call Me Traitor, however, the worldbuilding starts with intriguing little hints, builds up as the action continues, and then starts getting a lot deeper and broader with flashbacks to an interrogation, until some truly horrifying foundational facts are revealed to the characters and the readers. There is romance, of course, and it is integral, but it doesn’t really manifest as a plot element until well along in the book. There is also horror, comfort, academia, exciting action scenes, some lyrical descriptive language, divided loyalties and identity conflicts, callousness and kindness, scary antagonists that may not be so villainous after all, and supposed allies that have terrible secrets. This is as good and deep as any great fantasy novel that I’ve read lately; it does a LOT, but it all comes together amazingly satisfyingly in the end.
En, the first protagonist (third person, past tense) is a war-tank, a magical construct under the command of magicians with enough intelligence to carry out orders and cast spells on a battlefield. Every so often, a high mage erases her memories and re-aligns her so she’ll keep functioning properly. In a way, she reminds me of a SecBot from Martha Wells’ Murderbot universe, whose governor module hasn’t been hacked yet, except that En is much more deadly. However, a tool is only as good as its wielder, and En has been sent on a mission under the command of two mages who often give her conflicting and/or incompetent orders. Sometimes En has to figure out what to do, which gives her a little wiggle room, which gradually throws her perfect loyalty out of alignment.
Anyway, the mission is to find and retrieve some exiled traitors who are apparently becoming dangerous again, or potentially useful, or something. En’s not to question why. When En and her commanders make it to a partly ruined fort, they find a soldier there, Tamol, the only survivor of a previous, unsuccessful mission. En hasn’t been ordered to stop Tamol from deserting (again?), so she doesn’t, and when they meet up again later, Tamol helps En survive.
In the third chapter, the viewpoint switches to Tiriani, a prisoner being interrogated under a magical truth drug. She’s explaining how she and some other mage-college students got involved in “study group” that’s cover for something else. Here’s where the reader starts to learn a lot more about how the world, or at least this empire, works, telescoping out from En’s tight focus. After every few chapters of the main plot, the story returns to the interrogation transcript, and the unfolding of events in Tiriani’s life. Eventually, Maxwell reveals how all this is relevant to En’s part of the plot, and En and Tamol and some other characters they’ve encountered realize what’s been going on, and it’s breathtakingly appalling!
Meanwhile, there are even bigger problems arising in the world than the characters or the Empire realize. Every time a spell is cast, the mage has to work to stop it from creating a side effect/byproduct of “gauze” that is kind of like snow, or dust, that sedates and eventually kills anyone who touches it. Gauze has been getting worse, lately, and it turns out there’s a reason for that, which also plays a major part in the resolution.
Aside from the plot, one of the things I liked best was how complex the characters were (although that complexity is partly revealed through plot). En and Tamol and Tiriani all have a lot of conflicting desires and make some terrible choices sometimes, but there are also some well-sketched side characters who have interesting reasons for what they do.
One unexpectedly interesting person is one of the mages who has often handled En’s re-alignments, who would be En’s favorite commander if she were allowed to have favorites, who is exasperated by En’s mis-handling by the junior mages, and yet who can be ruthless in the pursuit of her duty. Is she evil or just single-minded? How does one tell the difference?
Back to the romance aspect: The publisher’s description mentions that “it takes everything En has not to start falling for [Tamol].” Yes, En has feelings, though she’s trained to suppress them. Tamol has feelings too, which start as terror for En, then sympathy for En, then … well, it continues to be very complicated! But this isn’t the only relationship in the book. The students have pairings and a throuple, and angry breakups, and loyalties and familial bonds, and other complexities. I also really enjoy how all these complex dynamics affect the characters’ decision-making.
This is an incredibly good book. I want to reread it from the beginning, with the knowledge that I gained by the end, but I already stayed up very late reading it once, and disrupted my review schedule for it, so the reread will have to wait. But I highly recommend it for fantasy lovers!
Call Me Traitor, by Everina Maxwell, is scheduled for publication on Dec. 1. (480 pages)
Content Warnings: Body horror, pain punishment and other magical bindings, betrayals, battlefield killings.
Comps: Beside the Murderbot comparison that I make above, there are also some elements that remind me a bit of Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice.
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC from the publisher via NetGalley for review.
