Daniel M. Ford’s The Warden freshens up some of the tropes and conceits of epic fantasy with the story of the titular character finding that service to the crown can be far more dangerous and less comfortable than she expected.
Aelis De Lenti, daughter of a Noble House and talented in magic, had a Plan. A good Plan. Go to the magical academy known as the Lyceum. Graduate with honors. Get posted to a cushy job with said degree. Become a success and rise to fame and power and stature more than she could just as a Count’s daughter.
Said plan, however, did not go to plan. Aelis did graduate with a trio of magical excellences (which is rare to be sure). However, her first posting as a Warden is in the backwater village of Lone Pine on the edge of the frontier of the wild where the ruins of the old Empire and lots of orc tribes are? Getting a decent bottle of wine is going to be hard up here. It’s worse, though. The old wizard’s tower she is to stay in is fairly ruined. There’s a goat that keeps trying to get in. Something odd is happening out in the wilderness.
Oh and did I mention that no one is going to trust Aelis because her highest and primary magical excellence is in *necromancy*? (A misunderstood discipline, to be absolutely clear.)
This is the story of The Warden, the first novel in the series of the same name by Daniel Ford.
There are novels, especially in the last twenty years, but even more, recently, where I can play the game of “This would make an excellent RPG setting”. This is not to point out works that WERE inspired by roleplaying game campaigns (c.f. Malazan) but rather works that have fantasy settings where classic D&D adventuring parties are part and parcel of the landscape. The Kings of the Wyld series, by Nicholas Eames, for example, has adventuring parties as “touring bands”, hard-rocking adventurers seeking fame as much as fortune. The anime/maga “Delicious in Dungeon” is all about adventuring parties in a growing and changing and rather dangerous dungeon.
And here, we have the Warden. Aelis is not part of an adventuring party, but in the course of the novel, we learn about adventuring parties, who go out into the wilderness beyond the borders in search of treasure, magic, ancient secrets and more. When they come back to civilization, it is Wardens like Aelis who have to make sure that the adventurers blowing off steam don’t cheat the locals and cause mayhem in the process. The adventurers in question fit some D&D classes rather well. Could one run an RPG game in this world with an adventuring company going into the wilderness of Old Ystain? Absolutely. It’d be child’s play.
The first portion of the novel is a slow burn (perhaps a bit too slow for its own good) as we set up Aelis in Lone Pine, meet some of the locals, and start to get our feet around where poor Aelis, who just wanted a cushy berth, is stuck with. The actual main driving plots of the novel really don’t hit until an adventuring party comes in from the wilderness and this helps finally charge up the plots (although it takes some working out to figure out how and why they do). I have the patience for building up a character and a world, but some might find this waiting for the plot somewhat tedious.
I also want to talk about the cover at this stage. Beautiful cover, right? That’s our necromancer on the right, setting up a ward. (Her second best magical talent beyond necromancy is Abjuration, and Ford has a great deal of fun with a magical discipline that basically is really interesting and useful shielding spells.) The person on the left, well, that’s Maurenia, one of the members of the adventuring company. And while there is a very slow burn will-they-get-together plotline (and a queer interspecies romance at that), they don’t actually spend all that much time together. Instead, Aelis is usually a loner (see above: Necromancer) or in the course of events winds up going into the wilderness with a male half-orc Ranger for reasons that are plot-spoilery. In reality, given “screen time”, he would have made a far better choice if one was showing narrative weight and importance to the narrative on the book cover. Don’t get me wrong, the slow burn romance between Aelis and Maurenia is great, and tender, and sometimes rather funny, but it holds a lot less narrative weight than the cover suggests. (And yes, the aforementioned Ranger and Warden do have a lot of discussion and platonic relationship building where we get a bunch of worldbuilding in the bargain).
So, once things do kick off, we get a lot of fun action sequences, a main character learning to do better and learning to adapt her city and courtly ways to the wild frontier, to tackle a problem far bigger and dangerous than she imagined, and torn between wanting to stick it out and wanting to decamp for other climes. I am not that well versed in Westerns as a genre, but it sure does sound like Support your Local Sheriff!, doesn’t it? I am sure there are plenty more Westerns that Ford is borrowing from to help flesh out the plot of Aelis and Lone Pine, just set in a fantasy setting. (This does goes to the idea of using Western tropes in Fantasy, which dates back to at least Conan).
The novel walks a line, making women academy graduates (and especially Necromancers) uncommon but not unheard of, meaning this is not a gender blind society, and Aelis has to prove herself to the people of Lone Pine that she can do the job.
The novel is definitely queer friendly, though; there appears to be a relationship between the two innkeepers that Aelis strikes up a friendship with but it’s never really discussed or brought out as a big deal. (Similarly too, when Aelis and Maurenia are starting to move toward being a thing, it doesn’t cause any waves more than the fear that the adventuring company’s machine-mad arcanist might be lost in the process if she left the group. Maurenia likes her toys, you see, and she is awfully adept at building them.)
The Warden is the first in a series and it ends if not quite on a cliffhanger, more of a “oh, crap. Now what do I do?” moment. I suspect that this book and this series hasn’t gotten a ton of interest and attention and I think that’s a shame. Aside from my cover issues as outlined above, this is queer friendly epic fantasy. Take that, add a western flavor of the fish out of water city Warden, freshly minted from the Academy, running straight into the teeth of the edge of the wilderness and finding a lot of the world works differently than she thought. Or that her clever plans need adjustment to the realities on the ground. This is the sort of fantasy readers of the works of authors like Nicholas Eames (already mentioned above), R J Barker, Ed McDonald, and Hannah Kaner among others, should really enjoy.
