A Story of Magic and Peril

Banner of the Damned by Sherwood Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel forms a bridge between the Inda tetralogy and the era of Crown Duel and the CJ Notebooks. In Crown Duel, there was a reference to the ties between Remalna and Marloven Hess, going back to when a Marloven princess married into the old royal family. There have also been references in the later books to Indevan's ride into Norsunder with his First Lancers. This is the story of those events.

In the Inda books we saw the Marlovens through their own eyes, but in this, we see them through the eyes of the Colendi, a cultured people reminiscent of Heian Japan or the court of the Sun King at Versailles, but with magic. And by this point magic has become far more common than it was in Inda's era, although not to the near-ubiquity of CJ's notebooks.

It is also the story of a woman on trial: Emras the Scribe, who became royal scribe to Princess Lasva, and who accompanied her to Marloven Hesea (as the country was known at the time) when she weds Prince Ivandred, who rescued her from the Chwair king. Officially, Emras went as a scribe, but the Queen gave her a secret mission: protect Princess Lasva from dark magic, which both the Chwair and the Marlovens had a reputation for using.

A very open-ended mission, with almost no instruction on how to go about it. So Emras does so as best she knows how, trying to learn how magic works. And her very diligence and determination lead her down a path she might not have, had she been given better instruction and been less easily led astray.

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