James Nicoll Reviews

2025’s Point of Hearts is the sixth volume in Melissa Scott’s Astreiant¹ secondary universe fantasy series.

With a royal marriage impending, maintaining public tranquility is paramount. The city of Astreiant being Astreiant, the city is anything but tranquil. This is a problem for both Adjunct Point Nicolas Rathe and his lover, City Guard Captain Philip Eslingen.

Years earlier, famine very nearly ended in open revolution. Revolution was forestalled by two developments: the queen assuaged the mobs by providing food from public storehouses, and the rabblerouser whose jeremiads inflamed violent revolutionary passion fell silent.

Now, revolutionary handbills have appeared once more. Why just now? Who can say? While the handbills embrace less violence rhetoric, they are an unwelcome development.

Were the above not problem enough, aristocrats are flooding into the city for the royal wedding. The high-born are as keenly aware of their prerogatives as they are thin-skinned. They are eager to pursue vendettas provoked by the slenderest of pretexts.

Take for example the unfortunate playwright Chresta Aconin, whose witty parody of fellow thespians is interpreted as a jab at the Soueraine d’Alamenon. Innocence is no defense against critical misinterpretation, nor does it help when an armed mob descends on Aconin. Aconin is lucky to survive with only bruises.

Reports of mysterious nighttime wagons whose guards bear firearms of questionable legality invite closer examination. Investigation fails to clarify who owns the cargo, but the goods themselves are identified. The wagons carry barrels of gunpowder.

There are any number of reasons someone might want to secretly accumulate large amounts of explosives. Few of them are good. It behooves Rathe and Eslingen to unravel the plot and expose its architect.

Alas, the player on the other side is uncooperative, which is why Rathe soon finds himself framed for a crime he did not commit. Rathe and Eslingen cannot investigate plots if they are too busy dodging the law themselves.

~oOo~

I was going to snark about Astreiant crab-walking towards becoming a nation of law but actually, that’s not quite what’s happened. Astreiant has an abundance of law. Arguable, it has too much law, in the sense there are at least two formal systems that often work at cross-purposes.

Take the Vidame de Castiat. She evaded the royal salt tax. Although she admitted to guilt, she eluded punishment by the common justice system by preemptively using her aristocratic privilege to convict and sentence herself to house arrest in her lavishly appointed home. As long as there are two or more legal systems that could apply, which does apply in any given case must be ambiguous. This is not ideal, unless you’re a miscreant with a knack for selecting the legal system most favourable.

Now one might think that it’s odd that there would be two systems of law, and that neither is particularly disturbed that someone is shipping large amounts of explosives into the city. One would think that the authorities would go into crisis mode (though they do later, once it’s almost too late). Is this a plausibility-straining plot contrivance? Alas, it’s a trivial task to point to nations where the applicable legal systems vary by caste² or cases where the police, informed of untoward developments, did nothing.

Obviously, the best solution to Astreiant’s problems would be a violent revolution and the comprehensive obliteration of the aristocracy. However, this would raise serious issues for Rathe and Eslingen’s relationship, having as they do divergent political beliefs, so fans of that particular pairing will no doubt be relieved that the series doesn’t swerve into Reign of Terror territory.

Although the novel seemed a little short, it otherwise delivered what readers want and expect from an Astreiant novel: a mystery, an escalating crisis, and the couple managing (somehow) to keep their relationship going despite significant challenges.

Point of Hearts is available here (Queen of Swords Press), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

I did not find Point of Hearts at Bookshop UK.

1: Of which I appear to have reviewed only four: 

Point of Hopes

Point of Knives

Point of Dreams

Fair’s Point

Which means I somehow missed Point of Sighs.

2: USA delenda est.