James Nicoll Reviews

2023’s The Warden is the first volume in Daniel M. Ford’s The Warden secondary universe fantasy series.

Aelis de Lenti un Tirraval is a high-achieving academic who is confident that she will receive a high-status first assignment as Warden. To her great vexation, she is assigned to serve in Lone Pine, a rural community barely large enough to warrant a name. She will serve as law enforcement and general problem solver.

She could turn down the post, but this would mean abandoning the career towards which she had worked so hard. Aelis accepts her assignment.

At least Lone Pine is small and isolated, unlikely to attract magical threats. Right?

Aelis signs a contract with the community. Her duties are as expected: law enforcement and problem solving. Their duty: provide housing and meals. She is annoyed to find that her residence is run down and her first meal never appears. Not a good start.

Initially, Aelis’ magical skills in necromancy, abjurations, and enchanting alarm Lone Pine’s rustics, courtesy of a previous heavy-handed Warden. However, it does not take long for challenges to arise that call on her magical skills, literacy, and judgement

Item one: a crazed old illusionist. Aelis easily fends off his pathetic ambush. He does manage to steal one of her magic books. She gets busy with other stuff and doesn’t follow up on the theft.

Item two: a troupe of murder hoboes salvage experts returning from the wastelands of Old Ystain on the far side of the frontier¹. Aelis must prevent them from looting Lone Pine. She also must tax their haul. Most important: dealing with the chaos caused by the two chests of cursed gold the expedition brought back.

Item three: a young girl, the adorable Pips, has an affinity for magic. How much of an affinity remains to be seen. Aelis undertakes a first step: teaching an easily distracted girl to read.

Item four: shell-shocked veteran Elmo stabs his brother Otto before fleeing Lone Pine. Aelis’ magic is sufficient to save Otto’s life². Next she must locate and retrieve Elmo, establish whether he was in his right mind when he attacked his brother, and determine and impose the proper consequence for Elmo’s actions.

Item five: Aelis discovers that she has greatly underestimated the magical menaces lurking near Lone Pine. She needs the help of local half-orc scout Tun, a man with secrets of his own.

~oOo~

Aelis is fortunate that her D&D-inspired world includes a sorting algorithm for evil. She encounters supernatural challenges in the specific order that allows her to work out what is going on in time to survive the later events. Different order and this would be a short story. Possibly of the horror variety.

Tor’s original cover for The Warden didn’t entice me to read the novel.

It was the cover for the second volume, or more specifically the Glen Cook blurb on that cover, that got me to go back and read The Warden.

Never underestimate the marketing value of a good blurb. Or the hazards of setting reader expectations a bit too high.

Cook led me to expect a fantasy novel that was transformative in some way. Instead, The Warden is an almost perfectly acceptable D&D-inspired secondary-world fantasy novel about an earnest young woman doing her best with an assignment she didn’t want. The Warden does pretty much everything it needs to do. My error was expecting it to do more.

My one quibble involves the ending, which is an enormous cliffhanger. I have nothing against cliffhangers, provided they are entirely absent from the books I read, but readers might want to be aware the author and Tor really really want you to set down The Warden to run right out to buy volume two, Necrobane. Necrobane will be available in April 2024³).

The Warden is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: The frontier in this novel appears to follow the European model, in which frontiers represent the limit of one polity’s ability to encroach on another’s territory. Power disparity might allow North American settlers to ignore the indigenous people into whose lands settlers moved, but in the Old Worlds, polities had to acknowledge that there were heavily armed people over there because that was why the border was where it was. The frontier in this novel represents the border between those lands the orcs could conquer, and those lands that could successfully resist them. The frontier can move depending on who is stronger at the moment. Revanchism in old Ystain is alive and well.

However, the land use pattern around Lone Pine, a small town in the ass-end of nowhere, seems North American.

2: Aelis manages to save Otto from the bleeding, at least. Whether he will survive the ensuing infection is less clear. Otto should be grateful that this book’s setting was inspired by Dungeons & Dragons and not HârnMaster.

3: It is a complete coincidence that I ended up reading The Warden just before Necrobane was due out. I am terrible at keeping track of release dates.