Liz Bourke Reviews The Master of Samar by Melissa Scott

The Master of Samar, Melissa Scott (Candle­mark & Gleam 978-1-952456-16-9, $22.95, 340pp, tp) June 2023. Cover by H. Won.

Melissa Scott’s long career is one filled with interesting and ambitious novels. Her second-world fantasies have always struck me, with one or two exceptions, as strongly influenced by ideas of the Renaissance city. This is true for The Master of Samar, Scott’s latest standalone fantasy novel: a novel with a fascinating cast of characters and a setting whose magic seems strikingly unique.

Gil Irichels was rejected by his aristocratic family for his mother’s choice of husbands, as well as for his own choice of lovers. He’s been content for the last twenty-odd years to make his living as a travelling cursebreaker, work­ing with his lover, the mage Envar Cassi, and more recently, their friend and bodyguard, the swordswoman Arak min’Aroi.

A series of deaths leave him the sole heir to the family’s house and fortune, the titular Master of Samar. Samar is a significant name in the powerful sea-trading city of Bejanth, with political and financial influence. When Irichels left, it was a reasonably numerous family, but mischance can thin anyone’s numbers. His first thought is to do whatever he has to in order to settle the affairs of the estate and get back to his life, away from the city that, unlike in the hill country, disapproves of the fact he’s chosen to spend his life with another man for his lover. And lurking in the bricks of his newly inherited house is the house’s guardian spirit, or daemon, a presence he regards at best with ambivalence and at worst with dread: it responds to the will of the Master of Samar, and in his youth that Master, his grandfather, did not much care for him. Irichels’s upbringing did not leave him privy to all his family’s secrets, though, or all the intricacies of Bejanth’s politics, and it gradually becomes apparent that not all of Samar’s misfor­tunes were accidental, especially when Irichels is attacked, and warned off making alliances with the Master of Manimere, a house peer to his own. When the Master of Manimere is forced to flee the city ahead of arrest, and when Irichels himself is faced with legal and political difficulties, he, Envar, and Arak, along with the young woman that Irichels is compelled to marry, are set on a path that ends with them confronting a conspiracy that could well cause the utter destruction of Bejanth.

In this setting, contracts form the basis of magic: contracts and curses. A contract is an agreement; a curse is coercion. These contracts are between people, or between people and otherworldly entities, and their existence has the force of a kind of natural law. (Though there appear to be otherworldly courts that oversee certain deals, and enforce certain terms.) Con­tracts and curses can be layered on top of and around each other, an accretion over time that may not be able to be disentangled without terrible consequences. As a cursebreaker, one of Irichels’s jobs was the disentangling of such layers, and the prevention of additional harm. Now he finds that he may need to play this role for all of Bejanth, even though he may not have the power to do so. For one of Bejanth’s foundational contracts, one that prevents it from being swallowed by the sea, is linked to Samar, and Samar’s enemies wish to see that contract rewritten, though the consequences might drown them all.

Scott’s novels are always atmospheric, richly detailed, with a sense that much more extends beyond the edges of the page than the reader gets to see. In this, The Master of Samar is no different: Bejanth, reminiscent of Venice with its canals and its oligarchic voting bodies, its orien­tation to the sea, its murky depths, its religious and educational institutions and its outcasts, feels much like a real place. The characters, too, feel real, worn at the edges by a life well- (and hard-) lived. Irichels and his lover, Envar Cassi, are men in their forties, with Arak seeming not more than a decade younger, and the hints we get of their lives before the novel begins makes me wish desperately for a prequel. (A fantastic sword-and-sorcery premise, this wandering cursebreaker stuff.) Irichels’s struggles and in­securities centre on his desire to leave Bejanth again, to not be forced to see his lover snubbed or to lose Envar entirely because of politics. Though the novel sticks close to Irichels’s point of view, the other characters come across viv­idly, with lives and desires of their own.

The claustrophobic pressure of Samar’s neces­sities, of Irichels’s responsibilities, of Bejanth, homophobic and culturally arrogant and filled with intrigue tightening like a noose around the main characters’ necks, are palpable pres­ences in The Master of Samar. This is a novel of mystery and intrigue and fascinating magic, its characters negotiating their relationships and the pressures that face them like the adults they are. But it’s also a novel about going home to a place that made you feel you didn’t belong, about taking responsibility to protect people who judge you for your sexuality (who might prefer to ostracise you, if they could get away with it), and one with an ambivalence around whether the choice to claim your birthright will trap you in a place you weren’t sure you ever wanted to stay. The Master of Samar’s conclu­sion leans into this ambivalence, and while it’s a satisfying conclusion on a narrative level, part of me wanted a rather less complex, grown-up result and something rather more in the way of wish-fulfilment. But that’s on me, not on Me­lissa Scott: The Master of Samar is a powerful, evocative novel, and a very entertaining one.

This review and more like it in the August 2023 issue of Locus.

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