Liz Bourke Reviews All the Hidden Paths by Foz Meadows

All the Hidden Paths, Foz Meadows (Tor 978-1-250-82930-6, $29.99, 520pp, hc) December 2023. Cover by Micaela Alcaino.

Foz Meadows’s All the Hidden Paths is a direct sequel to their A Strange and Stubborn Endur­ance. Velasin and Caethari have survived the plot against their diplomatic marriage, though it cost the lives of Caethari’s father and his sister Laecia. Their newlywed status and tentative happiness, however, is about to run into further complications. Personal complications and political ones.

A note before I continue: I’m mentioned in the acknowledgements. At this point, if I stopped re­viewing books by people I know and like, I’d pretty much have to stop reviewing SFF. But it seems only fair to acknowledge I’m more likely to be partial to Meadows than to a stranger.

To return to the novel: Vel and Cae’s marriage is supposed to help normalise relations, or at least open the borders, between the nations of Tithena and Ralia. But Ralia is a homophobic and misogynistic nation, where people who pursue relationships with members of their own gender are strongly stigmatised, marriage is between men and women, and women have few rights. Vel spent his entire life in Ralia trying, and ultimately failing, to hide his preferences. In Tithena, he doesn’t have to hide. He likes Cae, finds him extremely attractive, and quite possibly loves him. He’s married to him, and can openly show his affection. You’d think this would make things easier. But all of Vel’s instincts were formed in an environment where secrecy was the order of the day, and where any difficulties in his relationships were typically resolved by ending the relationship. Adjusting to Tithenai openness is proving difficult, as it challenges him to do the opposite of his first, ingrained reaction. It’s made more difficult yet by his doubt that he deserves Cae, or that Cae ought to want to stay with him. After all, their marriage has cost Cae a sister and a father: Can Vel really be worth it? Cae, meanwhile, has a lover who sometimes flinches from him, who he can’t forget is married to him because of a treaty. And he hasn’t figured out how to reconcile his grief for his sister and his father with the fact that Laecia was herself responsible for the plot to kill Velasin, for his father’s death, and by her choices, for her own.

The two of them haven’t had much of a chance to settle down and work things out – for themselves, or for their relationship – when Cae, now officially heir to his grandmother’s yaserate (the equivalent of a dukedom in lands and precedence, but also com­ing with a permanent seat in Tithena’s equivalent of a royal cabinet), is summoned along with Vel to Tithena’s capital city, Qi-Xihan, to make himself and his spouse properly known to his monarch.

Cae and Vel’s journey to the capital is beset by problems. Someone is trying to kill them, though whether it’s on account of Cae’s inheritance, or on account of the marriage (a contested issue, sinceit’s not particularly palatable to Ralia that their treaty should hinge on the kind of relationship most Ralians prefer to believe unnatural, while not everyone in Tithena is delighted at the thought that they should be tied by treaty to a people who have such barbarous beliefs), or some third, less plau­sible reason, is not particularly clear. The capital offers no greater safety: No sooner do they arrive than Vel is subject to an assassination attempt that nearly succeeds. Vel is a stranger to Qi-Xihan’s political currents, while Cae has never had to pay much attention to them before, and feels himself unsuited to the task. This may be why he is shortly the subject of 1) a drugged seduction attempt, 2) an assassination attempt, and 3) a thorough attempt to frame him for murder.

Who’s a friend, and who is an enemy? Who wants their marriage to succeed, and who’s willing to kill at least one of them to see it end? And what does it mean for Vel to go from being a closeted gay man (his birth culture has different words for it) to hav­ing the most visible relationship in two countries?

All the Hidden Paths is told from three points of view: a first-person narrative from Vel’s perspective, a third-person narrative tightly focused on Cae, and interludes from the first-person perspective of Lord Asrien bo Erat, another Ralian man whose preferences lie with his own gender. Asrien, we learn in All the Hidden Paths’s first pages, is being blackmailed by the Ralian crown into an attempt to break up Cae and Vel’s marriage – and if that fails, to destroy it by making sure Vel dies in an appar­ently accidental way. But Asrien’s conscience holds him back from outright murder, and in Qi-Xihan he too is grappling with what it means to exist in a culture where there is no need to keep his sexuality hidden – and with the tension between his fears and his hopes.

Meadows’s characterisation is deft and compel­ling, giving us well-rounded characters with real, believable inner lives. Even the individuals we encounter only briefly seem like entire people with whole histories and agendas of their own, a state of affairs helped by Meadows’s richly vibrant approach to worldbuilding. We see the world in which the story takes place through a narrow lens, but within the scope of Meadows’s story, the world feels tangibly real. While I imagine some people will find the invented titles for Tithena’s noble ranks – or the terminology to describe sexuality, attraction, and third-gendered people within the world of the novel – to be less than entirely transparent, I found it very clear and adding immeasurably to the sense of living cultures. Meadows’s prose is clear and vivid, and their grasp of narrative tension – in a novel driven both by emotional realities and by factional intrigue – is extremely on point.

Many significant incidents in the court at Qi-Xihan occur in a maze-garden. The image of the maze is thematically apt, since the push and pull between what is hidden and what is revealed, what is visible and what is obscured from view, is a re­peating motif in both emotional terms and in the political intrigue that surrounds the protagonists’ relationship. This is, as Meadows puts it in a lucid and personal set of paragraphs in their Acknowl­edgements, a book about what happens after you Come Out™. Or rather, a book about the endless process of navigating the gap between what youknow (and are constantly learning) about your­self, the assumptions the rest of the world makes about your identity(/ies), and your expectations of the world.

Though I’ve often witnessed discussions around how coming out seems endless (and how one can either keep coming out in context after context, always braced for the possibility that this is the time you get handed some bonus queerphobia, or else deal with the grating presence of assumed hetero­normativity) among fellow queer folk, Meadows’s All the Hidden Paths is the first time I’ve encoun­tered such a clear interest in its various aftermaths in fiction. Portrayals of queer lives and relationships in the science fiction and fantasy I’ve encountered tend to fall, this decade, into three types. Either they take place in a world where queerness is so normalised that the question of homophobia or queerphobia never arises, and thus even the idea of the closet doesn’t exist. Or they take place in a version of a (modern, Anglophone) world, where a happy ending to a romantic relationship may involve coming out, but coming out lays all angst about sexuality in that relationship to rest. Or they take place in worlds (or places and times in our world) where the closet is a necessary shelter, and coming out to more than one’s closest intimates presents an intolerable risk. Rarely have I seen a character grapple with unlearning self-protective secrecy in an ongoing relationship, and never in such a viscerally relatable way. (Though let me caveat that when it comes to queer small-press work, as opposed to work from the larger houses, I’ve read far more queer fiction where the principals are primarily queer women and nonbinary people, as opposed to queer men.)

All the Hidden Paths is an intense novel, deeply felt, wrapping its romantic heart in a tense web of intrigue and danger. I suspect readers will want to start with A Strange and Stubborn Endurance to get the best effect, but I enjoyed it immensely. And I sincerely hope to see Meadows publish more stories in this vein.

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

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