Liz Bourke Reviews The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond

The Fireborne Blade, Charlotte Bond (Tordotcom 978-1-25029-031-1, $20.99, 176pp, hc) May 2024.

It’s always interesting to review a novella, and this month I have three. Or three very short novels, at least: the line blurs. Charlotte Bond’s The Fireborne Blade harks back to the adventure style of sword-and-sorcery fantasy that had its most recent great flowering (to the best of my knowledge) in the 1980s. Everything old is new again! That’s not a bad thing.

A disgraced knight needs to retrieve a magic sword from the underground hoard of a dragon, to wipe out the stain of disgrace. That knight is Maddileh, and her disgrace came from bare-knuckle punching the now-former-lover who cruelly mocked her. In Maddileh’s world, it’s unusual for women to be knights, even more un­usual than it is for them to be mages, on account of patriarchal and classist standards restricting who has access to training. Maddileh is excep­tionally stubborn (a point of character that will prove important) and has persisted despite much discouragement. Now, in underground tunnels leading towards the dragon’s lair, with memory problems and a magic-inclined squire, Petros, who she doesn’t remember hiring, she’s focused on her goal to the exclusion of other concerns, such as why she doesn’t remember hiring Petros, or what his motives are for accompanying her.

Bond intersperses chapters dealing with Mad­dileh’s current predicament with first-person or second-hand accounts of dragon-hunting knights of the past, reporting to an organisa­tion (of mages, interested in dragons for their magical properties) on the success or otherwise of their really rather perilous endeavours, and with a few short interludes set a short time in the past, in which Maddileh learns information about the dragon rumoured to have the fabled titular Fireborne Blade, and meets Saralene, another woman stubbornly persisting in a male-dominated and misogynistic field – though her field is magic rather than knighthood. Saralene is important to the story’s conclusion: turns out that Petros, Maddileh’s mysterious squire, is her (evil) brother.

The plot’s twist, which I will explain in this paragraph – so skip to the next if you’re a reader who’d prefer not to know in advance – is rather good, actually. It turns out that Petros has a scheme to secure his advancement to be the right hand of a would-be immortal wizard, by exposing his sister to a dragon’s powerful magic emanations and then killing both the dragon and his sister, and giving his sister’s (now incred­ibly magically powerful) blood to the would-be immortal wizard. To accomplish this and kill a dragon that all rumour suggests cannot be killed by mortal hands, he has summoned Maddileh back from the dead, counting on her stubborn­ness to keep her in a semblance of life until the job is done: That’s why she doesn’t remember hiring him.

Ultimately, Petros’s plans are foiled by the fact that Saralene is a better (smarter) mage than he is. Maddileh is even more stubborn than he realises.

This is an entertaining story, with some vividly inventive dragon-related-worldbuilding, and a compelling dragon-battle showdown. Bond uses the claustrophobic environs of the cave system to atmospheric effect. It’s not deep, and its the­matic argument about the evils of patriarchy is embroidering over a well-worn theme. But it’s fun. A breath blowing straight in from the D&D-esque sword-and-sorcery of yesteryear. I could definitely stand to read a few more earnest adventures in this vein.

This review and more like it in the April 2024 issue of Locus.

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