Fiction Reviews
A Sword of Gold and Ruin
(2025) Anna Smith Spark, Flame Tree Press, £20 / Can$34.95 / US$26.95, hrdbk, 344pp, ISBN 978-1-787-58969-8
This is the second in Anna Smith Spark’s new series that began with A Sword of Bronze and Ashes, one of my favourite books of the last ten years or so and if, like most sequels (Godfather II excepted, of course), it doesn’t quite have the impact of its predecessor, it is still a thing of grim and dark beauty. A Sword of Bronze and Ashes opens with ‘Kanda’, a farmer’s wife, coming across a body floating down the river from the nearby village and realising exactly what that means. For she is, or was, none other than Ikandera Thygethyn, the most illustrious of the Six Knights of Roven, who would quest and fight and kill monsters and men and … others. That book wove together the mythic and the mundane into something stunning and horrifying, as Kanda’s other life intruded into the everyday, threatening both her and her family. And to save them, of course, terrible sacrifices had to be made.
In A Sword of Gold and Ruins the consequences of those earlier decisions become all too appallingly apparent as Kanda and what remains of her family set out to find and rebuild Roven. So, this is a quest story that begins in what in this world counts as an idyll, but ends with, as the title suggests, a ruin.
Having wintered in a friendly and supportive village community, Kanda begins to feel uneasy with the coming of Spring - there’s something, literally, in the water that brings a long-suppressed memory almost to the surface. And so she and her family set off through a countryside full of the promise of new life. However, that sense of something terribly wrong is always hovering in the background and before long, sure enough, they encounter a mysterious hooded woman who asks for Kanda’s help in crossing a river to reach her cows that are grazing on the other side. Reluctantly, Kanda agrees and her suspicions prove to be well-founded, as the shallow ford becomes a raging torrent and the woman grows ever heavier on Kanda’s back. Nevertheless, the pair makes it across, whereupon the woman asks if Kanda will be her horse from then on, in exchange for all kinds of precious and beautiful things. Kanda, of course, refuses and the woman assures her that she will regret that decision, before disappearing with her cows, who all turn out to be, in fact, dead.
As Kanda and her family walk on, the lush and green woodland becomes a grisly forest of bones, and they are forced to spend the night in a bone-bothy, with the hooded woman’s dogs howling and sniffing around just outside. Eventually they make it to another village, ruled over by a former warrior in Ikandera’s army. However, his welcome upon seeing his erstwhile Queen enter the gates of his little kingdom is nothing but a veneer laid over abject terror at her mere presence. As the two reminisce it’s as if the lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’ were rewritten by Stephen King and Kanda begins to wonder if her splendid memories of Roven and the Six are nothing but the overweening exaggerations of her middle-aged self-reflecting on youthful exploits. Exploits that were bloodier and grislier and generally more horrible than she would prefer to admit, at least to her family, and it is here, in this little kingdom in the middle of nowhere, that both the past and the hooded woman catch up with her, in an episode that is itself bloodier and grislier and more horrible than I can write about here.
Indeed, this is one of the underlying motifs of the book: facing up to one’s past, as difficult as that may be, and stripping away the rose-tinted overlay to reveal that past for how it really was, with all its harsh and remorseless brutality. That and family: who counts as such, how to keep them safe and how to negotiate the inevitable changes as you all grow old and become, well, other than what you were.
This is what I love about Anna Smith Spark’s work - her ability to develop and explore such themes in a rich fantasy setting, where violence and magic may suddenly erupt at any moment. That and her prose, which can be richly descriptive and as delicate as a watercolour, but also bone-jarringly powerful, as she hammers home Kanda’s misgivings and her fears and, ultimately, her feelings of guilt. The overall effect is like watching someone dancing with chainsaws and by the end of it all you’re both relieved and elated but also braced for the final act to come.
Steven French
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