Spoiler alert: Fevered Star is the second book in the Between the Earth and the Sky series and I can’t discuss this one without spoiling the first one. You can read that review here. If you haven’t read Black Sun and don’t want it ruined, go read it now. I’ll wait . . .
Okay. In Black Sun, Serapio (avatar of the Crow god) sets out to kill the Sun Priest (named Naranpa) and all the priests who follow her. He crashes their winter solstice ceremony, the moment when the sun is at its weakest and the shadowy Crow god is strongest. Everything goes according to plan for the Crow god, except that mere days before, Naranpa had been assassinated and replaced by a sort of puppet Sun Priest. The Crow god can tell the difference–all that killing and the Sun is not defeated.
Which means Naranpa must not be entirely dead; somewhere, she must be alive and still holding the Sun’s power within her.
Which means Serapio s mission is still unfulfilled. He was supposed to crash the Solstice ceremony, kill everyone on behalf of the Crow god, then die. His little crow friends sacrificed themselves to save Serapio but the Crow god isn’t too thrilled with the defeat and Serapio was not prepared at all for life after that battle. The Crow clan, who he thought would embrace him as family, has decidedly mixed feelings about their god walking amongst them. Some of them worship him as the Odo Sedoh, the Crow Grandfather, but many of their leaders wish their god had never returned. He’s upset the balance of power and the Crow Clan’s matron is afraid of reprisals from the city’s other clans.
While Serapio navigates life as a living god (but also a nice young man), Naranpa is back in Coyote’s Maw, revived by her estranged brother and his witch friend. Once Naranpa is revived, she begins to realize she’s become more than just a priest of the Sun. She seems now to be the sun’s vessel on earth. Instead of escaping certain death, she’s still on a collision course with the Crow god.
The book rocks back and forth between three stories this time. We follow Serapio’s story as he forms an uneasy relationship with Okoa, brother of the Crow Clan’s leader. We follow Naranpa as she attempts to find allies in Coyote’s Maw. We also follow Xiala, Serapio’s Teek friend, as she travels with Iktan, another surviving priest (an assassin, the Priest of Knives) to distant Hokaia. In Hokaia, the Eagle clan conspires with Hokaia’s spear maidens, a band of Teek warriors, and a couple of Cuecolan merchant lords (one of whom was briefly Xiala s boss in the first book. Small world.) Together, they make plans to attack Tova now that the Watchers are dead and the city is in confusion. Well, all those other people want to attack the city; Xiala just wants to find Serapio and help him out if she can. She misses her weird crow-loving friend. They really bonded in the first book and now that she knows Serapio survived his big revenge mission, Xiala desperately wants to see him again.
As epic fantasies tend to do, this one sprawls a bit. There are a lot more moving parts than the first book had, and a lot more secondary characters. We still have the central conflict between the Crow and the Sun, represented by Serapio and Naranpa respectively. Along with that, we now have impending war, with representatives of several nations planning to invade a fractured and weakened Tova. One of the Cuecolan lords, Balam, is also trying to master the magic of dream walking in order to defeat Tova and ultimately become the avatar of his own god, the Jaguar. As all this is brewing, Xiala’s mother is head of the Teek contingent and none too happy to see her daughter. Xiala is, in fact, sent packing back to Teek against her wishes, only to find Teek has become a shell of itself while she’s been gone.
This book is messier than the first, not as tight or touching, but there are some interesting twists and turns, and the ending really surprised me. It ends, as the first does, with a confrontation between the Sun and the Crow, but this one turns out much differently than either of the avatars expect. In some ways it’s a much weaker ending but I respect it for going in a direction I did not see coming. At the end of this I was immediately itching to start the third book and see how Roanhorse was going to bring all this back together.
You’ll find out how that went next week. Until then, embrace the darkness and read more books.
Darker Books 