Matt Wallace's SAVAGE BOUNTY

 I told you it wouldn't be long before I took up Volume Two of Matt Wallace's Savage Rebellion trilogy. This is both because the first, Savage Legion, was everything I like and nothing that I don't about epic fantasy, but also because I have definitely decided in my old age that the closer together I can read books in a series, the better, although Matt Wallace and his publishers actually did us all a solid in the form of a very helpful "Previously in" introduction that summarizes the key points of Savage Legion and can this become a norm, please?

Savage Bounty picks up almost right where Savage Legion left off, with the newly ascended Dyewan, no longer a bright little cleaning girl rolling around the campus of the Craiche Institute of Technology (properly called the Planning Cadre but I like thinking of it as CIT) participating in the funeral rites for Edger, who revealed himself as the secret actual ruler of Craiche but also as a moral monster of unconscionable proportions at the end of Savage Legion, prompting Dyewan to take the step she had unconsciously been planning for anyway, of killing him. But her unconscious-yet-brilliant plan allowed her an easy alibi; everybody just blames a failure of the wonderfully weird assistive technology Edger used to talk and breathe that I'm still going to make you read the books to discover. Dyewan is now poised to take over as the secret ruler of Craiche, setter of priorities, maker of plans, architect of Craiche's future. Whoa.

Meanwhile, Lexi is now the prisoner of one of the bureacrats who has been thwarting her efforts to preserve Gen Stalbraid and to find Lexi's missing husband. Councillor Barr is descended from the former nobility of Craiche and has managed through cunning, manipulation and all the other dark arts to hold on to just enough power to conceal the fact that she still owns a huge chunk of property just outside the city that she has turned into a sort of living history museum and I can't have been the only person to have read this and thought of Antebellum, right? Barr has servants in livery and a castle and refers to Lexi as a Lady and is just a complete Madame D'Auroet of a person. She has a role for Lexi to play that in a way offers Lexi everything she could want short of getting her husband back, but Lexi already distrusts her all the way, even before Lexi almost gets eaten alive by some giant carniverous plants that guard an apparent escape route from the garden.

As for Evie, she has managed to convince what's left of her Savage Legion to join with their supposed enemies, who have been revealed not to be a mighty rival nation opposing Craiche but the last pathetic remnants of various peoples upon whom Craiche has been pursuing a campaign of genocide for generations, and is fixing to lay siege to a city that it turns out used to belong to her new allies. Oh, and she's a legendary general now, and the spy who was her first frenemy is her lover and it's all very Paul Atriedes without the mystical bits, which is excellent.

And now, off on adventures of their own is the nonbinary warrior Taru, late of Gen Stalbraid and Lexi's only true friend, now themselves conscripted into a Savage Legion and shambling along with them to defend the very city that Evie the Sparrow General is about to attack!

Somehow, though, this brewing battle for Craiche's Tenth City is not nearly as interesting as how Dyewan's and Lexi's widely divergent paths threaten to eventually come together, as Dyewan strives to extend the promise of Craiche to all of its citizens and not just the ones who are traditionally useful (read: not poor, not sick, not injured, not old) while Lexi is caught in a plot to drag Craiche back to its elitist feudal past. Again, not thinking about the real world circa winter of 2022 at all, nope, nope!

Alas, as is so often the case in middle volumes of trilogies, while the trajectories of our three heroines start veering towards an intersection or two, they don't yet touch (and was Wallace trying to warn me of this by naming a character Edger, I wonder?), while that of Taru comes so close to one of the ladies' that I wanted to scream when I realized I was reading the final chapter of Savage Bounty and I wasn't going to get to see them meet. And then I did scream, because [REDACTED] happens, and now I'm going to have to join the obnoxious chorus of people asking Matt Wallace if he's done writing Volume Three yet, has he, huh, huh, when do I get it give it to me noooooooooow.

Which means that, by any measure, Savage Bounty is a roaring success. Now excuse me. I need some Throat Coat tea to heal my poor throat. It's been a while since I shrieked like that. Kthnxbai!