Review: Witch King, by Martha Wells

 

After being murdered, his consciousness dormant and unaware of the passing of time while confined in an elaborate water trap, Kai wakes to find a lesser mage attempting to harness Kai’s magic to his own advantage. That was never going to go well. But why was Kai imprisoned in the first place? What has changed in the world since his assassination? And why does the Rising World Coalition appear to be growing in influence?
Kai will need to pull his allies close and draw on all his pain magic if he is to answer even the least of these questions. He’s not going to like the answers.

"Don’t let everything we fought for be for nothing". Martha Wells' Witch King is a standalone novel which alternates between two timelines: on the one set in the past, we follow the body-hopping demon Kai as he joins a revolution and possibly finds himself some love in one of his partners, a noble. The other timeline follows the present as he wakes up from being imprisoned and tries to understand what's happening while saving his friends, among which there are a witch who controls the winds, and her kidnapped wife.

The world-building is pretty intricate and layered; the information isn't spoon-fed, but the reader is immersed in the world with no kind of hand-holding, trusted to gather all relevant information. Not everything is explained, but there's enough to go by and have a sense of the world. The magic system seems fascinating and complex and there's a lot of interesting things going on. It's a solid fantasy adventure with a dash of mystery.

But it feels a bit like soulless homework. Everything goes like clockwork and we have many moving parts and many characters and it's clever, but it lacks heart. We're told that it's a found family story and we see the characters as they met, a human lifetime ago, and as they're in the present, but there's a sort of disconnect. The witch and her wife are never shown together in the present, not even for a small reunion, and in general the ending was pretty rushed after there was so much focus on everything that was happening.

The better-developed relationship was the one between Kai and the noble Bashasa. You get the sense that there's a growing affection, and in the present Bashasa is often on Kai's mind. There's more nuance there, more than with Kai's friendship with the witch Ziede, which is still the one that gets more screentime despite this. And I get it; it's a bit of a historical mystery, inside the novel, whether Bashasa and his demon were in a relationship, and we're left with that question too. But the rest of the cast falls flat despite the numerous quips.

Witch King is a solid fantasy novel for fans of Martha Wells.

✨ 3.5 stars