A Taste of Gold and Iron

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Kadou, the shy prince of Arasht, finds himself at odds with one of the most powerful ambassadors at court—the body-father of the queen’s new child—in an altercation which results in his humiliation. This is breaking my heart because this book was absolutely one of my most anticipated releases of the year and I was SO convinced I would adore it, but. There were times when Kadou acted and only later realized, in a flash of crushing humiliation just like this one, how his actions might look from the outside. To prove his loyalty to the queen, his sister, Kadou takes responsibility for the investigation of a break-in at one of their guilds, with the help of his newly appointed bodyguard, the coldly handsome Evemer, who seems to tolerate him at best. Azuta was too clever to answer a question straight when she could reply with a rhetorical question or a half-truth instead.

Who you are isn't the thoughts in your head or the fears in your heart or the name someone else gives you or takes from you.The counterfeit had to be mostly gold, because the rest of the signature had seemed mostly the same as usual—the smooth flow of warm, thick cream poured from a pitcher, the flash of sunshine on nearly still water.

With the help of Evemer, Kadou’s understanding of his anxiety slowly improved, and the man he was in the first and final chapters of the story were two different people. He’d been second-guessing himself constantly, worrying and half-confused over his own motivations, lying awake at night wondering whether it was an inevitable matter of when he brought harm to his sister and niece, rather than an impossible, unthinkable if. Luckily, he has Evemer—cold, handsome, eventually utterly, hopelessly devoted to Kadou—to protect him.The mystery plot got lost constantly, to the point that I didn’t understand wha This completely flipped the dynamic between the two, as Evemer, who had trained his whole life for this moment, resents the man he must protect with his life. This book was made to be listened to, and the narrator makes the characters and names come to life in a way reading it could not. We know characters with a ~binary gender presentation~ are cis because the characters use plenty of assumptive and bioessentialist language to describe each other’s bodies. Kadou slid into my heart within the first few pages, and I knew I was going to be in serious trouble if anything ever happened to him.

Zeliha had a whole ministry of professional spies whose job it was to know everything that went on in every corner of the palace, in every alley of the capital, and in every village in the country. It was barely wide enough for two horses to pass each other, and in some places their riders would have had to dismount to do it.

Rowland’s main interest here is not the mystery or even the fantasy but the romance between Evemer and Kadou. The water-sparkle tasted faintly reddish, as if it were the light of sunset, or colored by the smoke of a wildfire. Some people are going to be obsessed with it and others, like me, will find it difficult to keep their minds from wandering off the page. It seemed Her Majesty decidedly agreed, and moreover felt that it was up to her to hurry things along.

I am a total dingdong when it comes to mystery plots, and this was obvious from the first time they’re introduced. Seliha was the queen I was hoping for, and everyone would have been doomed if it weren’t for Eozena’s cunning political movements. This is a place to post about read alongs and coordinate details so that you don't miss out on any around the blogosphere .I know a dozen kahyalar who would happily die for you, Tadek had murmured to him, as if that were at all what Kadou wanted. He’d been tugged along by the will of the gods and his own fear for his whole life, and here they were, two ships on a dark cloudy night whose only point of reference was each other. But what appears to be a straightforward crime spirals into a complex counterfeiting operation, with a powerful enemy at its heart. This should have been a great fit for me - fantasy world with political intrigue, and a queer central romance?