Photo credits: Florian Kurz
Edited by Vaishali
Title: ‘A Reaper at the Gates'
Author: Sabaa Tahir Series: (An Ember in the Ashes #3) Genre/Themes: Fantasy, Young Adult, romance, dystopian, forbidden love, oppression Publisher: Harper Voyager Year of Publication: 2018 Version: Paperback ISBN: 978-0-00-828875-4 Review
“Our stories are not bones left on the road for any hungry animal that happens along. Our stories have purpose. Souls. Our stories breathe, Laia of Serra. The stories we tell have power, of course. But the stories that go untold have just as much power, if not more. I will sing you such a story – a story that was long untold. The story of a name and its meaning. Of how that name matters more than any other single word in existence. But I must prepare myself, for such stories are dragons drawn from a deep well in a dark place. Does one summon a dragon? No. One may only invite it and hope it emerges.”
Laia of Serra, The Soul Catcher, and the Blood Shrike are scattered across the Empire and beyond its boundaries, estranged in their demarcated duties; Laia is bound to her people, Elias is bound to the dead, and Helene is bound to the Empire.
“Remember that fate is never what we think it will be.”
After deceiving Laia, the Nightbringer now has only one piece of the star left to collect, soon to set his kind free and claim vengeance on the Scholars for a thousand years of forced imprisonment. Mutineer of the empire, Laia travels seeking allies and finding information to take down the biggest threat to the Scholar race– The Nightbringer.
“You dare to judge me, Laia of Serra? How can you, when you know not the darkness that lives within your own heart?”
Newly free from the travailing wretchedness of Kauf prison, Darin is free, working alongside Laia, actively setting about saving their long-suffering race and freeing them where they can. Two books leading to his freedom, Darin is the flickering hope, the imperative weapon in potentially redirecting the bearing of this war; the only Scholar who can forge the weaponry necessary to give their people a fighting chance against the Empire. Darin is haunted though, and has not touched or broached the subject of artillery. People risked for him, died for him, and the Scholar who holds much in his blemished hands, can’t quite escape his own imprisonment.
'Strange how monsters can reach from beyond the grave, as potent in death as they were in life.’
Elias is in a completely new realm of hell, duty-bound and tied to the needs of the dead, he must learn the true duties of the Soul Catcher and sacrifice everything that was Elias Veturius . Derided by the jinn inhabiting the trees in his forested domain, Elias hasn’t yet understood what his precarious position means for the dead and the living. Tied to love, but overshadowed by duty, Elias’s path among the dead forces him to cross lines. To help the living, he must commitabsolutely to the magic of death: Mauth …and that means relinquishing something underlying in Elias’s soul, the scraps of which he has always tried to hold on to through his brutal years as a Mask. He has to renounce his humanity. He has to yield his bonds to the living. He has to defer wholly to the dead. Elias can’t have one foot in the realm of the living, when both are needed to strike equilibrium between the balance of the empire because his failure has bigger implications for the world.
“But for us, Elias, duty must reign over all else: desire, sadness, loneliness. Love cannot live here. You chose the Waiting Place, and the Waiting Place chose you. Now you must give yourself to it, body and soul.”
After executing Helene’s family, Marcus Farrar, tyrant and Emperor of the Martial Empire, holds the life of the Blood Shrike’s only living family over her head. One mistake, disobeying his order only means more pain and abuse for her sister Livia. Marcus’s seemingly psychological decline, volatile temper, and abusive outbursts are enough for any enemy to pry upon, and he has many, Keris Veturia being the worst, stopping at nothing to see his fall as Emperor. Helene is angry and venomous, cold , but she must protect this revered Empire, and her sister from permanent harm. Knowing what is at stake should she fail, Helene has to play tame and obedient, falling into her Mask’s ruthlessness and disciplined emotion while accomplishing her task to take out the Commandant.
'My song is not one of peace. It is one of failure and pain. My song is one of battle and blood, death and power. It is not the song of Helene Aquilla. It is the song of the Blood Shrike.’
Thwarting attacks to the Empire, engaging in the politics of war, ploys for power, plays for it too, the Blood Shrike competes with Keris for ascendancy and the trust of the Empire because forces are wishing and watching them fall. These are trying times for Helene, and it doesn’t get easier for her in this instalment. She is a force to be reckoned with, but even that holds no bars to the sacrifices required of her. Never being quite so partial to her character in previous books because of her bigoted views of the enslaved and lower classes, I’ve always struggled with finding the heart in her character when she has only ever had a heart for her own race. I did however find that this book brings out the better aspects of her personality, and I really look forward to seeing where the next book takes her. The content in Helene’s chapters could be become tiresome to read, the war intrigues constant, and there was at times too much information that I wasn’t following, and not enough of what I wanted.
“But you are a paragon of perfection? You live and breathe and eat and sleep on the backs of those less fortunate. Your entire existence is due to the oppression of those you view to be lesser. But why you, Blood Shrike? Why did fate see fit to make you the oppressor instead of the oppressed? What is the meaning of your life?”
“The Empire. That is the meaning of my life.”
I’ve never quite taken to the Blood Shrike’s character, always showing tones of class discrimination, she is as much an oppressor as she is oppressed, but she is a strong noblewoman nonetheless with her own heartaches and furtive struggles. Alongside Laia, she is the leading female in where this war is heading, and though she carries the quintessential traits of a Mask, I’m looking forward in seeing Avitas perhaps bring out a subtler, softer side to her beyond duty.
“You humans give your loyalty so willingly for just a little hope.”
“And you think we are fools because of it?” I shake my head. “Hope is stronger than fear. It is stronger than hate.”
A prophecy is spoken, each line of it slowly coming to pass as this novel comes to pass, embracing a dubious premonitory aether, where every character is falling into a pre-planned trap, only waiting for the worst to happen. The Nightbringer intends for the kind of unassailable butchery that the people walking this empire can never come back from, impeding the power of the three torches against the night , driving them to play into his game and shove them while shoving them off of the game board.
“There is a price for greed and violence. We do not always know who will pay it. But for good or ill, it will be paid.”
Hounded by visions, and magic arising in her that she can’t quite grasp, Laia is still hopeful of defeating her foe irrespective of those attempting to crack her spirit. Laia doesn’t want to lead, but she is a vanguard that her overcast, tyrannised people need because who else can know their struggle, and who else can lead them to a civilisation that accepts them and fights for their humane rights?...The truth is a disturbing thing though, and Laia can’t afford to crumple under the weight of it when so much of the world is dispirited, and she a forerunner in playing her part. I think there is much more about Laia that we are currently not allowed to be exposed to and I look forward to watching what she becomes!...though the future doesn’t look quite so bright for our golden eyed Scholar rebel.
'The freedom of this place, the ease of it – it feels like none of it is for me or my people. All this belongs to others, to those who do not abide at the crossroads of uncertainty and despair. It belongs to people so used to living free that they cannot imagine a world in which they are not.’
It took time for me to settle back into this world, understanding the war politics, who was allied with whom, the strategies, reacquainting myself with the characters, the jargon, for which reason I think a glossary would have benefitted the reader as I wasn’t following the goings on – particularly from the Blood Shrike’s POV. Though 'A Reaper at the Gates' shines with character development and subtly effective writing, it otherwise left a lot to be desired for. I felt adrift for about 50% of the book, wondering what the author’s objective was, where she was taking the characters, and whether it was going to get interesting. ‘An Ember in the Ashes’ was phenomenal, ‘A Torch Against the Night’ though I had some issues with it was also great, but I thought ‘A Reaper at The Gates’ would make up for what lacked in the previous instalment, creating a fire of its own, and though I don’t want to say it, it didn’t. I made my way through wondering when it would sweep my feet out from under me, which only happened about 75% through. The ending and the last 100 pages did grab me, but not enough to reconsider my thoughts.
‘Curse this world for what it does to the mothers, for what it does to the daughters. Curse it for making us strong through loss and pain, our hearts torn from our chests again and again. Curse it for forcing us to endure.’
'A Reaper at the Gates' felt more impersonal , a greater importance set on peripheral measures which perhaps was why I felt a sense of detachment. The themes however continue to be constructively confronted. Sabaa Tahirdoesn’t sugar-coat the brutalities or happenings of this story, and she hasn’t done so since 'An Ember in the Ashes'. Her world of oppressive severity, genocide, infanticide, infighting, philistine customs, and class apartheid is candidly outspoken and deftly written of. The Empire hasalways been a bleak and drab place of hopelessness, crushing souls and hardening it’s inhabitants through trial after trial, and our three main protagonists would know more about that than anybody. The Martials don’t question the prejudice they were brought up in, the Scholars are punished for the mistakes of their ancestors, but in the end all of them are paying for the blunders of the people who came before them.
'The Scholars around us scatter, running every which way, driven by a fear that’s been hammered into our bones. Always us! Our dignity shredded, our families annihilated, our children torn from their parents. Our blood soaking the dirt. What sin was so great that Scholars must pay, with every generation, with the only thing we have left: our lives?
Elias’s life is devoted to the dead. Laia’s life lies in the opposite – hope for her people. Helene’s life lies in the endurance of the Empire. Elias is gradually shedding pieces of his humanity. Responsible for the deaths of so many, Elias must now resort to such extremes – that which he wanted to repent for is now his saving grace. Laia is hounded by what she can’t have and what she must leave behind. Helene’s duty will never know any bounds. Rogue spirits, tribes warring with the Martial, Scholars running for their lives, the dead invading the realm of the living, clever cover-ups of history (though some I saw coming),our three torches will give up soul-deep gifts to pay for the world’s sustenance…is the price of civilisation ever too large? …apparently not as all three forfeit hefty ransoms.
'In this fiery hellscape of a world, this mess of blood and madness, justice exists only for those who take it.’
Sabaa Tahir humanises the darker characters; antagonists are approached with reason, kindling sparks of humanity in the people you’d think deserve the worst. Their sins are repugnant, but their reasons can be valid, triggering my sense of humanity and degrees of sympathy for the crimes they committed that go against human nature themselves. There is often enormous torment underlying the surface of the wicked, the root of a person narrating a different story, which also lays opposition to the notion of ‘actions speak louder than words’, because though they at times do, they don’t elucidate the whole story. Though choice may speak of character, its doesn’t pronounce a whole story because an enemy can also start out as a victim. For moments I saw the antagonists as something other than antagonists. I loved this about the representation of some of the wicked in 'A Reaper at the Gates,' making me believe that some can even have a chance at redemption? Though perhaps I’m pushing it :D
“You don’t know what love is.”
“Ah, but I do. For I was born to love. It was my calling, my purpose. Now it is my curse. I know love better than any other creature alive”
This series casts it’s persistently plagued but doggedly intrepid characters in an unpleasantly battered and dogmatic world, with nothing fair or just where lives matter. It examines the harshness we can concentrate as people against our own, the way the suffering challenge life by hoping their lives will improve. Running from the Empire, the Scholars also run from the worst for a better life, and the Martials perpetuate that which they were borne into. Laia and Helene, though divergent in demeanour and place in society, are strong women who have lost so much, driven by a duty of love for their people. I hope for the life of me that Sabaa Tahir will re-establish my slowly dwindling confidence in this series, so please Sabaa Tahir prove me wrong , scream ‘damn you’ to me, and make the last book in this series be my all and end all, my prince charming, sweeping me off my feet and giving me all the feels I’m waiting for!
“The executioner has arisen. The traitor walks free. Beware! The Reaper approaches, flames in his wake, and he shall set the world alight. And so shall the great wrong be set right.”
‘For an instant, every human with a thousand leagues is united in a moment of ineffable dread. They know. Their hopes, their loves, their joy – all will soon be naught but ash.’ I gave this book 3.5 stars -
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