Kushiel's Avatar

I've just finished Kushiel's Avatar the last book in Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel's Legacy trilogy, which two of the principal threads left over from the previous books: the curse that binds Hyacinthe to the Three Sisters after he became Master of the Strait in Kushiel's Dart and the sequestering of Melisande Shahrizai's son Imriel at the end of Kushiel's Chosen.

As prophesied at the end of Kushiel's Chosen, Phèdre nó Delaunay has enjoyed a decade of peace, during which she has settled into her relationship with Joscelin Verreuil and continued her fruitless search through the Yeshuite scriptures in an attempt to find a way to break Hyacinthe's curse. The calm is shattered when she is summoned to La Serenissima by Melisande, who remains confined to the temple of Asherat-of-the-Sea following her failed coup. Melisande reveals that her son Imriel has disappeared from the place where he was being raised in ignorance of his heritage and all the resources at her command have been unable to locate him. She charge Phèdre to recover the boy and Phèdre, knowing that the child is innocent of his mother's schemes and that his recovery is also desired by Queen Ysandre, reluctantly pledges herself to the cause in exchange for information to help her locate one of the missing Tribes of Israel: the Children of Dân.

Satisfying herself that the child was not killed by Duc Barquiel L'Envers, the queen's powerful uncle, Phèdre discovers that child has been taken to Menekhet by a group of Carthaginian slavers. As Menekhet is on the way to Jebe-Barkal, the first step on the path to finding the missing tribe, Phèdre and Joscelin travel to Iskandria to help the Queen's delegation in their search. Concentrating on the general population of the city, rather than confining themselves to its aristocracy as the delegation have been doing, Phèdre realises that Imriel has been taken north to Khebbel-im-Akkad and on to Drujan, where a group of malign priests dedicated to the worship of Angra Mainyu have seized power. Motivated both by her pledge to Melisande and by the stern demands of the angel Kushiel, Phèdre reluctantly postpones her trip to Jebe-Barkal and instead heads into mountains of Drujan with only Joscelin for company.

The rest of the book concerns the hell Phèdre and Joscelin go through in the Drujan capital of Daršanga at the hands of the Mahrkagir, its psychotic ruler, and the eventual resumption of the quest for the Tribe of Dân and the Name of God. Along they way the pair find themselves forced to deal with the impact the horrors of Daršanga have had on their relationship and confronting their feelings for Imriel, the son of their oldest enemy. Rather than rushing to a conclusion the novel gradually winds down, with the protagonists returning to Terre D'Ange to deal the political fallout from their decisions before the eventual confrontation with Rahab, the monstrous angel of the deep.

Kushiel's Avatar provides a excellent and satisfying end to the trilogy, balancing a dark beginning and middle with a more hopeful section towards the end as the various characters process the consequences of the lengths to which they've been forced to recover Imriel. The book stresses the fantastic elements of the story more than its predecessors, where the supernatural was largely limited to the power of the Master of the Strait and the occasional stretching of coincidence. Here there can be no doubting the presence of evil in the form of Angra Mainyu nor the powers of good, from comfort granted by Blessed Elua and his companions to the ultimate intervention of the One God, whose Name is used to banish the Angel of the Deep.

ETA: Corrected the titles of the last two novels, which were consistently the wrong way round in my original review.