All know it is difficult to bring a child to full term in the rain wilds and Malta, heavily swollen with pregnancy, can only hope that this child will not be stillborn. Other characters that have a part to play in this book are the Elderlings, Malta and Reyn Khuprus, whom we find in Cassarick awaiting the birth of their child. Treachery haunts him yet again and Chalced’s reach is closer than he thought. Hunting is limited and takes too much time, supplies are running low, emotions are running too high, and keepers and dragons alike are beginning to despair at their collective situation.Ĭaptain Leftrin has left his beloved Alise at Kelsingra and returned to Cassarick to collect supplies and the keepers’ pay, but the politics and corruption of the Trader’s Council greet him and he realises the plot to slay dragons for the supposed healing properties of their bodies may go deeper than he first thought. With the river only traversable by flight, and the dragons underfed and malformed, the keepers and dragons are failing now, and so disappointingly close to their goal. Instead, we have weak and flightless dragons that are trapped outside of the city by an uncrossable span of the Rain Wild river. In the patchy ancestral memories of the dragons, it was a city filled with life, where Elderlings would tend to the dragons in all their glory and the two races lived side by side in opulent splendour. Thymara, Tats, Rapskal and the other dragon keepers have finally found the legendary city of Kelsingra, although it is not all they thought it would be. This is the mark of work that will live on for generations, I suspect. These echoes of the Assassin, Liveship and Tawny Man trilogies, and all that has gone on in this world before, are really one of the great strengths of Hobb’s writing that she is able to keep alive, years later, characters that we have left far behind us in time and telling. Although I’m skipping from volume one to volume three of the Rain Wilds Chronicles, it is perhaps apt to illustrate the marked difference in reader perception as the saga has progressed, and this book unlike its earlier counterpart scored five stars and rightly deserves them.Ĭity of Dragons begins with a snapshot of the long missing dragon Tintaglia and her mate Icefyre, and straight away I was filled with happy memories of the stories of Fitz and the Fool that I so love from Hobb’s earlier career. It felt somewhat appropriate to review City of Dragons for Fantasy-Faction in answer to my review of the first book of this series that went live on the site in March.
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