Review

(Please be advised that this is an adult romance.)

Osric Mordaunt, an assassin with the deadly Fyren order, has a problem: he’s suffering from seith degeneration, commonly known as seith rot. In about three to four months, his seith, or magical power, will dwindle significantly, rendering him unable to kill people for a living and hence to his own death (no such thing as a retired Fyren). And there’s no known cure. But, his expensively retained physickers tell him, if there’s anyone — anyone — with even the remotest chance of being able to treat it, it’s Aurienne Fairhrim, a Haelan (magical healer) and a phenomenon, whose knowledge of seith-related medicine is unmatched, and who had some experimental ideas early in her career about integrating the Old Ways into modern medical practice.

Aurienne hasn’t the slightest intention of trying to treat any Fyren for any disease, curable or not. It’s against everything she and her order stands for. But fortunately for Osric, and unfortunately for the waifs and strays of the Tiendoms, there’s a mysterious and uncontained Platt’s Pox outbreak raging, and the Haelen can’t get any funding for vaccine development. Aurienne’s pragmatic boss cuts a secret deal with Osric: twenty million thrymsas in return for Aurienne’s very experimental, and very unlikely to work, treatments.

Pushed together by circumstances and loathing each other on principle and in practice, Aurienne and Osric reluctantly meet up every full moon for secret treatments and to bicker with and insult one another. Then some suspicious events begin to suggest that there’s something big going on — something shady and potentially very, very dangerous — and a need for both of their particular talents to figure out what it could be.

*

I’ve been looking forward to this book release for about a year, and it did not disappoint. Knightley is the author of the Dramione fanfic Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ordeal of Being in Love, the raging success of which led her to this, her first traditionally published novel.

If you enjoy Terry Pratchett (comic fantasy), Ali Hazelwood (slow burn STEMinist romcom) and cheerful British vulgarity in general, you will love this as much as I did. I absolutely adore comedic fiction, and this was so witty & silly. For example:

At Swanstone, duggery was skulled.

This only served to reaffirm Aurienne’s opinion that he was not only a hateful Fyren, but also a monumental twat.

“That’s a messy kill,” said the deofol, jutting its chin towards the body.

“My client wished to send a message,” said Osric.

“Was the message ‘I don’t know where the jugular is and had to stab him twelve times to find it’?” asked the deofol.

And lots, lots more in this sort of light comedy mode, a mode that is mother’s milk to me, raised as I was on the ABC’s neverending supply of Britcom.

Knightley is also a dab hand with beautiful but elegantly understated description, like this:

The sun hovered at the edge of the horizon and was, for a moment, both under it and over it, and, for a moment, it was neither day nor night. The earth tilted. The sun found its vanishing point.

The book starts with a fantasy map (looks like England), a glossary and a pronunciation guide, all of which I advise skipping in order to plunge straight into the story proper. Refer back to it when you need to.

The narrative’s set in a sort of 1800s, sort of English-y world, in which magic is common and women seem to have contemporary rights to work and movement. People move about using their seith (magical powers) via waystones located at various amusingly named pubs. There are carriages, daguerrotypes, cravats and gas lamps (yes! gas lamp fantasy… though there is also electricity), as well as a couple of steampunk-ish inventions, e.g. a Curie machine (X-rays), a Lovelace engine (a sort of digital image projector) and a Franklin diffractor (for examining seith fibres) — big props to Knightley for all the STEMinist references.

Aurienne is a classic STEMinist character, with all the fantasy-STEM lingo:

“No. We cannot simply ‘push a bit of seith’ into those lines. We are talking about one of the most delicate, and poorly understood, structures in the human body. Unlike in the nervous system, we’ve never managed to trigger the activation of latent circuits in a degenerating seith system, nor the genesis of new channels. There is no plasticity – no regeneration. Grafting attempts fail. Transplants fail. What’s dead stays dead.”

(I added single inverted commas to ‘push a bit of seith’ – the original is italicised.)

This novel is billed as having Dramione (Draco x Hermione) energy, and Aurienne is obviously the Hermione here: clever, ethical and doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Osric is the charming but less-ethically burdened Draco-character. The narrative unfolds from their more-or-less alternating third person points of view. This is slow burn – which works – and this is the first book in a duology, so don’t expect everything neatly wrapped up at the end of this volume. Having said that, it definitely has a reasonably satisfactory stage-ending.

Sadly, this is not appropriate for a school library collection, but highly recommended for adults looking for a fun romantasy read. 387 pp.

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Lots of physical & fantasy violence, injuries & death… fairly mild depictions; lots of medical/hospital scenes, including children at risk of a deadly disease; masturbation; a scene set in a brothel; sex workers (treated with respect); lots of comedic vulgarity, e.g. penis jokes, sex jokes, lots of innuendo & smutty humour; frequent comical swearing: f-words, s-words, colloquial sex-related words, one c-word. No actual sex scenes. Main relationship is mlw; minor relationships are mlw, wlw and mlm. Both Osric and Aurienne are bisexual.

*

Knightley, B. (2025). The irresistible urge to fall for your enemy. Orbit.

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