Romantasy before the trend: Kushiel's Legacy
or, love will find you in the end
New short story by the one and only
over at the Broken River Writers Collective!
David is truly one of the best. Has such a unique and off-kilter perspective. One of the most unique voices out there.
Also, check out Ghosts of East Baltimore and its sequel Ghosts of West Baltimore, some of the wildest books I’ve read.
Love as thou wilt.
Long ago, the land of Terre d’Ange was blessed by Elua and his companions.
Elua ben Yeshua was conceived by Yeshua and the tears of Magdalene. Being the illegitimate son of the son of God, he was rejected by many in his travels around the world. He was accompanied by a host of angels and with them he spread the gift of love to mortal men and women. The children of Elua and the angels became the D’Angeline of Terre d’Ange.
This is the backdrop to Kushiel’s Legacy, a trilogy by Jacqueline Carey published from 2001 to 2003. It’s set in a reimagined France (Terre d’Ange) and has many cultures familiar to us, though the history is all quite different, which makes their names different as well. But it makes for a fun little puzzle to assemble, as you come to realize the Tiberian Empire was the Roman Empire or that the lands of Alba are England and so on.
This is some of the cleverest kinds of worldbuilding. Rather than try to invent the world from whole cloth, you take a few details from our world and give them a twist. Then follow the implications of those twists. Carey plants a garden here and allows us to look upon her world in the same way we viewed the opulence of King Louis’ court at Versailles and then she waters it with her imagination and we all witness the bounty springing forth.
We begin with Phèdre, a child of no name and no family who is sold to one of the houses where she will learn to be a courtesan. This is not so bad a thing in Terre d’Ange, given that their entire nation and people descend from the son of the son of God and God’s angels who willingly copulated with anyone and everyone who desired this.
To the people of Terre d’Ange, sex is not only quite liberal but it is, in a way, sacred. On our Earth, Catholics have their Communion wafers but in Terre d’Ange, the people have a different kind of sacred communion.
One thing that separates Phèdre from almost everyone else is a scarlet mote in her eye. This is, at first and by many, seen as a great flaw. It may be why her mother abandoned her. But she is discovered by Anafiel Delaunay who takes her in and gives her his name.
From there she’s pulled into intrigue and mystery and continent spanning adventures that are often not of her choosing. Delaunay trains her both as a courtesan and spy, but he also recognizes this scarlet mote as Kushiel’s Dart. For Phèdre is blessed by Elua’s companion, Kushiel. And this is not a kindness, this blessing.
For Kushiel was God’s punisher who understood the pain and chastisement he gave were acts of love. And so those who follow Kushiel or who are devoted to Kushiel also see pain as an act of love.
Some of you see where this goes for little Phèdre.
Blessed by Kushiel to find pleasure in pain.
I’ll say no more about the goings ons of the trilogy because I really do think you should read it. It’s as brutal and full of intrigue as George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire with the same kind of intricate and robust worldbuilding, full of deep mysteries, long histories, and strange and wild magic.
It’s also a bit more inviting in that I think the first novel works quite well as a standalone.
You don’t often hear about these books, which is a shame. I feel that Carey published them about twenty years too early because if they came out now the tiktok algorithm would spread it like wildfire.
This age of Romantasy, where the bestselling and fastest selling books are all erotically charged and sexually explicit novels set in fantastical worlds, was made for Jacqueline Carey’s series. But, sadly, the books are decades old by now.
And so I’d like to give them a bit of a shot in the arm. If you’re a romantasy reader, I think you should turn back and pick these up. If you’ve never read a romance, let alone romantasy, I think this is a great place to start.
They’re lush and evocative. They’re erotic and explicit. The language is beautiful and often haunting.
While I have heard many critiques of romantasy writing—that it’s full of cliches or that the writing is sloppy or unskilled, that it’s YA+fucking—Carey’s Kushiel’s Legacy is a truly masterful work. From worldbuilding to plotting to language, it really is an accomplishment.
This is entirely a series written for adults and while it has all the brutality and intrigue of A Song of Ice and Fire, it is a very feminine work to stand beside that overwhelmingly masculine one.
I find that many novels and movies and shows demonstrate a female character’s strength by giving her stereotypically masculine characteristics. They’re often badass fighters who have no respect for authority, who aren’t afraid to go it alone, who like drinking and fucking with no attachments.
Phèdre is a very strong character but she also shows the kind of strength more typically associated with women. She’s a courtesan, trained in love, so she’s not going to out-fight or overpower someone.
That’s not who she is. And even were she to try, it would not go well for her.
And so rather than take a path of violence, she finds power in subservience, in compliance. It makes for a daring, dangerous game she often plays where her very life depends on the passions and desires of violent men. But we see how she finds a way forward through and with such people.
In different hands, Phèdre would be a master manipulator. She’d use her feminine wiles to turn armies and nations, but she actually does something far more interesting.
Everywhere Phèdre goes, she builds coalitions.
Even when she’s enslaved and powerless, she finds friendship. She is always plotting to achieve her goals, but we see the very human conditions she must deal with. And for all that she was trained as a courtesan and spy, she cannot shut her humanity away. She is, perhaps, overfull of compassion. And so she makes genuine relationships everywhere she goes. Even when she’s despised, she seeks friendship and takes what scraps she can and slowly builds those into companionship, into friendship, and finally into the kinds of bonds that tether lives together through hardships and tragedies. Often forged by trauma and terror, she builds community over and over again in this series.
She does it through kindness. Through compassion. Through curiosity, through genuine interest.
It’s this, more than anything else, that makes the novels a marvel. Makes her a heroine to remember for decades.
She will never beat you in a fight, but she doesn’t have to. While you were enjoying your status, she was building connections with the servants and slaves, with the women domineered over by powerful, violent men. Mothers and wives and children become her friends and allies. And so when you turn your sword in her direction, you find that all the thousands of invisible people who make your life possible are now clenching their kitchen knives, their gardening shears. In that moment, you may understand, for the first time, the foundation beneath your feet has been weakened, has been turned to sand. And all those little people who you never noticed outnumber you and look upon you with seething hatred.
It’s not a perfect trilogy. I think the first book is the best one. The second and third follow a mini-formula formed by the first. But there is a lot of beauty and wonder and magnificence here. The language is lush, the world is evocative, the characters are memorable and worth rooting for.
And at the center of everything is a doomed, tragic, but inescapable romance.
But I’ll leave that for you to discover.
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Thanks for this recommendation. Had not heard of it before but sounds like something I would enjoy particularly if the language is beautiful.
Truly an incredible trilogy!