![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Audiobook read by Paul WoodsonI read three of Lackey's Herald Mage books some time ago, so I'm not all that familiar with Valdemar and it's subsequent history, but since this goes back to the very beginning, I thought I'd give it a try when it popped up on an Audible deak. Duke Kordas of Valdemar is planning tyo escape the corrupt Eastern Empire, not just himself and his family, but all the people currently living in Valdemar, together with his precious horses - including the famed 'Golds.' To do this he needs to avoid attracting the evil emperor's attention for long enough for his mages to create a gate to a place so far distant the emperor can't follow. The plan is going well, the gate has become a possibility, but at the last minute Kordas is called to the capital on the emperor's whim, There, while trying to appear a nonentity, he finds unbearable amounts of injustice and cruelty, from children held hostages for the good behaviour of their noble parents, to enslaved air spirits trapped in lifesize doll bodies. Gradually his plans expand. Can he save everyone who deserves to be saved and if he does can he save himself?
The story is relatively slight, but the book is world-building heavy, including minutely detailed descriptions of how barge hulls are grown organically, and step by step, blow by blow details of how things work from machinery to . There are other viewpoint character, mainly Kordas's wife and her sister, but the story hangs on Kordas himself and he's a likeable leading character, though not without a few flaws.
I'm not 100% convinced by the reader, he has a laid back style that sounds almost bored by what he's reading.
