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After several false starts with the first book I read them all in an excited blur. After Game of Kings I read two different books before Queens’ Play. After Queens’ Play I read one other book before Disorderly Knights. 

And after Disorderly Knights I could not stop until I hit the end. 

The excitement I felt through the ever-increasing stakes of Disorderly Knights and Pawn in Frankincense was incredible. The end of Pawn was one of the most devastating and brilliant things I have ever read in my life. 

That rising operatic crescendo of the first four books, can Lymond save himself? Can he save a Queen? Can he save his country? Can he save the world?

Should have become, in books 5 and 6: Can he live with what he’s sacrificed to do it?

Can he live with the consequences of the chess game. Which, small aside, the chess game is thematically brilliant and excellently written, but plotwise is a bit nonsensical. Gabriel, the big bad of two books is neutered very fast, and the antagonist here is suddenly Roxelana, who is a bit, who are you exactly and what on earth are your motivations for doing this?

I mean, Roxelana kills Kharredin for reasons that are extremely unclear. Which, I will forgive, for the very satisfying resolution to this book, but damn it really would have been so much more meaningful if Gabriel had been the architect of that chess game. If Gabriel had really manipulated things so that Lymond had to choose between the children and kill one of them in order to kill Gabriel. 

Because I would like to think that the suffering that act puts Lymond through is what Gabriel means when he tells Lymond: “I have prepared for you a detailed exquisite death. You will not enjoy it.” right after he says that he laments that Lymond perhaps will not suffer enough even with a horrific execution. because after that he will be dead. Surely, Gabriel would enjoy far more, a lifetime of impossible suffering. Which is what is given to Lymond. Or it should have been.

But then, well, I did not like where the series went from about halfway through The Ringed Castle to the end of Checkmate. And I want to unpack that.

I have two problems. The first is that the ending of Pawn was such an incredible wreaking of devastation on Lymond that I was very disappointed to find he seemed to, kind of, get over it. And the second was the way it became a romance novel.

Frankly, I don’t really care for Philippa, or, at least, I liked her fine until she became the love interest. She feels just rather a lot like a female character calibrated to be just special enough for us to believe in the romance, but not so special that readers can’t use her as a handy self insert and imagine themselves being the one to tame this man who believes himself incapable of love. 

Lymond, by the end of Pawn is an almost mythical character. He is basically forced to play God and deal with the consequences. It felt almost fatuous to have him reduced to a character who could play his part in a very traditional romance-novel ending. Especially when this whole series is about complicated relationships. 

This is a man who inspired his brother to hate him out of love, who calls Will Scott lover, who raped a 15 year old because he couldn’t beat her brother, who bullied Robin Stewart into loving him until it killed him, this man, this man, can have a romance novel happy ending? Does he even deserve one?

This man, who knows the only way he can live with what he’s done is to die?

I think he can’t. So my way of reading those final books is to wonder if what we are being presented with is what is really happening at all. (Yes, it’s a cope.)

Lymond emerges from the chess game expecting and planning to die. This is postponed by the promise he makes Philippa. 

He still holds out hope the opium addiction will kill him, but he survives withdrawal. Saying, at one point, “If Marthe comes back in here I will kill her.”

Maybe Marthe’s existence is a problem. Then again, “Marthe,” was the word he spoke to kill his son

Incidentally did you know opium also dulls emotional pain. And withdrawal brings it all back much more intensely. Anyway…

So instead he decides to freeze his emotions to death in Russia. I do not think he is giving very much thought to his parentage while he is in Russia. It’s something Philippa has decided to look into. But he burns her letters about it. Meanwhile he is also throwing up every time he plays chess and not caring either way if his head is cut off. I don’t think his mind is on who his mother is. The aim is staying in Russia forever. As far as possible from what happens.

But then he comes to London and falls in love with Philippa. But who is Philippa to Lymond now?  Philippa was also there. She’s the first person he sees who was there. Philippa is someone who also gave up everything she had to save a child and she succeeded. Maybe that is what he sees in her. Maybe by binding himself to her he can erase what happened. By sticking himself closely to the person who did what he did not. The person whose child lived. 

Maybe that even the reason he married her in the first place, because the taint on her name from being in a harem doesn’t really seem to be a thing at all. 

Being in love with Philippa doesn’t really seem to help at all though. She sits in his life, untouchable, a solution to all his problems that he erects endless false barriers around. These barriers are so significant in keeping them apart and none of them are ever removed, just forgotten about when he finds another one. 

Meanwhile he’s also been presented with a convenient reason he cannot face his family. A reason that has never bothered him before, despite the fact he basically knew all of it, and something he seems quite uninterested in once he does get the truth. 

But maybe though, not wanting to ever see your family again, the people close to you, the only people you share your feelings with ever, might be a good idea if your only way to survive is to bury your feelings forever. 

So he encounters Richard and savages him before going blind. I have no doubt that all his headaches and blindness are caused by his repressed trauma. That blindness is Kharredin. That is the pain coming out any way it can. 

In Sevigny he tells Philippa everything. Or perhaps he does not because we never learn exactly what he said. Does he tell her the truth, or is he trying to find a way to rebuild himself? Rewrite the myth of everything he has done? Unfortunately he’s also having a breakdown so intense he still wants nothing except to die. 

Gabriel is still winning. 

Oh Mill What Hast Thou Ground, he thinks as he tries to die via suicide by flaming mill wheel.

When he is lying, dying in an opium stupor, he thinks of Kharredin. One of the few glimpses we get of him inside Lymond’s point of view. That trauma, is still unprocessed, still locked away. Lymond is trying to die to get to his son, to save his son, he’s still going after him. And no one will let him.