#daylight war

The third book didn’t have very much in the way of character development and there wasn’t much plot advancement altogether. It still remains an entertaining read, but it also gives the feeling that 80% of the book could have been cut out for the same amount of actual progress. 

Krasia, Witch-Priestesses, and Harems

Daylight War adds in a new point of view character in the form of, Inevera, who is the First Wife of Jardir, the Krasian Deliverer messiah-figure who betrays Arlen in the first book. Her POV covers her backstory and a lot of things we already know from Jardir’s POV in Desert Spear. Arlen, Renna, Rojer, Leesha all continue to have their own POV chapters and every single character involved has a lot of sex. I have nothing against this when it’s well done, but it started to feel a bit unnecessary as the book went on. As Brett explored more of Krasian society, it also clearly became an orientalist stereotype. Krasian society comes down to these things:

Proud warrior society obsessed with honor

Harems of women available for male pleasure

Inevera is a dama’ting, the Krasian order of priestesses who tend the sick and learn demon bone magic. They are also well-known for using the demon bone dice to prophesize the future and every warrior is given a reading to determine whether or not he is suitable to take the uniform as a rite of passage to adulthood. It is death to strike a dama’ting and even the proud, deadly Krasian warriors are terrified of them. Apparently it is within the rights of a dama’ting to kill a man who has offended her and this would not cause a fuss. So from this, we know the dama’ting are feared and respected--something shown even in the first book during Arlen’s POV in The Warded Man.

The dama’ting are also female-only, served by eunuchs to preserve their chastity, and learn pillow dancing so that they may serve better in bed. All of them, to a one, take lessons on how to pleasure men and they are apparently well-known for their skills. This, despite being a female-only order where dama’ting rarely have contact with men except on the occasions where they need to produce a daughter to succeed them in the future generations.

This might be justified in-book by how the original dama’ting were the wives of the first deliverer, but the contrast between their fear-inducing witch/priestess status and their sexualization is both strange and jarring. Also, due to the introduction of several Krasian women, the pillow dance makes many, many appearances. Not to mention Inevera goes on to teach the dama’ting beginner’s pillow dancing classes before her marriage to Jardir. Altogether, the emphasis on the pillow dance, used by Inevera, Amanvah, and Sikvah to seduce and pleasure the men in their lives, seems pretty unnecessary except as a means to make the book more racy. It also gets repetitive after the first appearance, since every cut-to-black involving a sex scene with those three seems to involve them pulling their finger cymbals out of their harem silks. It’s as though they always have to do some kind of dance before getting down to the quick and dirty, instead of maybe finding other ways to explore each others’ bodies and keep sex interesting over the years.

I found it interesting that dama’ting learn martial arts as part of their training, which makes use of pressure points in the human body to disable the use of limbs or other vital points. This is their own brand of sharusakh, not shared by either the warriors or the clerics in Krasian society. Inevera puts this to great use in Daylight War by personally killing the Kaji damaji’ting (head priestess) and defeating her former martial arts master in single combat so that she may take control of her clan’s dama’ting. What I find strange is that despite her skills, Inevera couldn’t manage to kill Leesha in Desert Spear. Leesha is many things, but a fighter is not one of them. Given the disparity in their abilities, with Inevera having been trained since childhood and later becoming one of the best users of the dama’ting martial art, it’s almost certain that Leesha should have been deader than dead. We can possibly do a handwave since they were both under the mind coreling’s influence during this fight, but why build up Inevera in book 3 if she was going to get trashed by events that already happened in book 2?

To be honest, I like Inevera. She’s a nice contrast to Leesha’s relative altruism and, considering how she’s portrayed as scheming, manipulative, and bitchy in book 2, it was interesting to see her viewpoint on things. From Jardir and Abban, we only get the impression that she’s poisonous and is using Jardir for the sake of winning the imminent demon war. Not to mention seeing Leesha as a rival for control over Jardir. Inevera’s chapters reveal she’s been helping Jardir since he was twelve and that she actually loves him. Also that she had to climb to power in the dama’ting order, mirroring Jardir’s own rise through the warrior ranks, and brought Jardir’s other dama’ting wives to him as the heir apparents of each of their own clans. That’s right--for all Jardir and Abban’s talk of how Inevera will not abide a rival like Leesha, Inevera had to dominate the chosen successors of each tribe’s dama’ting, every one of them proud and thinking themselves above her, before Jardir was named Sharum Ka. She has the benefit of the demon dice backing her up with prophecy, of course, but it’s one thing to be first among her husband’s wives in name and first in actual power. Every one of those dama’ting was accustomed to their orders being obeyed. It seems a wonder to me that Leesha would be such a threat, even with Jardir’s support behind her. Inevera has played this game much longer and though she hadn’t had a true rival in a decade, Leesha seems to be much exaggerated as “indomitable”.

The Herb Gatherer

Which brings us to Leesha. In truth, Leesha has always been a slightly difficult character for me to like. When she starts out, she’s a  young girl in an unhappy household. Her mother’s infidelity and controlling nature gathered some sympathy from me, and then Leesha grew into her own by becoming the herb gatherer’s apprentice. They’re a mix of doctor and chemist, since they also keep some “old world” science alive and Leesha will go on to become a leading figure for Cutter/Deliverer’s Hollow.

To sum her up, Leesha is smart, caring, forgiving, and as beautiful as the dawn.

At the same time, pretty much every single story arc involving her eventually comes down to her love life and her sex appeal, along with the troubles it causes her. In the first book, the emphasis wasn’t as heavy. She goes from a child in love with the local handsome bully, to a possible romantic entanglement with Arlen, the northern Deliverer. She also gets raped by bandits before meeting Arlen, and is incredibly upset and angry when Arlen and Rojer leave the bandits to be eaten by demons later. 

This incident was expanded upon in book 2, when she shows Rojer a couple of poisoned needles she keeps in her apron pockets at all times. The significance of this lies in that when she was raped, she had the choice to kill the bandits, but she realized she couldn’t kill them even to defend herself. She wouldn’t. So when Arlen and Rojer cause the death of the bandits later, her anger and horror comes partly from her herb gatherer’s oath to help people, and from the way their choices undid hers. She suffered for her choice, and in the end, it amounted to nothing. 

I really liked this scene from Desert Spear. Her reaction made a lot more sense with that information and it added to her character, rather than implying she blindly opposed killing because it’s bad on principle. The bandits were no saints--they left Leesha and Rojer to die, and they would have if Arlen hadn’t saved the two of them. But where that scene built up her character, Leesha’s character growth kind of went in odd directions.

By book 2 and book 3, it’s established that Leesha is an amazing warder. She’s creating new wards by altering the ones she knows, and by this point she’s surpassed Arlen’s warding. This only adds to her credibility among Deliverer’s Hollow, where she already has significant standing as the leading herb gatherer. In an odd development, however, Leesha also begins to reconcile and take advice from her mother. Her mother, who was controlling, abusive, negligent, demanding, and whose infidelity to her father caused her no end of anguish when Leesha was young.

Elona is beautiful like her daughter Leesha, but cold, sharp-tongued, and believes in using sex appeal to control men. Leesha’s smarts come in part from her mother, who “sees things with a cold clarity” in Rojer’s words. The world of the Demon Cycle is indeed a patriarchal one so it’s hardly surprising that Elona would give such advice, but it’s really questionable whether this is a good direction for Leesha. Leesha is beautiful--Brett emphasizes this--and she certainly has her hang-ups about preserving her purity, at least until she starts becoming more open as the books progress. In a way, Leesha probably did need to come to terms with her sexuality, but going from accepting it to being encouraged to use it to control men? It cheapens Leesha. It cheapens her other accomplishments and reduces her, as does the constant emphasis on her love life in every single book. Her mother Elona has never been presented as a role model, but her growing influence on Leesha certainly doesn’t seem for the better. Plus, with the story revolving around her relationship with Rojer, Arlen, and Jardir, it’s hard to separate her as an individual from the men she’s entangled with. Book 3 makes her even less sympathetic as a character when her and Rojer get into a fight over her relationship with Jardir and Rojer chews her out for her “holier-than-thou attitude”. Her father, meek, mild, forever under Elona’s thumb, actually raised his voice to Leesha before she realized what a hypocrite she was. 

This basically boils down to what I dislike about Leesha. Her hypocrisy, and how she’s always romantically entangled. I keep trying to like her, but the way the story presents her just doesn’t do it. Where healing is concerned, Leesha has it all down. She stands by her gatherer’s oath and she’ll help even those who try to hurt her and kill her. We see this when she spares the bandits and when she helps Amanvah, who had tried to poison her. But where her love life is concerned, Leesha’s a tangled mess and her relationship with Jardir leads into all sorts of hypocrisy. The infidelity of Leesha’s mother had a huge impact on her childhood, but Leesha still sleeps with Jardir several times, despite knowing that Jardir has 14 wives. This is most definitely scandalous by Northern sensibilities, and Leesha insists on being a singular wife for her own wedding, but she’s attracted to Jardir and suddenly the moral questionability of such an affair is irrelevant. Having Inevera’s viewpoint only makes it worse because as the reader, we know she loves her husband truly. And we also know that Arlen warned Leesha about Jardir beforehand, and that Jardir tried to kill Arlen. Turning the entire Hollow/Krasian confrontation into a scandalous romance just feels wrong, and Leesha comes out the worse for it.

The Wild Girl

To her credit, Leesha comes around fast enough once she gets back to the Hollow and talks with Arlen about what truly happened in the desert between him and Jardir. At the same time, this is when Renna Tanner shows up and meets Leesha for the first time. And it does not go well.

Leesha’s failed romance with Arlen isn’t for lack of affection on her part. The third book makes it clear she has feelings for Arlen, which are all thrown into conflict with her relationship with Jardir and Arlen making Renna Tanner her fiance. I have to admit, I was delighted when Renna stares down Leesha. After Leesha had the gall to shout, “Like you’re one to talk!” when Arlen realizes she slept with Jardir and points at Renna, implying Arlen had “cheated” on their unspoken sexual tension, Renna grabs Leesha’s wrist and reminds her that Arlen has promised to marry her and that their relationship is none of Leesha’s business. This is the first major knockdown Leesha has in the series and, given all of Leesha’s increasing unreasonableness, it was pretty darn satisfying.

Despite this, Renna also falls into a similar failing. Renna is defined by Arlen. She wanted to escape her sexually abusive dad’s farm, and she grabs onto Arlen like the lifesaver he is, hurtling headfirst into the world of hunting demons. I like Renna. She’s got a kind of honesty and simplicity to her character, and she humanizes Arlen. At the same time, it seems like her humanizing effect on Arlen comes at the cost of her own. New to eating demon flesh and fighting demons, she’s aggressive and wild, and cuts off a guy’s hand for grabbing her inappropriately. She relies on intimidation and freaks out when a lot of people surround her, understandable because she nearly got lynched, but she hasn’t moved past her initial recklessness yet. Renna loves Arlen she spents too much time in a hazy honeymoon glow, and doesn’t really do anything significant on her own. She copies Arlen. She wants to be there for him when he goes to fight in the Core, but nothing she’s done has really made her stand out as a character, awesome fighting ability or not.

Final Thoughts