The Hidden Queen is the second book in Peter V. Brett’s series The Nightfall Saga, a trilogy that serves as a sequel to the five-part Demon Cycle. I spotted it at a bookstore a few weeks ago, and I’m so out of the loop on fantasy books these days that I hadn’t even known it was out. So I picked it up, and I finished it off about a week and a half ago. (This review is delayed because I took last week off from…pretty much everything. For mental health reasons, to be specific.)
This book picks up right where its predecessor, The Desert Prince, left off, in the mostly ruined city of Fort Krasia, called Desert Spear by its inhabitants. Our protagonists are the same as in the previous book, and are the children of the major players from the Demon Cycle. Olive functions as your traditional "girl pretending to be a boy so she can fight" trope, but with the added twist that she’s actually a hermaphrodite, so technically is a boy. Darin is…well, kind of a wimp, and a self-admitted coward, but he has what can best be described as superpowers: a magic akin to that of the demons who are the enemies of the series.
More specifically, the enemy in this case is the often-unnamed demon king. (Incidentally, the finale will be titled The Demon King.) He was a prisoner way back in The Core, the last book of the Demon Cycle. He found a way to sneak out during the climax of that book, spent a generation in hiding, and is now trying to create a new demon queen to finish off the free peoples of humanity once and for all. And if he can get some revenge on those who wronged him way back when, that’s even better.
The big reveal of The Desert Prince, then, was that he was working towards that goal. After a devastating battle, a number of prominent leaders of the Free Cities and the Krasians were taken prisoner. And that’s where the troubles with this book start.
The Nightfall Saga really is a direct sequel. If you didn’t read the previous series, you won’t know or care who these older people are. Sure, you can tell that Leesha is Olive’s mother and the duchess of the largest free city, that Darin’s father Arlen was a hero who saved the world, then went on to be worshipped as a literal Second Coming.
But that’s about it. So many important backstory details are left unsaid, and this has to be because it’s assumed that you’ve read the Demon Cycle. If you didn’t, you’re going to be completely lost on most of the worldbuilding, most of the geopolitics, and most of the magic system. The Desert Prince doesn’t help, nor does this book.
Part of the reason The Hidden Queen doesn’t do much exposition about the events that came before is because it’s too busy doing…nothing at all. Nearly the first half of the book serves as little more than a way to get the main characters back into position for a new campaign. Lots of overland travel, a few scenes of political intrigue, and a couple of demon attacks fill 200 pages or so, with a relatively brief stop in New Krasia, the conquered lands bordering the Free Cities of Thesa.
Only then does the action get going, except that it doesn’t quite yet, because there’s a power vacuum to be filled. Here lies the second of the book’s major troubles. While the woke mind virus has made "gender identity" an issue—it’s really not—a character like Olive, who is, due to magical shenanigans before her birth, a natural hermaphrodite at the age of understanding what that entails really does present narrative problems with the English language.
A good author might tie this into a larger narrative structure, a tale of adolescent confusion and acceptance. To be fair, Brett does manage some strides in this direction: Olive has an interrupted fling with a girl and a more protracted affair with a young man in The Desert Prince, for example. But he can’t quite pull it off with depth. Instead, he comes across as tiptoeing the minefield of identity politics, constantly talking about "identifying" and "presenting". Honestly, I’ve seen authors of hentai who handled it better.
Darin, by contrast, is better written. His primary conflict is within himself, the struggle of a physically weak young man trying to live up to his idealized mental image of the father he never knew. His powers make him a pariah, as well as a perfect sneak, and he’s the driving force behind most of the plot; this contrasts with Olive, whose only abnormal abilities are super-strength and Wolverine-level healing. She leads by force of will. Darin tries not to lead at all, but ends up being listened to because he’s insightful.
He’s also autistic. That wasn’t something that came through much in The Desert Prince, but it’s a lot clearer here. He doesn’t like crowds or hugs. He doesn’t understand emotions. His response to a young woman’s "I love you" is, "Why?" (I’ve asked the same question before, though, so call that one necessary but not sufficient.) It’s one of those cases where you have to read between the lines a bit, and that’s perfectly fine. Autism is a diagnosis that is purely modern. The Renaissance-to-Baroque setting wouldn’t have a word for it. And unlike Olive’s hermaphroditism, the author manages to make Darin’s autism click. Once you realize it, things make a lot more sense.
But some things don’t make much sense at all. This isn’t a fault of The Hidden Queen specifically, so much as it’s an issue with Brett as an author. And it’s a consistent issue, one that has been a feature of every book since The Warded Man.
Most readers would complain about his choice of dialect for dialogue—and also narration in this series, since it’s written in first-person present tense, presumably to avoid any pronoun issues regarding Olive—but I’ve never had trouble understanding it. I can only assume that’s because I’m a Southerner who speaks an Appalachian dialect, which is pretty close to the rural speech of the book. "Ent" instead of "ain’t" trips me up, but that’s about it.
No, Brett’s biggest failing is one that has risen in prominence as his books have gone on, and they’re only more glaring in today’s world. The Krasians are bloodthirsty savages, barbarians who combine the worst traits of Sunni Muslims, Ottoman sultans, and Chinese courtiers. They conquered one of the duchies of Thesa 15 years ago—in book time and real time—and killed or enslaved those who fought against them. They tried to do the same to two of the other Free Cities, Lakton and Angiers, but were stopped in what was a major arc of the Demon Cycle series. They not only practice slavery, but have a rigid caste system, a warrior culture practically based on rape, and a prickly sense of pride in all of it.
That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t so obvious that the author idolizes them. Krasians are shown as smarter and stronger, more powerful and more pious than their counterparts in the Free Cities. Worse, they’re believed to be all of those by the very same people they spent multiple books attempting to conquer. Yet the evidence quite clearly shows that they’re a culture in the same way that ISIS is. They never create, but only destroy. They have no philosophers or scientists, nor would they want them. Their proudest moment was a full three millennia before the books even start.
Somehow, this doesn’t bother any of the characters from more civilized lands. Krasians have a number of slurs directed at the "soft" people of Thesa, and Olive often finds herself nodding along with them, only to get ready to pick a fight when her best friend’s father doesn’t immediately fall to his knees before her kidnappers. The only character who genuinely seems as put off by their presence as any sane person should be is Lord Rhinebeck. He gets chewed out by Olive for saving her from being killed by one of them, and somehow that rational act is enough to end her brief infatuation with him.
"But they’re Muslim ninjas," you can almost hear Peter Brett saying in response. Because that’s pretty much all they are. As far as readers are concerned, that’s all they’ve ever been. They’re a gimmick that spiraled out of control, I think. The alternative is that I’m reading books by an author who really does venerate the sort of culture that gave us rape gangs, Christmas market stabbings, and beheaded journalists.
I’ve rambled on long enough. The Hidden Queen is a decent read if you can ignore its flaws. If you can let yourself escape into the world—reading the previous books in both series is a prerequisite to that—then it has its fun moments. And Darin is a well-written, well-rounded character who is the genuine bright spot. Other than that, it’s half a book of wandering around, a few dozen pages of hype for barbarians, and a payoff that’s just too short.
I’ll read The Demon King once it’s out, just to say I finished the series, and because the overall plot really is interesting. I like the struggle of humanity against an implacable foe. Brett actually does a decent job of imagining what a civilization dealing with that struggle would look like, and those worldbuilding gems are worth it.
But they’re diamonds in the rough, I have to admit.