In the first book in her 'A Realm Hereafter' series, 'The King's Son', J. F. Castillo introduced us to a kingdom called Belasi, surrounded by a vast wall to keep out the savage Bero Toc. The king's son is Exendrik and he's clearly the lead, sent on a crucial mission by his father and Lady Etha, who leads the Temple Guard. He's accompanied by thief Fen and interacts with a few supporting characters, and, well, we have a general idea of how these stories go from decades of reading fantasy series.

Now, I won't say that some of that traditional stuff won't happen in this series as well, but Castillo clearly won't adhere to convention if she doesn't want to and she pulls the rug out from under us. The quest turns out to be a distraction, because the king invited the Bero Toc into a trap in order to slaughter them. Exendrik slays his father at the end of the book, without us learning his name, but he dies in the effort. That means that the only lead we have left is Fen and the last act of the book is to hang her. Oh yeah, I didn't see that coming! So who's going to lead this series? I simply had to keep going to find out.

Before I hazard my guess, I'll mention that Castillo has one more rug to pull out from under us. In the first book, we never left Belasi, but we're about to leave it behind for the vast majority of this book. Exendrik is dead and thrown over the kingdom's wall, but Fen makes it out alive. Bartel and Lappet, supporting characters in the first book, are alive too but now wanted, so they want out of Dodge, especially after Lady Etha is executed. Fen soon joins them in Bavora Forest, but the gate is locked and the key is with the new queen, former servant Klarette. They visit Nesair, who turns out to be Etha's sister, and she suggests they go over the wall to the mountains of the Bero Toc.

And so they do, which means Castillo isn't deepening the story she began in 'The King's Son', but expanding it instead beyond a single kingdom to the lands around it. We learn a great deal in this sequel and I'm especially happy to say that we do so to a much more consistent tempo than we did the first book. I wonder all the more why the second half of 'The King's Son' felt so threadbare. It doesn't here. Everything unfolds at a consistent pace and so this feels much more substantial as a complete volume. Maybe that's why it's as third as long again.

So Fen, Bartel and Lappet cross the desert, knock on the huge door and are let into the mountain of the Bero Toc. Well, Bartel stays outside because he's a dragon, but they treat him with respect because of that and build him a shelter. Clearly, the Bero Toc are not savages, whatever the king with no name believed. They may or may not be disfigured, because they wear cloaks and hoods, a vague uniform that hides their faces. I don't believe we see the face of any Bero Toc at any point, though we do learn that Queen Aleandre has no eyes.

We learn a lot more about her too, but I won't spoil that because she deserves to tell you herself. What I will say is that we spend most of our time in the Bero Toc's mountain, which turns out to be a huge valley with a lake in it, surrounded by houses built into the mountainside. They also have a huge library with books going back to before the war. I'm not entirely sure if the old language, in which many of these books are written, is English, thus identifying this world as a post-apocalyptic version of our own, but that's the impression I got. Certainly the Bero Toc rarely have children, an effect of the war they had to endure while the Belasi hid underground.

It takes a while for Fen to gain access because the Bero Toc are naturally suspicious. After all, the three visitors have come from Belasi, which just slaughtered a whole bunch of their people, in an overt act of genocide wrapped up in betrayal of hospitality. Sure, the king's dead but it's hardly a good look for a kingdom. So they take their time, the Queen presumably learning plenty from her spies in the background. Revelations open more and more doors until Fen makes it to the library, finally realising that the more she understands something the more power she has over it. That's why she couldn't save Exendrik, because she had no understanding of anatomy. Now she can learn and, in doing so, gain power.

That's about all I'll tell you about where the story goes because it has quite a few twists and turns that deserve to not be spoiled. However, there are things I can say. For one, while I'm still not sure as to who will lead this series, I gained a much better idea a quarter of the way into this one. This one, however, is led by Fen, at least for most of its running time. Around a third of the way in, she makes a friend among the Bero Toc, Layna, and, while she remains firmly a supporting character, for quite a while we see more of her than we do Lappet or Bartel. Eventually, they find a little bit of parity but it's still fundamentally Fen's book.

I'll also add that, as the title suggests, there are dragons here. It appears that they come in three flavours; but, surprisingly, they aren't delineated by species but philosophy. The Kin-su desire that humans and dragons foster active connections. Shin-si prefer to keep a distance. Nox-i are actively antagonistic and will happily attack humans if they see them. Those differences come into play as the book progresses. We also learn more about certain characters we met in the first book, maybe things they didn't even know about themselves. Surely we didn't.

Anything else would probably count as spoilers, wherever it sits in the book. This is an odd volume from that standpoint. I've exposed some things that don't happen until the halfway mark but left other things from much earlier unsaid, because I'd feel wrong in spilling those beans. So I'll end by saying that Castillo continues to deepen her world, even if it's often in directions we don't expect. There's another tough ending, though not as ballsy a one as the first book, and I'm eager to learn where the third book is going to go.

'The Dragon Queen' is a better book in almost every way than 'The King's Son'. It's a longer book, which fits the epic fantasy feel. It's more consistent and that applies to the pacing as much as the story. There's more history to ground us and the characters are deeper, especially Fen, who has a number of revelations to absorb and relationships to repair. We learn much more about dragons too, Bartel being the only one we met in the first book. The only downside is a sprinkling of typos, annoying ones because they're ones spellcheck doesn't catch because they're all real words, just not the right ones, like "heeled" for "healed", "poured" for "pored", "clothe on polls" for "cloth on poles". That isn't a unique problem to this book.

So, next month, I'll happily continue on into book three, which is 'The Witch of Belasi'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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