The gripping launch title in Robin LaFevers's His Fair Assassin series, Grave Mercy, focused on the training of the assassin nuns and inner workings of the Breton court. In the second book, Dark Triumph, Sybella takes readers deep into the dark heart of the enemy. It, too, will keep readers' lamp light burning into the wee hours.
Like Ismae (narrator of Grave Mercy), Sybella was sired by Mortain, but she was raised in the household of the lecherous and greedy d'Albret. The abbess sends Sybella into the enemy's lair when she orders her back to the man who's had nearly as many wives as Henry VIII, with just as lusty an appetite for women and blood.
LaFevers starts this follow-up precisely where the first book left off, with Sybella standing on the North tower and warning Ismae of a trap that's been set for the duchess and her soldiers. While there, Sybella witnesses "a great big ox of a man," the last of the duchess's soldiers, fall in battle. That man is Beast, a legendary warrior met in the first book. The abbess sends a message to Sybella with orders to determine if Beast is alive and, if so, to free him and return him to the duchess in Rennes. Rather than kill him, d'Albret plans to make an example of Beast, to send him back to the duchess drawn and quartered. In the course of freeing Beast from his jail cell and transporting him, Sybella discovers that she and Beast are connected not only by their obsession with justice but also by their pasts.
Readers learn more of the plans of the French and their treatment of the Bretons, and about the charbonnerie--tiny exiled folk who extract coal from the ground and live in the forests. When Sybella and Ismae reunite, they compare notes and find that they share a mistrust of the abbess. Sybella at one point refers to herself as "a lamb sacrificed for the elevation of the convent." Themes of incest and more graphic violence come to the fore, but they are not gratuitous. LaFevers explores the desperation that can grow out of a household consumed with violence. These complexities echo Sybella's growing awareness that her powers to heal are as strong as her skills as an assassin, and her ability to love is as fierce as her propensity for hatred. Sybella, who was so bent on avenging d'Albret's many transgressions, realizes there may be a greater purpose to her life than simply exacting revenge. --Jennifer M. Brown
Shelf Talker: The 15th-century tale of France's efforts to take control of Brittany continues through the perspective of Sybella, ordered to return as a spy to the household of d'Albret, where she was raised.