A tuyo is a young man left to appease a victorious army and signal a commitment end current hostilities.
This is an adventure featuring a 19 year old nomadic warrior. The book is also a deep delve into trust and the ethics of power, pitting two powerful sorcerers against each other. The protagonist is on the squeaky clean side, and I'm not a fan of the emphasis on giving/accepting physical blows as discipline and dispute settling, but that seems to fit the culture of the nomads. The world is definitely not quite fantasy standard geography, seemingly banded into north steppe, grading to middle savanna to southern desert with jackal headed inhabitants.
The moon and sun seem to have some agency in their movements. ( )

Pretty fun!

A note that this is very much about the characters. The world described doesn't fundamentally make sense. And there are far too many characters trying very hard to be reasonable and to understand each other. So - I would have hated this book in 2020, and even now I'll still probably have to be in a hoping trusting mood for a reread.

But keeping that in mind, this book is all about the (extremely platonic) relationship growing between Ryo and Aras. The characters are all nice and helpful and willing to wait for everybody to come to grip with people being reasonable. There's really only the one bad guy; everybody else has their customs but can look past it for the Greater Good.

A similar feel to the Hands of the Emperor, but this one isn't the world's longest epilogue to the story you never read, and there's actually some violence since there's a war going on. ( )

This book is a quick and smooth read. It's narrated entirely in first person PoV by Ryo.

The prose is very clean - just a couple of typos that caught my eye. Since we're in Ryo's head, he uses terms familiar to him but not the reader (for example, when he counts), but there was never any difficulty comprehending what he meant.

It was interesting to explore a world where the climate varied so much between different areas that people who lived across the border from each other had essentially different physiologies. Even though I'm not a big fan of heavy worldbuilding, I liked learning about this one. Some aspects (both physical and social/customs) might stretch the reader's credulity, but I was happy enough to go with the flow.

I'd say the story falls into the coming of age category. Ryo learns about an initially frightening and unfamiliar world and overcomes his fears. The plot unfolds at a rather gentle pace. Other than the Big Bad, the characters are perhaps a bit too good to be true. They're certainly distinctive - I enjoyed their interactions - but in a sense they were all on the same side (or to paraphrase Pratchett, on different sides that are side by side). I didn't feel a great sense of peril or tension while I was reading. And that's fine - there's no need for everything to be about anguished souls and melodrama.

A feel-good, rather relaxed fantasy with intriguing worldbuilding.

Ryo is left as a “tuyo” -- a sacrifice to be killed by an enemy -- as a sign that his tribe will withdraw from the Ugaro’s war with the Lau. But his captor doesn’t want to kill him, he wants Ryo to help him stop the war.

Neumeier effectively creates tension between people who are polite, honest and honourable. There are times when Ryo has good reasons for feeling mistrust, fear or even hatred towards Lord Aras -- and it’s never because Lord Aras has treated him or anyone else poorly. While the story begins with Lord Aras holding power over Ryo -- literally of life or death -- Lord Aras is incredibly conscious of that and of Ryo’s wellbeing. He’s adamant about Ryo giving allegiance freely. Moreover, there are situations where Lord Aras, despite his power, is utterly dependent on Ryo. An intriguing relationship, defined by mutual respect, fealty and something more familial (Ryo swears to accept Lord Aras’s authority “as though you were my father [...] as though I were your son”).

The Ugaro culture is intriguing, too. Given what we see of it and of Ryo’s family, I thought that his perspective -- his values, choices and concerns -- made a lot of sense.

There’s also some unusual magically-defying-physics-as-we-know-it worldbuilding -- a river on which one side is summer and the other winter, and the people living on side struggle to cope with extreme weather on the other side -- but apparently I was far more interested in the character dynamics.

Anyway, I enjoyed this. Sequel, please?

I faced south, so that my death would not ride up behind me on his tall horse and see my back and think that I was afraid to face him. Also, I did not want to look north because I did not want to see that trodden snow and remember my brother leaving me behind. That might have been a different kind of cowardice. But I could only face one direction. So I faced south. ( )