Originally posted on Just Geeking by.

Content warnings:
This book contains a large amount of violence, gore, and death (on and off page). There are scenes of torture, corpse desecration, kidnapping, and captivity.

As with any second book, it’s the same characters, yet everything is different. Floré and her companions survived their first run in with the enemy, an unknown enemy that appeared in the night in flying orbs surrounded by silence bringing fire and death. Many were lost including family and friends. They aren’t the same people that left the small town of Hasselberry.

The battle hardened Floré has seen even more battle, lost her husband the skein-wreck Janos and chased the enemy, the rust-folk, across the land to retrieve her daughter from their clutches. Yselda was forced to quickly overcome the fears left to her when wolves murdered her family leaving her the sole survivor, and the loss of her loved ones all over again when the orbs attacked. Cuss faced the loss of his brother Petron who was taken by the rust-folk in the attacks and bravely sacrificed himself to save a fellow child prisoner. Benazir lost a hand fighting the wyrm that attacked her Storm Castle, along with the people in her unit, including her lover.

Despite the dangers and difficulties they have faced, they now have each other. They’ve fought together, bled together, and they have a common enemy. And it’s personal. The problem is that their enemy is more powerful, and is growing so by the day. The skein-mages magic can only do so much. The powerful skein-wreck Janos is dead and the only other skein-wreck is his daughter Marta, whose magic is attacking her own body. Things aren’t looking good for our heroes.

A desperate mission is launched led by Benazir and Floré to find out what happened to the whitestaffs, the mystical order of healers and sages who were the support network of the Stormguard. They fled to their island citadel of Riven when strange orbs cut through the night and have not been heard of since. All attempts to contact the island have failed, and with multiple ships not returning our heroes have no idea what they are heading into.

But are they the heroes of this story? While fighting the crow-man Varratim, Floré was told a devastating truth. Everyone knows that the rotstorm is the result of the god-bear Anshuka’s nightmares, an eternal punishment for the Ferron. What no one knew was that the rust-folk are children who have been caught in the rotstorm. It is a truth that leaves a mother like Floré reeling, and one that she shares with her companions in The Gauntlet and the Burning Blade. There’s a turning point in the novel where Floré has to reconcile her feelings with their reality; the fight between her people, the Undal Protectorate, and the rust-folk is in full swing. Right now they have to concentrate on surviving and worry about fixing the problems of the past another day.

Floré also has to keep an eye on Tomas, the skein-mage that she left in the ruins of their crashed orb at the feet of the bear-god. She tried to save him but was too injured to be able to lift the tree bough that was trapping him. With the offer of a knife, she made the choice to save her daughter and left him to die. It was an understandable decision to make, the problem is that Tomas didn’t die and Floré is left watching and waiting to see if there will be consequences for her actions.

Like the previous book this is a full on battle for survival, and it doesn’t stop from start to finish. It also becomes evident that there is more going on than they realised, and what they thought was one enemy is much more complicated. Green excels in showing the complexity of the situation. It’s not as simple as giant orbs appearing and shooting fire down from the sky. The enemy can be a lot sinister, and I saw a lot of familiar undercurrents in the subplots to what is happening in society today.

One of the ways Green does this so well is that he narrates from multiple perspectives, as he did in the previous book. The reader doesn’t just get the perspective from the “good guys” side, it also gets the story from the opposite side. In this book there’s also a third party who we met in book one, and they play a much larger role in The Gauntlet and the Burning Blade. Their actions suddenly becoming a bit clearer, and it’s a huge OH F*** moment which has repercussions across the entire world. We’re no longer just in Undal as Green shows us briefly the ramifications in one of the neighbouring lands, hinting that in book three we’re going to see the wider world he’s created in The Rotstorm series.

This is a massive action packed book with flashbacks to Floré, Janos and Benazir’s past, namely the infamous attack that made Janos the biggest enemy of the rust-folk when he destroyed their city. Knowing what we now know about the rust-folk being children changed by the rotstorm they are particularly chilling recollections to recall, and it’s fitting that Green has included them here because you can imagine that the characters are going through those memories again. It’s things like this that weave a full picture of the characters and what’s going through their minds. It makes it feel real.

When the group do find the whitestaffs is worse than anyone could ever believe and what has happened is something that no one will have seen coming. I’m not quite sure if I can forgive Green for what happens, however, as a result there are some absolutely brilliant fight scenes. In the first book we really didn’t get to see best friends Floré and Benazir fight together as a team, and in this one the two ladies get extremely pissed off which is bad news for the idiots in their way. It is glorious (more please Ian!).

The Gauntlet and the Burning Blade also has a stunning mage duel that is written so well you can visual every detail as you read. Sometimes I find that magic duels sound amazing on paper, but the writer hasn’t really thought about how well they translate when someone reads them. No, this one you can actually see happening as you read it, and you will be on the edge of your chair the entire time, guaranteed.

Green deals with a lot of serious topics and sprinkles it with classic Scottish humour to keep things from getting too depressing. A skein-mage falling in love with a tiny kitten and Floré and Benazir’s A-class banter throughout. This is a must-read for any fantasy fan. Book one was good; The Gauntlet and the Burning Blade was explosive. I’m almost a little scared for what book three, The Gauntlet and the Broken Chain is going to contain!

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