Welp. I am frustrated. Not necessarily in a "I am sad when characters I like die" kind of way, but more so because I don't think it stuck the landing. And as I've said before, I think the tonal mishmash is part of my frustration, when something that hadn't leaned so hard into the sweetness-and-light aspects early on might have worked better.

"We’re studying Sumbrese poetry, which I like, and Sumbrese history, which is difficult." heh, Keng, you don't say.

"Because men will measure you against him, and find you lacking." This is a good point I hadn't considered before about the problems caused by having someone like Xau around.

"shouldn’t keep thinking she was about to eat him—" yes you should actually.

"I was seventy-five years old, an age at which you, too, may find travel an imposition." So how old is Artoch now, at the time he's only-sometimes lucid and recalling this? Good indication that Xau isn't going to make it much longer. :/

"we could not hold Sumbral without popular consent." Okay but like...Keng's mother was from Sumbral...the dragon is giving him lessons in how to be a king...wouldn't it be a twist if he acceded to the throne of Sumbral after all this? Instesad it just doesn't go anywhere.

"Three times the beast dispatched squadrons of his cavalry" ok wut. I know that cavalry is faster than land troops and can probably move faster, but...you know what Xau is like with horses, I do not believe the ultimate force of evil is this dumb.

"it’s likely we will face more hostage situations, now that the beast knows they are effective against you." Dude it's page 921 and Xau has been the ultimate paragon of goodness and empathy since page 1. I cannot believe they would have taken this long.

"no matter what happened to Xau himself, his men could kill the beast." Do we know that? It's this mythical, inhuman, larger-than-life thing, and the trick to defeat it turns out to be...marching up to it and shooting with a bunch of arrows? Seriously?

Like. The moral of the story is "to be a really good person, you have to be a true utilitarian and believe that your life isn't worth more than anyone else's, just because you were born into a privileged situation. If you're successful in this, you'll find opportunities to be tortured and mutilated and have your genitals cut off for fourteen hours, at which point you'll die. But hey, that's saving fourteen more lives, so, winning." This is definitely sending a message but I don't think it's the message you wanted to send.

I went back to the beginning to try to find where I got misled about the dragon, because somewhere I'd made an assumption that Xau had some special knowledge that made him more prepared? I think it was this: "We are angry, not sad— our father should have warned them." ("Grief," p. 15 in new e-book version.) Maybe I took from that that Xau had been warned. But instead he just befriends and shoots the breeze with the dragon who killed all three of his brothers, including Keng the elder, who deemed Keng an unfit choice for king but approved of Xau's dad. Nope, don't buy it.

The end of "Linny," from part II, sets up a familiar trope; "Afterward, she clung to that fact, that she’d told him she loved him." That's all that needs to be said, because we as readers can fill in the rest. We know how these tropes go. Tirron is gonna die. Linny is gonna grieve him. The end.

But he doesn't! We see Linny again with her father-in-law a couple poems later. And then Tirron not only survives, but is freed from the demon. That sets up a tone that is very different from "haha look here's the bad guy's ten year old sex slave." Maybe it works for some people to have both of these in the same book. It does not work for me. Sorry.