Book Review
Title Inkmistress (Of Fire and Stars #0.5)
Author: Audrey Coulthrust
Genre: YA/Fantasy/LGBT
Rating: ***
Review: I didn’t know much about Inkmistress before getting into it other than it was the prequel to Of Fire and Stars. The opening of Inkmistress introduces us to Asra who is a demi-god, her father is the Wind God and she has the ability to dictate the future by writing with her blood so she remains hidden in the mountains working as a healer in order to hide her ability from the world. The only true happiness she has in her life is Ina, a mortal give who she is in love with but when winter fades and Ina returns she tells Asra that her parents want her to get married in order to form an alliance with another village to protect them from the bandit which are moving in their directions. However, Ina technically can’t marry until she finds her manifest, which is like the daemons from His Dark Materials, and people get their manifest by forming a magical bond with an animal so she asks Asra for help in getting her manifest as the time she should have spent training she spent with Asra.
In order to help her lover Asra performs a blood rite in order for Ina to find her manifest and protect her family, however, the next morning it turns out that bandits have raided the village and killed everyone including Ina’s family. In her anger and grief Ina calls the dragon to her and bonds with it making it her manifest and Asra knows this is the worst possible outcome. It also turns out that Ina doesn’t just have an extremely deadly manifest she also has the power to wield magic which is an ability which only belongs to the royals. These very royals are the people Ina blames for the death of her family as the boar King had refused to send help to protect the village from the bandits and Ina is going to use her new powers to destroy them all despite Asra’s protests. Seeing the girl she loves on a mission for revenge when she had been so kind and gentle as a mortal, Asra knows it is her fault and she has to fix it before it is too late. Asra follows Ina but fails to prevent her from killing the bandits that destroyed her village and she gets no satisfaction from it but rather than seeing that revenge isn’t the answer she turns her attention towards the boar King and his death and leaves once more. Asra continues to try and track Ina down but along the way she meets another demi-god in the form of a boy named Hal, we don’t know which God is his parent but he has some sneaky gifts and I can’t wait to see what happens with him.
From Hal she learns about the Nightswifts, a gang who were the King’s former elite assassins but have separated from the crown and all have a bounty on their head and Hal’s sister is one of them. After escaping the town with Hal, they are captured by the Tamers, a faction of people that tame their animal companions instead of manifesting them like Ina did. They want to dragon removed from their forest and Asra offers to climb the cursed cliff in order to get Ina to leave. When she meets her lover there she comes clean about what her ability does and that she is to blame for the death of her family, Garen and the others. Ina completely destroy Asra by telling her that she didn’t love her she was just using her to become an elder and that she had cheated on her with Garen and was pregnant with his child and she once again disappeared. However, in the cave she meets a man who claims that he knows which God she belongs to, Asra thought it was the Wind God but the Wind children like Hal and his siblings can hear each other from leagues away. It turns that she is the sibling of Veric who was also a bloodscribe and she has the power to wield the Fatestone which is what both the boar King and the NIghtswifts are after and with it she can right the wrong and drive out the darkness and bring light to the world.
Asra asks Hal to come with him to meet the Nightswifts and his siter, Nismae as she as the former scholar and assassin might have some knowledge on Atheon and the secrets it contains. Nis tells Asra that Atheon is lost as the Fox King burned all the documents relating to it and all the entrances have either collapsed or been built over so the only person that knows the way in is the shadow God. Asra hasn’t told them that she knows the location of the Fatestone or why she needs to go to Atheon despite being offered a place among them because she her abilities. Knowing that the Nightswifts have nothing that can help her Asra knows she has to leave but she isn’t quite ready to leave Hal and things get even more complicated when Ina shows up asking to become a member of the Nightswifts. Ina betrays Asra further by telling Nismae of her abilities and she spends the next few days being bleed for her blood so that the Nightswifts can make Ina a Queen but eventually Hal comes to his senses and rescues her, but both know the Nightswifts and Ina will be coming after them. They have two options now, either get into the Grand Temple or find Hal’s uncle who might be able to help them. When the first option doesn’t work they go after the second but here Hal learns that he has also been betrayed by his sister who has been lying to him for years and the only option Asra has now is to go directly to the King. When she meets with the boar King he explains how the challenges work and she explains that Ina’s growing powers prove a real threat to him and he asks her of her own free will to give up her blood to recreate the enchantments for him so Ina won’t succeed and she agrees pledging her service to the King, Ina’s swore enemy. However, she hasn’t given up on finding the Fatestone but this drive a rift between her and Hal as Hal doesn’t want to live in a world where he never met Asra because she has rewritten the past and the pair are obviously falling in love. However, we know that time is against them and they don’t have long before Ina comes to challenge the King.
As time is running out Asra is fighting hard to protect the King and stop Ina but it isn’t going to plan, however, the King gives her a token to visit the Grand Temple and after learning of Hal’s mission to find the only living bloodscribe, her, she is hurt and angry so she heads to the Temple for guidance. Despite knowing the gods won’t speak to her, Asra has to try and she is surprised when the Shadow God appears before her and she learns not her father but her mother is the God where she gets her gifts from. Her mother explains the circumstances of her birth and why she was left alone and her mother asks her why she is seeking the Fatestone and when Asra relays her tale, her mother gives her the information she needs to find the Fatestone but she also gives her a warning that whether she changes the past or the future, ripples will be felt across the land and she needs to be prepared to wield that power at any cost and Asra agrees. When the day of the challenge draws near, Hal has left her and Asra is alone but she doesn’t dwell on it opting to throw herself into her work but when Hal returns telling her than Ina has gone into labour and is asking for her, Asra has a difficult choice to make, does she help her former lover give birth to the child of a man she killed or does she leave her to suffer the consequences of her chooses. Asra helps her friend give birth but she wants nothing to do with the child and tells Asra to raise him as her own and to name him Iman.
After returning to the palace she and Hal make up and she finally connect the dots given to her by her mother and realises that Hal is the key which will lead her to the Fatestone. She finds it and has it on her finger no more than a few minutes when she is attacked by Nismae who takes it from her and leaves her in Veric’s tomb. After escaping she tells Hal what has happened but the challenge for the crown has now arrived so she can’t leave again as she has to protect the King so Hal offers to use his thieving abilities to get the Fatestone back so Asra can set the world to rights. The ending of Inkmistress was action-packed and I couldn’t figure out what was going to happen until it did but the actual ending itself left me a little underwhelmed and I think another 50 pages could have easily fixed that to give the ending a little more clarity on what Asra actually did with the Fatestone as it is unclear but it might become a little clearer in Of Fire and Stars. One thing I dislike was the LGBT representation, yes initially the female/female romance between Asra and Ina was wonderful but the second Ina betrayed Asra it seemed to just be a plot device, it would have been a heterosexual couple and it would have had the same effect. The LGBT romance brought nothing to the book and it didn’t really serve much purpose except to cause conflict and give the book purpose to move forward which isn’t why LGBT romance should be used in books. If you want a good book where the LGBT romance adds so much to the novel without being a plot crutch read They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera.
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