Readers of Shauna Lawless and Thilde Kold Holdt will love this Celtic-inflected adventure by critically acclaimed, grimdark epic fantasy novelist, Anna Smith Spark.

A Sword of Bronze and Ashes combines the fierce beauty of Celtic myth with grimdark battle violence. It’s a lyrical, folk horror high fantasy.

Kanda has a good life until shadows from her past return threatening everything she loves. And Kanda, like any parent, has things in her past she does not want her children to know. Red war is pursued by an ancient evil, Kanda must call upon all her strength to protect her family. But how can she keep her children safe, if they want to stand as warriors beside her when the light fades and darkness rises?

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This is a story about family, about Kanda the matriarch, whose body bears the marks of middle age and motherhood, bringing three children into the world and raising them towards adolescence. The family live in bucolic farmland surroundings with Kanda’s loyal if often mystified husband Dellet.

That comfortable pastoral existence is ruptured when, not so much a stranger, but a body comes to town. Kanda and her family must flee their house before unknown raiders burn it to the ground. However, there is always a hint of unreliability in Kanda as third person protagonist, a sense that she is not telling everything, that she knows more about these raiders than she is letting on and, more importantly, that they know more about her. As her family’s flight gets more desperate and more urgent, the perils become more surreal – cruel illusions and phantasms that pluck at memories of Kanda’s long buried past.

The story has a second timeline interwoven with Kanda’s family’s plight. It is a tale of the mythic court of Roven and the six warriors who defended it against all perils and rode out in response to desperate petitioners. They wielded magical swords gifted them by the Lady of Roven as they fought to right wrongs, defend the weak and pursue the persecutors.  There is a kind of Camelot aspect to Roven, though the Lord of Roven strays somewhat from that Arthurian Kingly analogue in being both eternally pregnant and lactating. The six however feel very much like a sampling of the knights of the round table – or perhaps the Norse Gods of Asgard. Their varied characters and attributes complement each other’s strengths and compensate for each other’s weaknesses. Like Arthurian legends, the six’s various missions all honour a chivalric oath of defending the weak and hang somewhat loosely together like the Norse myths. The chronology of the different quests is not always clear and the stories have that kind of surreal magical aspect that the tale of Gawain and the Green Knight had. However, Smith-Spark gives her mythic heroes ample human failings of pride and jealousy and simple weariness.

Kanda tells her anxious children the tales of Roven as bedtime stories or to ease the journey to the distant mountain that appears to be Kanda’s target refuge. But Roven’s past woes are entangled with Kanda and her families’ present experiences. And the present time line of the story steadily shifts from prosaic to mythic as Kanda finds her three daughters imposing their own powers and identities on events!

There is a fluid quality to Smith-Spark’s prose, flowing like quicksilver through the reader’s mind. The narrative sweeps you along like a river, sometimes languid savouring a moment, sometimes terse, clipped as it approaches a torrent of rapids. It is replete with rich images – some horrific, some delightful, but never bland – even when referring to Kanda’s failures at baking and fondness for beer.

Smith-Spark paints her characters honestly, “warts and all” as Oliver Cromwell would have put it! Kanda for all her wit and resourcefulness is no Mary-Sue. She has regrets and doubts, she does not love her children equally, she carries burdens from the past – but she has that fierce, ferocious even, quality of motherhood, like a vixen in defence of its kits. Birth order drives her daughters’ differences: Sal, the eldest, the responsible one, the trainee adult; Calian, second born, struggling for a role, fighting for her mother’s attention, sometimes just fighting her mother; Morna – youngest, neediest, never forced into abrupt growing up by the arrival of a younger sibling.

As Kanda and her family are forced to fight monsters, some old, some new, Smith-Spark’s inventiveness again comes to the fore as though forging some combination of the seven deadly sins and the four horsemen of the apocalypse into a trio of resolute but constantly shifting opponents.

While the plot might at first glance seem constrained by its small cast and simple flight and/or fight imperative, Smith-Spark throws in plenty of twists and turns that leave you anxious about the fate of each of Kanda’s family – sharing her shock when one goes missing, her relief when they are found, having prosaically gone for a piss. And oh yes, this is a story that doesn’t shy away from bodily functions as Kanda’s middle aged spreading body afflicts her with monthly bleeds and slumbering farts as nature makes no allowance for the significance or poignancy of any particular moment.

Besides the mythic themes borrowing from Celtic legends or echoing others, there is a dominant theme of motherhood. The pagan trio of Maiden, Mother and Crone, loom over the story’s denouement. As in her previous novel –  A Woman of the Sword – Smith-Spark eschews the traditional lithe young adult female warrior protagonist. Kanda is neither G.R.R.Martin’s Arya nor Tolkien’s Eowyn. Like Timandra Whitecastle with Lovis in Queens of the Wyrd, Smith-Spark gives us a protagonist with many mundanely familiar attributes, pulled from retirement and the gentle duties of parenthood into a swirl of conflict and danger. Smith-Spark juxtaposes Kanda’s scars of childbirth, her spreading sagging flesh of middle-age with images of the shining knights of Roven.  However, as is clear from the many inspiring women featured in the acknowledgements, the parallels Smith-Spark draws are less simile and more metaphor. That is to say, being a mother is not like being a knight of Roven, it is being a knight of Roven!

A Sword Of Bronze And Ashes is out today from Flame Tree Publishing! You can order your copy on Bookshop.org