“Give up? What is there to give when you have nothing? You want to sue for change? Sue. You want to kill for peace? You’ll kill for years, until your dying, pitiful last day, one hand wrapped round a rose and the other using the thorns to gouge the eyes of those you deem unfit to lead.”

King Rolandrian of Yem is dead and Anji has killed him. Now she faces a life on the run, always watching her back, always looking for a place to hide. The Menagerie, The Sun Warden’s bounty hunters, are sent forth to retrieve Anji and bring her to be publicly tortured and executed. The Menagerie are infamous throughout the kingdom, they are ruthless hunters each having a given animal persona—the Ox, the Lynx, the Goat, the Bear and the Hawk—they work day and night together in service of The Sun Warden’s religious decree. So when the Hawk captures Anji, she’ll do anything she can to escape. Yet why is the Hawk working alone? 

Anji Kills a King by Evan Leikam is a thrilling debut that immerses readers into a deadly journey across a hostile grimdark world. 

At first I thought that Anji and the Hawk may share a mentor/mentee relationship much like what we see in Wesley Chu’s Art of Prophecy, where we have a grumpy seasoned older warrior charged with looking after a spoiled, incompetent, loudmouthed youngster. Leikham does give us this dynamic but more in a captor/captee capacity instead. The Hawk is a formidable weapon, she’s also a crotchety older woman who seems rather weary with Anji fairly early on, and Anji can be difficult to say the least .Yet one of the themes I found rather compelling was that of the lesser evil. Once Anji realises that compared to the other members of the Menagerie, the Hawk is much less insane, she sees her in a somewhat better light. This isn’t to say they become close or even friendly to one another but they certainly begin to understand each other. This is then carried through when the Hawk makes Anji realise that actually, Anji killing the king didn’t magically or automatically make the kingdom a fairer, better, more prosperous place. In fact she made it far worse. Anji’s narrow view, her own anger and grief couldn’t allow her to see that even a bad king who allowed poverty, starvation, outlawed magic for the lower classes and banned schools in the poorer areas, was actually the lesser evil ruling. This notion I particularly enjoyed because our Anji is not some noble hero of this tale, in fact her character shows that you can have all the good intentions in the world, all the right ideals and motives, and you can still be wrong. 

Now having two characters bickering throughout the entire book can become tiresome, particularly as the novel reaches its final hundred pages, but what I thought was done well was their reasoning for this. I wouldn’t say that Anji is unjustified in her anger and smart mouth given that the Hawk is leading her to her execution, but sometimes she enrages the Hawk for no apparent reason. Sometimes Anji could be petulant for petulant’s sake, but this is a dark fantasy, strongly fitting into the grimdark genre, and so Anji is subjected to much cruelty and violence along the way, so you can understand her retaliation, even when it wasn’t wise. The Hawk also has her reasons for her harshness, we learn early on that she is an addict, hooked on the magical drug Rail, which gives users enhanced abilities but the more you use the closer you become to transforming into a Dredger, a feral creature. I thought this was explored fantastically because yes, any kind of an addiction can drastically change your temperament and when the drug itself is literally turning you into a monster, well you become unrecognisable. There is more to the Hawk though, more turmoil that we discover by the end and I felt Leikam did a superb job of showing how both these women, having come from disadvantaged and traumatic backgrounds, were shaped by it. 

“I still the body, and the mind follows. The still mind may do anything. I can tear through anyone, I can win mismatched fights. With a mind unclouded, pain is nothing, fear is no one.”

I love fantasy books where travelling and going through journeys are at its centre and I feel Anji Kills a King embodied this so well. As Anji and the Hawk traverse through the kingdom of Yem, we see various towns lying in squalor, the starvation of the people, the lands in ruin and we discover the firm hand of the Senate, the religious faction of The Sun Wardens and their harsh, unjust laws and punishments, first hand. Leikam drip feeds us the worldbuilding, creating a clearer picture the more towns we visit. The magic system is similarly explored as we are slowly introduced to more characters. We learn of objects infused with Maxia and people trained in the use of this sorcery which was fascinating but I felt we only scratched the surface of its concept in this book. Then there was the Menagerie themselves who were the most notable characters as their imposing appearance, their faces covered with magically infused masks, and their twisted, sadistic and fanatical nature was pretty memorable. The Menagerie were historically lauded as just, noble and worthy to keep the kingdom free of criminals but the truth is far from that. Alongside this savage physical journey, Anji and the Hawk go through personal emotional ones too, where many other truths come to light, and this makes for a very cleverly played out if heart-breaking ending. 

Although Anji Kills a King is the first book in a planned trilogy it does very much read as a standalone with a good sense of closure. Leikam weaves a grisly, gripping story that’s infused with bloodshed and political tension. It’s a story of adventure, of survival and finally, at its end, facing harsh truths. 

“The world won’t make space for you or your ideals.” She weighed her hands. “There’s the reality you wish for, and the one which exists. Try to remember which will keep you alive.”

ARC provided by Bahar at Titan Books in exchange for an honest review – thank you for the copy!

Anji Kills a King is out now – you can order your copy HERE