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

The sequel to the masterpiece folk horror high fantasy A Sword of Bronze and Ashes, a lyrical blend of epic myth and daily life.

Kanda and her family are on a quest to rebuild the glory that was Roven. Mother and daughters stand together as a light against the darkness. But mother and daughters both have hands that are stained red with blood. They walk a path that is stranger and more beautiful than even Kanda dared imagine, bright with joy, bitter with grief. Ghosts and monsters dog their footsteps – but the greatest monsters lie in their hearts.

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As with A Sword of Bronze and Ashes, Smith Spark’s second book in the series weaves two timelines together with the present-time quest of Kanda and her family punctuated by tales of her past-time as the greatest of the six warriors of Roven. Roven remains that kind of mythic place somewhere between Camelot and Asgard – the former with its chivalrous heroes riding out to defend the weak and slay dragons, and the latter peopled by immortal beings imbued with magical powers and human failings.

The book opens with a tale of Roven heroics, but then switches to Kanda, her husband and their two surviving daughters helping in the raising of a hall in a village where they have been spending the winter. The sense of community and belonging of the event has echoes of the Amish barn raising scene in the Harrison Ford film The Witness. And, as with that film – there is a sense of danger bleeding through every page.

Because Kanda is three people in one.

• She is the greatest hero of Roven – a sword swinging Demigod like Peter Newman’s Gamma of the Seven in The Vagrant.
• She is Roven’s destroyer, the fallen angel – the Melkor who slew the blessed trees of Valinor, the Anakin who slaughtered the younglings. And
• She is a mother – a steel spirit of protectiveness encased in a body sagging with the natural dignity of aging.

Kanda’s fractured identity leaves the reader on constant tenterhooks as to what will happen to her, or what she will make happen to others – and unsure which would be worse. Even as the righteous leader of the six of Roven her power made her fearsome with the people she rescued, bending backs and averting their gaze even as she came to help them.

Greatly she pitied them. They did as she bid them, but they did not look at her face, and the fear streamed like sweat off them.

As they travel on in search of ruined Roven, the present-story revolves around issues of motherhood and what has happened to Kanda’s children: Sal aged into an old crone by some perverse magic – yet carrying a power of healing; Calian become a child warrior as fearsome and ferocious as Stark Holborn’s space general Gabi Ortiz; Morna – lost, dead and mourned. Yet the children are their mother’s daughters – spawn of a demigod (retired), heir to her powers and demonically more than human.

Where the first book in the series dealt with Kanda’s past and the beings that came from it to haunt her, A Sword of Gold and Ruin is fixed in the present and her journey with her family to find and rebuild the Roven she destroyed. Kanda struggles with guilt, pride and the weaknesses that her the price age charges for “the grace and the privilege of growing old.” She has to confront her failures as a hero, a warlord and a mother.

She thought: I am the same person I was then, but I am sorry for the things I did then, that guilt will always be with me. I will try to be better than I was then, and that’s all anyone in this world can sat. Sometimes it is not enough. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, it is.

None of our pasts could be as atrocity filled as Kanda’s, but there is that sense as Josiah Bancroft put it in Senlin Ascends that “We are, each of us, a multitude. I am not the man I was this morning, nor the man of yesterday. I am a throng of myself queued through time. We are, gentle reader, each a crowd within a crowd.” The person we are now is the same person as the mewling puking child we once were, and every stage of life inbetween, all painted over on the same canvas.

In Kanda’s inner monologue there is something of the angst-ridden reflections of Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, all captured in Smith Spark’s soaring descriptive prose – a facility with language as fluid and seamless as Thomas Wolfe’s.

A Sword of Gold and Ruin delivers a nexus of literary fiction, mythic storytelling, and a journey for redemption.  The meetings that the family in the present, and the champions of Roven in the past, encounter have that weirdness of Norse folklore full of feasting halls, disguises, impossible combats and magically deceptive appearances.

The tale is struck through with fine lines that caught my eye, such as these ones sprinkled through the book’s pages.

Her husband Dellet lay on his back. His skin was the rich bronze of a good axe-head, his hair was dark and curled like pine bark, his snores were like a blunt saw on hard wood.

“I like it here,” Sal said now. “I like the marshes. The salt smell. The size of the sky here where it’s flat.”

The sunlight pierced the trees and fell long and slanting like sword blades.

The water was wide and deep, slow-running, glossy and fat as fat old horse flanks. Flies danced over the water, and a fish jumped to catch them.

He didn’t stand like a warrior or hold his spear like he would use it without a second thought. A third, a fourth a sixth, a tenth thought ad he’d still be too scared to use it, from the look of him.

Rarer and rarer and rarer as dragon eggs, is a child showing pride in a parent being praised.

Uncertainty dogs the protagonists and danger lurks on every page. The streaks of surreal through the narrative mean the reader is never sure what to expect and yet, the twists and reveals when they come are delightfully satisfying – the secrets that seem crystal clear in hindsight, but were mired in the fog of war before hand.

Besides Norse, Arthurian and even gothic overtones, there is a rich vein of history running through the story. Smith Spark’s deep understanding of ancient history and particularly the campaigns of Alexander the Great inform A Sword of Gold and Ruin just as they informed her debut trilogy with Mareth very much in the mould of Alexander.

One of the people the party encounters is Amraen a former soldier of Kanda’s from the days of her middle in incarnation as the invincible warlord Ikandera Thygethyn. Amraen recalls

“Your first and last concern was for your warriors; when you returned from the battlefield, bloody, aching, mouth dry as dust, you would not rest, wash, you could not drink a cup of water, until you had seen that your warriors were well-tended.”

Which very much echoes the stories of Alexander, waiting as his column of soldiers walked by him having finally escaped a barren desert and offering them each their first gulp of clean water from a bottle yet not taking one sip himself until all had passed.

There is then a sense of the covenant of blood – the fellowship of battle – which is thicker than the water of the womb. A saying often inverted “blood is thicker than water” to suggest family is the supreme bond when in fact its true meaning is the opposite. Amraen’s memories are filled with the glory of fighting in the ranks of Ikandera’s army a killing and a slaughter that was somehow glorious.

Curiously, as Kanda’s thoughts and preoccupations return always to her children and their squabbles, a message to take from A Sword of Gold and Ruin is that – for a mother at least, the blood of the covenant is thinner than the water of the womb.

A Sword of Gold and Ruin is available now, you can order your copy on Bookshop.org