A young soldier is taken down a maze of stairs into a windowless room beneath a desert military base. There is a drain in the floor. One wall is a sheet of dark glass with a spout set into the middle of it. She is told to stand on the drain, cross her arms over her chest, and hold. Then the door is locked from outside. Behind the glass, a man begins to scream, and the wall rattles with it, and the spout starts to run. Nobody tells her what is on the other side. The Emperor’s Enemy by Jasmine Mas puts a reading group in that room on page thirty and spends four hundred pages declining to explain who was screaming.
The World That Broke Its Own Machines
The premise underneath the romance is the best thing in The Emperor’s Enemy by Jasmine Mas, and groups that arrive expecting only a captor fantasy will be pleased to find it.
Antichthon is a world that used to work. Centuries ago something called the Mist appeared, rolling out of the ground in pale blue threads, and it kills any machine that runs. So there are aircraft, and they are almost never flown, because the fog finds the engine within minutes. Missiles exist, and firing one requires a soldier to plant a guidance dart in the target by hand first, and then a race against a cloud. Everything else has reverted: horses, swords, oil lamps, letters carried by trained birds, clothes sewn at home.
The effect is a society with the memory of technology and the daily life of the fourteenth century, and the war it fights is frozen exactly there. Neither continent can destroy the other, so both continents starve instead.
That frozen war produces the second good idea. Two newspapers open the novel, one from each side, describing the same event. They agree on nothing. The Commonwealth prints heroic portraits of its new champion and calls itself the first democracy in the world; its Marshals, hung in oils along a corridor, all happen to share the same nose and the same pale blue eyes. Discussion groups will want to sit with that corridor for a while.
What Jasmine Mas Does With Two Liars
Zora Ravenal grew up hungry in the far North, apprenticed to a tracker at ten, and joined the army after the Empire took someone she loved. Months before the novel begins she stabbed the Empire’s most feared magic-wielder in a forest and hauled him home as a prisoner.
He is now billeted in her bedroom. He is chained, he wears a collar wired to a dial she keeps in her pocket, and he has agreed to train her in exchange for a pardon. Her commanding officer has given her a second set of orders she may not repeat to anyone, including the two friends who would die for her.
He has his own arrangement. Neither of them knows the shape of the other’s.
For most of its length The Emperor’s Enemy by Jasmine Mas is simply these two people in a small room, reading books at each other like weapons, running a single chess game one move per day that keeps ending in a draw. It is a long, funny, genuinely tense piece of writing, and it works because both narrators are concealing something from the reader as well as from each other. Groups who enjoy an unreliable narrator will find two of them, pointed at one another.
The Question of Consent in The Emperor’s Enemy
This is where the evening will go, so it is worth flagging early.
Zora has been ordered to get close to a man she believes murdered her best friend. She does it. The Emperor’s Enemy by Jasmine Mas is explicit about the mechanics and considerably vaguer about the ethics, and it is written so that the reader is never entirely sure how much of what Zora feels is the mission and how much is hers.
That ambiguity is deliberate and it is the most interesting thing in the book. It is also handled with a lighter touch than the material can really carry. The captive holds a great deal more power than his chains suggest, which complicates the question rather than settling it, and a group will disagree loudly about who exactly was coerced here.
Where The Emperor’s Enemy Overreaches
Not everything holds.
- The novel changes genre in its last eighty pages. What has been a story about soldiers and a stalled war becomes something much older, very fast, and the groundwork only becomes visible on a reread.
- Answers are withheld by fiat. Characters refuse to explain roughly forty times, and one briefing the plot turns on is rendered as deliberate gibberish because the narrator cannot follow the mathematics.
- A single device runs at full volume throughout. Every character in the book gives off the scent of an abstract noun. It is a wonderful trick and it is used several hundred times.
- Nothing resolves. The last page opens a sequel rather than closing this one, and the sequel is not yet announced.
Set against that, the prose in The Emperor’s Enemy by Jasmine Mas is fast and properly funny, the action is legible, and a two-ounce talking owl called Squire is the most purely enjoyable character in any fantasy novel this year.
Questions Worth Arguing About
Start with the ritual. A young woman volunteers for a procedure almost nobody survives, in order to gain the power to avenge someone. Ask the group whether that is courage, grief, or an addiction to risk that the novel keeps describing in the language of snowboarding and free fall, and ask whether the book itself ever decides.
Then ask about the commanding officer. She identifies the one person who can accomplish an impossible mission, isolates her from everyone who might help, sends her out alone, and calls it duty. Ask whether a state is entitled to spend a citizen like that, and then ask the harder version: whether the group would have given the order.
Finally, ask about the propaganda. Zora’s face is printed across a continent by people who need a symbol, and children reach for her legs in the street begging her to save them. Nobody who prints those papers has asked her permission. Ask what The Emperor’s Enemy by Jasmine Mas is saying about the cost of being a country’s hope, and whether the two sides in this war are as morally distinct as the chapter headings insist.
Groups who want more should try Blood of Hercules, the book that made this author’s name and the fastest way to decide whether the voice is for you. The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King by Carissa Broadbent suits a group drawn to two people who each hold back the one fact that would end the alliance. Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yarros is the choice for readers who want the military machinery and the dragons foregrounded. And We Who Will Die by Stacia Stark works for anyone who came for the cruelty of an immortal court.
After the Last Page
There is a small ritual in Zora’s house in the North. Her mother keeps three platinum dice in a box, a secret gift from a father Zora never met, and the three of them roll before bed. The rules are inverted: the lowest total wins. Her mother rolls a four and calls it lucky. Zora rolls three ones and feels sick.
Everyone in this book tells Zora she is lucky. She tells herself, constantly, in the middle of things that would kill anyone else. What The Emperor’s Enemy by Jasmine Mas slowly makes clear is that luck is the story a person tells about surviving what was done to them, and that a girl raised on hunger and warning horns has been trained to be grateful for outcomes nobody should have had to survive. A reading group will spend an hour on the romance because it is loud. The other hour, the better one, belongs to those dice.