He spends the morning being merciful. A young elven magistrate hears an open-and-shut poaching case, three men who freely admit to taking deer from a noble’s estate, and the sentence for that is hanging. He gives them a year in prison instead and considers himself decent for it, then buys their defence lawyer a drink as an investment. Then he walks home, and the families of the men he sentenced are waiting in an alley with clubs, and by the time they finish he has a punctured lung and a skull that moves when touched. Something kneels in his blood and offers to save him for a price. Astarion: Baldur’s Gate 3 by T. Kingfisher opens there, and then takes four hundred pages to explain why that bargain was the second-worst thing that ever happened to him.
This is a tie-in novel, and readers who have never touched the game should know two things. It is set entirely before the game begins, so nothing is spoiled and nothing assumed. And it is by T. Kingfisher, who has spent a decade writing fantasy that is funny in the same breath as it is frightening, and who treats a licensed character better than most authors treat their own.
What Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3 Learned About Rules
The novel runs two strands. One covers a week in the present, a hundred and fifty years into his enslavement to a vampire lord called Cazador Szarr. The other runs his whole mortal life in order: a vineyard childhood he loathed, a summons from an ancient noblewoman, a decade apprenticed to a lawyer, a flight south with false papers.
Almost every chapter in the past is about a rule and the gap in it. As a child he is told to pull the weeds and pulls five, since nobody said all of them. He learns to pick locks from a bodyguard who should not be teaching him. He wins his first case by finding a statute about agricultural pests and applying it to a troll. It is a lovely running joke, and then Astarion: Baldur’s Gate 3 by T. Kingfisher puts him somewhere the joke stops working. His master does not need to give him orders he will obey. His master can reach into him and make him want it, and there is no clause anywhere in that.
The result is a man who has organised his existence around one instruction to himself: take as little damage as possible and feel as little as possible while doing it, and the book is very good on the cost. He keeps one hidden cache of silk and velvet in an unused room, because texture is the last pleasure nobody has confiscated, and he never once touches the curtains in front of his master in case the preference is noticed and taken away.
The Paladin Who Cannot Win
Then he is thrown into a cell with Hahn den Suriel, an aasimar paladin of an order of undead-hunters so obscure that nobody he meets has ever heard of it. Den Suriel is enormous, faintly luminous, a hundred and three, sworn to destroy exactly what his cellmate is, and incapable of not being kind. He also has a sense of humour, which makes him more than a foil.
Before revealing anything, our vampire extracts a promise of protection in very careful language, and the rest of the novel lives inside the space that promise opens. When the paladin works out what he is sharing a cell with, he is trapped: his oath forbids him to let the undead walk free, and his word forbids him to strike. He cannot keep both. Everything afterward is two exhausted men flirting across a stalemate with only bad exits, and it is the finest writing in Astarion: Baldur’s Gate 3 by T. Kingfisher. The last thing den Suriel says about penance will sit in your chest for a while.
The Household Baldur’s Gate 3 Never Shows You
Astarion: Baldur’s Gate 3 by T. Kingfisher is most disquieting when nothing dramatic is happening. Cazador is written less as a monster than as a management style, and the book lays out with real precision how a house of six gets organised around one person’s appetite for cruelty.
Comfort has to be rationed, because anything you are seen to need becomes a handle. The longest-serving of them tells each new arrival that the trick is to be dull. When two of them do help each other, it is never mentioned again, and one of them hates the other permanently for having witnessed her at her worst. Our narrator does not pull the wings off flies, and takes a certain pride in it, while luring strangers to their deaths several times a month because the alternative is a week in the kennels. The novel never lets his charm launder that.
There is comedy alongside, and it lands. A vampire who cannot check a mirror plans to hire a shapeshifter to pose as him so he knows how he looks. Best of all is an enchanted seagull who belongs to the local thieves’ guild, has no memory to speak of, and works as a lookout for one bottle of chip-shop sauce.
Where Astarion: Baldur’s Gate 3 by T. Kingfisher gives ground:
- The novel cannot end. It must halt before the game opens, so the final stretch methodically takes back every gain, and Kingfisher says plainly in her afterword that she was not allowed a happy one.
- The heist is thin. The vampire lord’s contest sends each of his children out for exotic blood, and the cult they raid is mostly a corridor with a lot of bones in it.
- The romance moves faster than its page count earns, and the closing chapters lean on a bond built in about three scenes.
- One betrayal is visible from the moment it is set up.
For the Group
Astarion: Baldur’s Gate 3 by T. Kingfisher hands a group its argument straight away: start with the paladin. Was he deceived, or did he choose? The novel is careful to show both that he was manipulated by a professional and that he understood the manipulation and went along anyway. Groups will split hard on whether that makes him a victim or a participant, and the split usually says something about the reader.
Then the harder question, about our narrator. He is funny as a survival adaptation, and the same charm is how he handles people before he hands them over. Ask whether he is redeemable, and whether the book thinks so. Then ask what it means that he stays alive out of spite, so a century and a half of suffering will not have been wasted, and whether that counts as hope.
Worth knowing: Kingfisher writes paladins better than almost anyone, for a petty reason. She started because a fantasy video game did one so badly that she wanted to demonstrate the correct method, and the annoyance turned into several novels.
Content notes: torture, mutilation, long solitary confinement, starvation, sexual coercion and servitude shown on the page, enforced obedience extending to enforced desire, a killing by beating, predation on people, explicit sex between two consenting men, harm to animals, body horror, thoughts of self-destruction, and steady profanity.
For groups who finish Astarion: Baldur’s Gate 3 by T Kingfisher and want more: Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher and Hemlock & Silver by T. Kingfisher show her horror-comedy in books she invented herself. The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix shares the trick of joking through menace, Swordcrossed by Freya Marske is the lighter version of the doomed-flirtation plot, and The Complete Guide to Fantasy Book Tropes is a primer for anyone in the group new to this shelf.
Where It Leaves You
You do not need to have played Baldur’s Gate 3 for any of this, though the last chapters land differently if you have, because you will know how much longer he has to wait.
What stays is a small scene early on. His master once put on heavy gloves and held his hand in a beam of sunlight, to teach him what carelessness costs, and made him watch the skin turn to ash and drift to the floor. More than a century later he still rubs that hand whenever the subject comes up, with no idea he is doing it, until someone points it out. Astarion: Baldur’s Gate 3 by T. Kingfisher is full of small revelations like that, and they are why a book that cannot rescue anybody is still worth four hundred pages of your evening.