The Fireborne Blade by Charlotte Bond (Tordotcom, 2024)

By Paul Weimer: Charlotte Bond’s The Fireborne Blade provides a modern sensibility to the standard “knight versus dragon” scenario.

Maddileh is a knight, one of the few female knights in point of fact. She is stalking one of the oldest and most dangerous of dragons, The White Lady. Just why she is going after the most dangerous of dragons, and the story of that quest is encapsulated in the title of the novella, the eponymous Fireborne Blade. 

The Fireborne Blade would have been a relatively straightforward and perhaps unremarkable novella as a read, not even to the level of a beach read, if the novella had been told in a straight up and linear fashion. Bond, however, has a couple of narrative tricks up its sleeve to hold the reader interest and help keep turning pages. 

First of all is the apparent or possible framing device that the novella has. While there is Maddileh’s story, we also get a series of vignettes from a fictional in-world book, “The Demise and Demesne of Dragons”. This gives us a series of short stories of knights facing various dragons in history. Some of these are poignant, a couple are funny, and all of them provide an excellent undergirding of worldbuilding on dragons and this world.  A couple of them turn out to be extremely relevant in Maddileh’s quest to retrieve the Fireborne Blade from the White Lady.  It gives a quasi-documentary feel to some of the proceedings. 

The other narrative trick is that while most of Maddileh’s narrative (and aside from the vignettes, she is our primary point of view throughout), is that Bond is willing to tell a couple of the pieces of the narrative out of order. This amps up the dramatic tension with the clever information control that Bond uses to obfuscate and make the reader guess as to what really is going on with Maddileh, her squire, and the entire quest in general. Between the aforementioned vignettes and the clever narrative framework, this elevates the novella into a rather interesting dragon quest narrative world.

 The world we are presented feels mostly like a relatively straightforward Western Fantasy kingdom set firmly within the Great Wall of Europe, at least on the surface. Feudal nobility. High Mage and trained magicians. It looks nearly completely patriarchal at first. Maddileh appears to be a extreme rarity among knights, almost unique in their ranks. Too, in the matter of magic, women are extremely rare, if not completely discouraged. For those who despair at the idea of yet another narrative where men are men and women suffer what they must, Bond is using the patriarchal world she sets up here as a method of critiquing it, and making moves to change it.

And as I alluded to before, we get a good look at Bond’s ideas on dragons, dragons lairs and the like. Bond brings some interesting inventions to the nature of Dragons, how to fight them, and the consequences of opposing them. I am reminded of how Dragons are handled in Delicious in Dungeon (although there is definitely no eating of dragons) with some out of the box and inventive thinking on not only dragons, their powers, weaknesses and even the ecosystem in which they live and inhabit. 

The problem I found with the novella is that the climax and denouement feel a bit unclear and not as cleverly plotted out as the remainder of the novella most enjoyably is. It feels like a tangle that is suddenly and very abruptly revealed and then resolved in a not so clear fashion. It is for me a bit of a misstep in a narrative that had been humming quite nicely to that point. I am being extremely vague because this reveal and climax at the denouement is absolutely spoilery without question. It’s a wobble that didn’t completely ruin the book for me, mind, but it felt like a misstep. I did give the novella a re-read (the book is short and a fast read) and I spotted a few more clues here and there, but I still think the resolution could have been handled a bit better. The re-read did reinforce the virtues of the novella, and how entertaining and fun it is. 

The Fireborne Blade is the first in a series (possibly just a duology, given the promotional matter, but the structure and nature as mentioned above give a fairly open-ended world). Even given the aforementioned wobble in the ending of this novella, I am curious as to where the narrative goes in the next installment. I found the novella a pleasant and quick and light read (twice!) and I am certain to be in the mood for another such read this summer.