I can't believe I never read this before! It's so great. It's honestly such a fun stand alone but in the context of the series it give so much information not only about the Pal and Cam (who are great!) but also about the world in general! It's so cool how Tamsin manages to world build so naturally from even the shortest of short stories!

So first of all...please go into this expecting to have your suspension of disbelief do a lot of heavy lifting on the setting elements! If you like a solid foundation and hole-proof plot this is not for you!

Vaguely…this is a medieval type world (swords, horses, messenger birds etc) with some people having magic (I’ll get to that). There are many different towns and each of them (maybe?) has either a champion or a wrongdoer who claims that town. Champions are trained by the federation and are chosen via vote, wrongdoers are trained by a guild and are then mostly on their own and they have to fight and hold the territory. So…this is kind of a ridiculous set up already. Like if you take it too seriously there are so many plotholes/questions that never get answered (why is the guild allowed to exist? Why do the champions not band together to get rid of the wrongdoers? Why are all the peasants just okay with any of this? idk and neither will you). You absolutely cannot think about it too hard! And that would be FINE except then later you get actual stakes related to this setting…which makes it kinda difficult to do that tbh. Like the Discworld series kinda has something similar right? Where there’s like a thieves guild and an assassins guild etc. that just…exist and everyone’s fine with it because its like..part of the city ecosystem 🤣 and it works there because those books are deconstructions/comedies. No one - even in universe- takes themselves seriously. It’s MEANT to be a joke. If ANYONE started taking it seriously it would fall apart. And that’s a little bit what this did. It was also clearly meant to be funny with the same kind of slightly anachronistic vibe…The setting just wasn’t fleshed out enough to make it make sense enough to have stakes. So yeah… suspension of disbelief, don’t think too much about it etc,.

Next the magic. In this world types of magic used to be divided by the seasons and spring magic is considered weak(er)? Although this point is already vague and there are a bunch of named exceptions + apparently this is an old view and not many people believe it anymore. So..why does the main character, Cyrus, have such issues around using his spring “weak” magic? Because one (1) child made fun of him one (1) time when he himself was a child (and then he killed him? maybe? its unclear 😅). Apparently! His magic isn’t even that weak! I get that he didn’t use it much but it was so easy for him to suddenly use it really well in the end that it makes it kind of stupid for him to not have used it before. And this is, again, kind of a big part of the plot… so if you can’t get past just accepting it and moving on, this book will frustrate you.

There are more examples like this, but these I think were my main two. Some of the others just stem from these same issues.

Now all of that being said… I still really liked the story itself. It was very cute, the relationship progressed at a nice pace and the mc’s had great chemistry. (They kind of gave me a Drarry vibe if that makes sense to anyone lol)

Anyway, this is a cute, short story that is nice, IF you can just…accept that the setting and some of the plot just has to be handwaved 🤷‍♀️