Stephen Deas’ The Adamantine Palace drops the reader directly into the action.  In fact, flings or tumbles may be a better word considering that, within the first ten pages, a woman falls to her death from the back of a dragon.  That ride is only the beginning of a wild journey that stretches across an entire world. Deas’ universe is a wild mesh of queens, dragons, towers, soothsayers, strife, and war – with a host of characters rushing and flying all over the landscape.

There are a lot of characters in this book and a lot of plot to spread around.  This keeps the book moving at a frantic pace (and leaves a lot to be explored in further novels) but, especially in the beginning, keeping the shifting and intriguing of one set separate from the rest is quite tiring.  But first, the dragons.  Deas’ dragons are not mere beasts of burden or psychically bonded pets, they have a purpose – there are war dragons, hunting dragons, and one very special, completely white, dragon. There are implications that the dragons used to fly free, but they are now broken and trained in infancy to bear the knights and hunters of this world on their backs. The dragons have been bred for their jobs, but they contain reminders of their wild nature and are even less controlled than their handlers believe them to be.

The wildness in the dragons is echoed in the lives of the nobility that rules this empire.  There is a swirl of queens, princesses, kings, and royalty-in-waiting and all of them are balancing on a knife’s edge, waiting for the declaration of a new Speaker.  Queen Shezira has schemed and bartered for years, and now, with the marriage of her daughter and the gift of a white dragon, she thinks that the Speakership will be hers and that she will rule over the rest of the nine kingdoms from the Adamantine Palace.  But, there are multiple plots within plots in this world, (and very few guarantees of safety or loyalty), and the dragon that was to seal her ascension to the Speakership disappears en route.

This dragon, Snow, quickly becomes a character in her own right.  Here, the wild viciousness, power, and compassion of the dragons begins to blossom and grow, and the control that the people believed they had is revealed as no more than a myth itself. Those who might be assumed to be good begin to show shades of grey, and Snow herself seeks out a different fate for the dragons.

The characterisizations and pace of the book are excellent.  The dragons, especially, make for an interesting story all on their own. The only issue a reader may have is that much of the action is divided into mini-chapters that hop between characters–and, with so many characters, it may be several chapters (and possible poisonings, daughters being married off, and dragon escapades) before the reader reconnects with a particular storyline.  Especially in the begining, when characters are flying, scheming, and dying, the story can feel erratic, but it soon evens out and the world-building, while certainly leaving a lot for later books, is intriguing enough to make the idea of a series an interesting one.

Bookmark to