Everybody loves dragons, or so it sometimes seems – the last few years have brought us Christopher Paolini’s mamoth-selling Inheritance Cycle, whose third volume was a publishing event almost on the scale of Harry Potter; Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series (the Napoleonic wars with added dragons), and the start of a new fantasy series in Stephen Deas’ The Adamantine Palace starring, you guessed it, lots of dragons. So you might think dragons have been, ahem, overdone, but Pierre Pevel begs to differ. The Cardinal’s Blades is what happens when you take  swashbuckling adventures in the France of the Three Musketeers, and throw in the aforementioned dragons.

Actually, that’s doing Pierre Pevel a major disservice, because what he has done here is really rather clever: there are dog-sized, unintelligent, dragonnets, kept as pets, and wyverns, that humans have tamed and trained to carry them aloft – but in this, the first book of this series, we don’t ever get to see a proper dragon. That’s because the dragons are more than just big, gold-obsessed reptiles with an image problem – they have, over hundreds of years, learned to hide among and even interbreed with humans. In Pevel’s Europe, the dragons have come to dominate the Court of Hapsburg Spain, and extended their influence to many other corners of Europe – but the France of Louis XIII has so far resisted them, thanks to the wiles of one of Europe’s greatest statesmen of the time, the sometimes sinsister but never unprepared Cardinal Richlieu.

It is to an elite company of swordsmen (and women) that the title of this book refers – disbanded following a so-far-unexplained disaster at La Rochelle, they have now been reinstated by the Cardinal at the request of none other than the Spanish Ambassador to France, perhaps the last person who could be expected to want to see them active again. Their mission is an apparently simple man-hunt through the streets and suburbs of Paris, but this would not be the start of a fantasy series if the mission was easy, and they find themselves crossing swords with the agents of the sinister Black Claw, the dragon cult that wants to gain a foothold in France. Swashes are buckled and there are sword fights aplenty as the Cardinal’s Blades struggle to achieve their mission. They are diverse crew, like Dumas’s Three Musketeers (indeed, Athos puts in a cameo appearance at one point), with some intriguing members – a half-blood dragon, a Spanish fencing master, a gallant young surgeon and the brooding Captain, La Fargue, tormented by past failures and betrayals.

Pevel has worked out that the trick with this kind of adventure is to take a historical milieu and not change more than necessary – so barring the dragons, this is a very effective and enjoyable evocation of early 17th century Paris, in all its smelly, bustling glory, as well as a pacy and joyous historical romp. The presence of dragons is skilfully handled and they are introduced in such a way that they do not make us question the rest of what we are reading. If you want an enjoyable fantasy romp, then the Cardinal’s Blades make excellent companions. Now if only I could stop humming the theme to ‘Dogtanian and the Three Muskerhounds’…

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