Even more unfortunately for him, the world-famous mariner he tries to invoke as a character witness was executed in Nuryevet for being a shameless pirate, which is a personal blow to Chant on multiple levels. Unfortunately for him, he’s suspected of being a blackwitch, which is very much a bad thing for him to be. Chant is old, irascible, and unimpressed by Nuryeven justice. The Chants are the descendants of the priests of a drowned land, who now “pass on the knowledge of what once was” so that it may live in memory at least (p. Chant’s name is actually a title: as he tells his advocate Consanza, “it marks me as a master of an order that goes back more than four thousand years” (p. The novel opens in a courtroom in the far northern country of Nuryevet, where itinerant storyteller and semi-mendicant Chant is on trial for “something stupid,” namely, witchcraft (p. What I got in the novel is definitely not quite what I expected, but it’s an engaging and interestingly offbeat fantasy tale all the same. I picked up Alexandra Rowland’s A Conspiracy of Truths because the elevator pitch, “a fantasy of fake news,” seemed to be right up my alley in 2018.
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