Daggerbound

Daggerbound is a fantasy novel centered on the unlikely partnership between a disillusioned scholar and a warrior magically bound inside an enchanted sword.

Learned Edmund, a 27-year-old dedicate (a non-ordained servant) of the Temple of the Many-Armed God, leaves the temple for the last time. He has spent years trying to reform the order's entrenched misogyny and insularity and concluded the effort is futile. As a final assignment, he agrees to deliver several books and an ornamental sword artifact to a scholar of the Forge God in the capital, Archon's Glory. He cuts his tonsure, sheds his vestments, and sets out with the temple mule, Sweetness.

Three days out, bandits attack Edmund and beat him savagely. His grip on the scabbard shifts the blade, partially drawing it, and a man materializes in a flash of silver light, killing the bandits with twin daggers. He is inhumanly beautiful, with silver eyes and metallic lines on his face. Edmund, delirious, mistakes him for an angel and faints.

The stranger is the Dervish, a warrior bound inside the sword centuries ago by a smith. The enchantment compels him to defend whoever draws the blade from all physical threats. Edmund is now his wielder. The Dervish initially hopes the scholar will die of exposure, freeing him from servitude, but his conscience prevails: He builds a fire, tends Edmund's wounds, and keeps him alive.

When Edmund wakes, the Dervish explains the constraints: He must interpose himself between the wielder and danger, cannot travel far from the sword without dissolving, and returns to the blade if the wielder dies. Edmund is horrified and offers to help break the curse, suggesting the scholar who requested the sword might know how. The two form an uneasy partnership. Edmund reveals he left the temple out of disillusionment; the Dervish, who despises priests for reasons he does not yet disclose, softens slightly.

Their journey is complicated when armed men steal Sweetness. Edmund insists on pursuing the mule, and they track her to a camp of the Sleeveless, a splinter faction of exiled men turned raiders. Captured and thrown into an underground crypt, Edmund establishes communication with a creature through mathematical tapping. The creature is a giant pillbug, an intelligent isopod about seven feet tall, who communicates through a music-box device she built herself. She introduces herself as Large Francis Building.

When a Sleeveless man draws the sword, the Dervish is involuntarily summoned and kills him. Large Francis's terrifying hiss routs the remaining raiders. The group also frees Dog Violet, a gnole, a badger-like intelligent creature common in this world, who has been held in the camp kitchen as a forced cook.

Francis was part of a scholarly delegation from a distant swamp, sent to establish a book-trade route after her people exhausted their reading material. The expanded group travels south. Along the way, they discover the enchantment binds the Dervish to the sword's location, not the wielder's. The Dervish walks freely away overnight but returns, motivated by the scholar who might break his curse. When Francis mentions wanting to visit the Temple of the Many-Armed God, the Dervish erupts, calling the order "butchers." He nearly attacks Edmund before the scholar meets his eyes and says simply, "I left." Those two words break through the rage.

The group encounters a dragon, a bizarre, apparently artificial creature with six legs and an impossibly long neck. They detour through farmland and warn settlers led by a man named Otto. Otto captures them and reveals the settlement has been feeding the dragon human sacrifices for five years. Despite Edmund saving a guard's life by treating werkblight, a devastating allergic reaction, Otto condemns them to die because releasing witnesses would expose the secret.

A farmwife named Alba slips Edmund a pocketknife, which he transfers to the Dervish through a kiss. The Dervish cuts their bonds as the dragon emerges. Dog Violet, who escaped capture and stole the sword, sheathes the blade just as the dragon closes on the Dervish, dissolving him into silver, then draws him out at a safe distance.

They raid the settlement for their gear, and Dog Violet captures Sweetness along with a massive draft horse the group names Greathoof. The Dervish kills Otto during a second break-in, reasoning the man would continue sacrificing travelers, but conceals this from Edmund. As the group continues south, romantic tension builds. At an inn, Edmund admires what he takes to be decorative scarification on the Dervish's body. The Dervish reveals the marks are torture scars inflicted by a priest of Edmund's own order who vivisected him repeatedly to test a disproved theory. A painful reconciliation follows: Both men agree that some things cannot be fixed.

The group leaves Large Francis in a swamp with rendezvous plans and continues to Archon's Glory. At the Temple of the White Rat, Edmund reconnects with his pen friend Zale, a solicitor-sacrosanct (the highest rank of the temple's legal arm) who uses they/them pronouns. Zale knows another sword-bound warrior, Commander Sarkis, the Dervish's old leader. Zale also warns about a cult called followers of the Sainted Smith that hunts the enchanted swords, and reveals that Edmund is secretly famous for curing werkblight seven years earlier, saving tens of thousands of lives. The Dervish confronts Edmund, who deflects credit, and they sleep together for the first time.

They visit Scholar Andraste, the Forge God's dedicate who requested the sword. Edmund realizes she is a member of the Sainted Smith cult and shoves the sword through the window grate before Andraste can seize it. Edmund is captured; the Dervish recovers the blade.

The Dervish reluctantly reunites with Sarkis, punching him and then collapsing into his arms. Sarkis, his wife Halla, Zale, and Dog Violet ride north to the cult's hillside fortress. Inspired by Edmund's lesson about myrmecochory (the dispersal of seeds by ants), the Dervish wraps the sheathed sword in bacon and has it thrown over the compound wall. Dogs drag it to their kennel, and when the blade comes free, the Dervish materializes inside.

He finds Edmund drugged and barely conscious and carries him up an agonizing staircase to the surface. During the climb, the Dervish confesses he killed Otto, and Edmund accepts this without judgment. Andraste and armed cultists wait at the top. The Dervish negotiates Edmund's release by revealing the scholar's identity as the man who cured werkblight. Edmund tearfully relinquishes his claim as wielder, and Andraste draws the sword, becoming the new wielder. The Dervish exploits a loophole in the enchantment: He grabs Andraste and leaps backward off the cliff, placing his body between her and the ground. The magic requires only that he interpose himself between the wielder and danger. Both die on impact.

Edmund flees south on Greathoof. Sarkis, Zale, Halla, and Dog Violet recover the sword. Halla stalls pursuing cultists at an inn with an interminable story, while Sarkis later frightens customs officials on a ferry by posing as a cannibal. They converge with Large Francis, who is being escorted to Archon's Glory by White Rat guards dispatched by Bishop Beartongue, and return together to the city.

In the weeks that follow, Edmund serves as cultural liaison for Francis's delegation while waiting for the Dervish to heal inside the sword. Each night, he tries to draw the blade. After several weeks, it slides free and the Dervish materializes.

The Dervish tells Edmund he loves him. Edmund responds with information about the etymology of huckleberries, fulfilling a promise from weeks earlier. The Dervish reveals he knows Edmund's most guarded secret, disclosed while the scholar was drugged: Gnoles cause werkblight, and Edmund has kept this hidden to protect them from extermination. The Dervish's immortality means this dangerous knowledge will survive without ever being written down. They agree to build a life together, accepting that some things cannot be fixed but can simply be the way things are.