Kings of the Wyld
60 pages • 2-hour read
Nicholas EamesKings of the Wyld
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Chapters 12-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Council of Courts”
The principals of the Council of Courts meet on the Isle of Wights, so called because of the ghosts that emerge there after dark. (The name alludes to the real-world Isle of Wight, an island in the English Channel that was the site of a famous 1970 music festival where performers included Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Joan Baez, and Joni Mitchell). Spectators have gathered to watch. Envoys have come from the kingdom of Phantra, which is ruled by the Salt Queen. Their representative, Etna Doshi, says her mother is still looking for the lost island of Antica. Others are there to represent the Kaskar kingdom. The Sultana of Narmeer arrives on a skyship. The Carteans are led by Obolon Han, who boasts about fathering Lilith’s first child. A fight is about to break out when a wyvern appears.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Duke of Endland”
The Duke of Endland dismounts from the back of the wyvern. The band recognizes him as Lastleaf, the son of Vespian. Lastleaf is now the master of the Heartwyld Horde. The goal of the Council is to convince him to disband the Horde, as the kings don’t really wish to wage another war. Lastleaf says he doesn’t intend to resurrect the Dominion, but after Castia falls, he will make Endland his own realm. Lastleaf says that although he compels the monsters of the Horde, no one can control them. The envoys debate over whether to send an army to help Castia. When he recognizes Gabriel, Lastleaf is angry and draws one of the three swords strapped to his back. When Obolon Han attacks Lastleaf, the wyvern eats him. Lastleaf leaps on the wyvern’s back and flies away. As they leave the Isle, Matrick asks Moog to kill him.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Farewell to the King”
Matrick is found dead, and his body is put on a barge and sent to float down the river. The band knows that Moog created a potion that makes Matrick appear dead. Lilith instructs her handsome bodyguard to fire a flaming arrow at the boat. Clay jumps in and asks for the honor, then purposefully misses his shots. When the bodyguard takes the bow to try one more time, Clay distracts him by asking if he’s thought of a name for Lilith’s child, which they know is his. Lilith says Matrick’s body will be broken by the waterfall. When the band finds Matrick, he is bruised from his fall but alive. They agree that they need to find Ganelon, who is in Fivecourt.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Breakfast with Thieves”
Clay and the others are robbed again by Lady Jain and the Silk Arrows, who make them breakfast. Jain reveals there is a bounty out for Clay and Gabe. She agrees to pretend that Matrick is dead. The next day, as they travel, Gabriel asks to look in Moog’s crystal ball. It shows them the Heartwyld Forest, then the enormous army surrounding Castia. Corpses have been piled in the river to poison the water. Moog says Rose is still alive, but it seems certain she won’t survive. Gabriel is upset and smashes the crystal ball in the river, then falls to his knees, weeping. Clay picks up his pack and tells Gabe that the rest of them are going to save Rose.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Snakes and Lions”
Gabriel is despondent, fearing for Rose, but Clay reminds him of other battles where they beat the odds. They discuss how they wounded Akatung the dragon. Clay reminds Gabe, “We were giants once, remember? Kings of the Wyld” (141).
They are attacked by a band of mercenaries with clown-like makeup. Matrick takes out his knives, Roxy and Grace, and Clay wonders how long it has been since Matrick was in battle. Matrick saves Clay during the attack. He recognizes one of the mercs as a rival, Raff Lackey. Raff says Kallorek has offered a bounty for Clay and Gabe. Raff mocks them for looking old and tarnished. When he continues to attack, Moog utters a spell that turns all the sticks to snakes. Clay uses a snake to defend himself, and it bites Raff, killing him.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Fivecourt”
They bury the ones who died in the fight, and Clay thinks back to the man he was after Saga disbanded. He thinks, “He’d done many a good deed during the years he’d toured with Saga, but he’d done bad things, too” (153). He spent ten years restless and fighting people who wanted to test him. When he met and fell in love with Ginny, he felt the urge to protect her. After she’d agreed to marry him, however, Ginny called off the wedding following an episode where Clay got into a nasty fight with a man who compared him to his father. She asked Clay outright, “Which are you, the monster or the man?” (154). Clay decided he wanted to be the man his mother had tried to raise, not the monster his father had made of him. But in killing Raff, Clay fears he’s glimpsed again the monster inside him.
Outside Fivecourt, there is a band called the Screaming Eagles trying to get inside, but their large vehicle isn’t allowed to pass. Clay thinks the leader is scrawny, pale, and young. When a carriage arrives, Clay claims it for the group. Gabe asks to be taken to see the gorgon.
Fivecourt belongs to all five kingdoms, who have split the city between them. The rich live in the upper streets, and the poor in the lower areas. They see an arena that Matrick calls the Maxithon, which floats in the middle of the river, anchored to towers on either shore. Matrick says that bands like theirs killed all the monsters, so there is little glory remaining for the bands of today. Instead, they tour arenas and kill monsters that are bred in captivity. Clay thinks that’s a stupid idea.
Chapter 18 Summary: “All That Glitters”
They go to Coinbarrow, the bad part of town, and Gabriel takes them to visit a kobold named Fender. Fivecourt is one of the few cities that grants citizenship status to nonhumans. Fender’s many children live in the apartment with him. Gabe asks Fender for the bag of coins he left with him earlier. As Clay surveys the hovel in which Fender and his children live, Fender shares that his wife got in a fight at the market and so was taken away and made to fight in the Maxithon. Moog tries to tell them the history of the city, which is that a short-lived empire of Grandual ended when the first Emperor made demands his citizens didn’t like. The Emperor’s son fled west to Endland, where he built the town of Castia and established the Republic.
They travel into the Narmeeri Ward. Ganelon was imprisoned in the Quarry after he killed a Narmeeri prince. Clay reflects that his bandmates weren’t there for Ganelon when he needed them most, and he might not be happy to see them.
Chapter 19 Summary: “Guests of the Gorgon”
They visit the house of Dinantra, a gorgon. She is a beautiful woman with hair made of snakes and a serpentine tail. Ganelon has been turned to stone, and Dinantra keeps him as a statue in her house. Gabriel has brought six hundred courtmarks to buy him. She invites them to meet her other guest, who is Lastleaf. Dinantra doesn’t know that Lastleaf tried to kill Gabriel and take back his father’s sword. Lastleaf has promised to make Dinantra an Exarch of the New Dominion he will establish once Castia has fallen and Endland is in his hands. Clay realizes the tapestries in the room depict the fall of Kaladar, the capital of the Old Dominion.
When Matrick refers to “the innocent people of Castia” (183), Lastleaf reminds him that the founders of the Republic established Castia by executing the monsters, exploiting and enslaving the mountain folk, and using bribery, poison, and massacre to extend their realm. They erected an arena called the Crucible, where creatures are bred only to be killed. Clay reflects how mercenary bands like Saga likewise rose to fame by killing monsters, and getting paid for it, but the idea of killing creatures in captivity seems repugnant to him. Lastleaf explains that he spent centuries living in the Heartwyld, but when he went to Castia to intercede for the residents of the forest, he was put in the dungeon. There he met Ashatan, the wyvern matriarch, and freed her in a massacre known as the Red Sands. Now he plans the complete destruction of the town.
Chapter 20 Summary: “The Soul in the Stone”
Dinantra says she will release Ganelon, but in exchange for his freedom, the band must fight in the Maxithon. Clay agrees to the deal. Dinantra leads them to the gallery where the statue of Ganelon is being held. Clay reflects on the events that led to Ganelon being seized by the Sultana, and again Clay feels guilty that none of the other members of the band stood up for Ganelon. Clay knows a bit about Ganelon’s brutal past, which made him Saga’s most skilled and fearsome fighter. Moog performs a spell to unpetrify Ganelon. The stone turns to flesh, and Ganelon asks how long he has been imprisoned. Gabriel answers that it’s been nineteen years. Ganelon tells them they all look like shit.
Chapter 21 Summary: “The Riot House”
The Riot House is an infamous tavern, a blast from the past. The band is recognized, and Clay sees several people he knows from long ago. Pete, a Riot House regular, is there as well. Ganelon agrees to go with the band to Castia, and Clay is surprised by his lack of bitterness. Clay aggravates a member of the Screaming Eagles, and a brawl breaks out. The Riot House burns to the ground that night. There are many resulting stories about the event. The one casualty was Pete, who is buried with the inscription: “When we seek to rule only ourselves, we are each of us kings” (204).
Chapters 12-21 Analysis
This second section follows the efforts of Gabe and Clay to, in their words, “get the band back together” (15), an expression that highlights the analogy between monster fighting and rock music performance. The fantasy setting of kingdoms and monsters is conventional, but Eames’s individual creations are sometimes whimsical and distinct. The gorgon Dinanta, the beings called druins, and the entities called kobolds all resemble fantastical creatures, but they all comment in some way on The Blurred Line Between Human and Monster, and the lesser status afforded to nonhumans. The gladiatorial combats in arenas like the Maxithon and the Crucible allude to the entertainments of the ancient Roman Empire, giving the culture an antique feel while seeding the resentments and past injustices that will have a real impact on the story. Dinantra, Lastleaf, and Fender the kobold all have different but shared experiences of being treated as lesser, outcast, or captives. This treatment raises the story’s larger questions about what defines humanity and what distinguishes vengeance from justice.
Clay’s reflections on his past illustrate his own struggle to maintain his humanity in the face of trauma. The abuse of his childhood is so far only hinted at, but it’s established that his mother was murdered, and it’s hinted that Clay avenged her in some way. That his father was the murderer is further hinted at in Clay’s reaction to being compared to the man. Ginny is presented as a stabilizing, civilizing influence on Clay, playing out the convention that domesticated life settles a man and reorients his priorities. This internal conflict hints at larger stakes for Clay in leaving home than just getting killed or embarking on a failed quest; away from the civilizing and calming influence of his wife, he wonders if his monstrous side will again assert itself, and he fears the repercussions if it does.
What seemed like the clear imperative to rescue Rose from the Horde, a monstrous entity, is complicated by the history that Lastleaf relates to explain his reasons for the attack. He recites a history of conquest and cruelty in which the humans played the role of antagonist, exploiting and eradicating nonhumans. Clay acknowledges his complicity in this mindset, considering that his entire career revolved around eliminating monsters for pay, never questioning whether the monsters had a right to exist. Seeing the human-adjacent life that Fender leads with his many offspring is the first real confrontation Clay has had with the possibility that those he considers monsters are people with lives, occupations, families, and a wish to survive as strong as his own.
For the most part, at this point, the other three members of the band are presented as stereotypes of washed-up rock stars. Gabriel is the golden boy who has lost his sex appeal and has no other real talent, interests, or ability to maintain family ties. Moog is the eccentric wizard whose experiments always seem to backfire. He is presented as especially vulnerable because of his childlike innocence, his enduring grief over losing his life partner, Freddie, and his incurable illness. Matrick is a warning about the effects of a life of luxury, leisure, and dissipation. Though he holds a position of status and esteem as king, he is made to look foolish by his wife’s infidelity and disdain. All three of them present a vision of a possible future for Clay that horrifies him, reaffirming his wish to return to his home and family, Choosing a Legacy of Kindness rather than one of fame or glory.
Ganelon is introduced, for Clay, as a fourth and most horrifying alternative version of himself. Ganelon’s loneliness, isolation, and decades-long imprisonment provide a foil and contrast to Clay’s domestic contentment, but Ganelon’s skill as a warrior reflects and amplifies Clay’s own questions about where brutality blurs into monstrousness. Ganelon demonstrates no remorse for killing humans, unlike Clay, who is overwhelmed with regret when he inadvertently kills Raff Lackey via snakebite. Under normal circumstances, Clay disdains killing for sport, but he is coerced into exactly this predicament by Dinantra’s bargain in return for Ganelon’s freedom. Moreover, the brawl at the Riot House suggests a return to the uncivilized days he thought were behind him.
That the one casualty of the Riot House brawl is Pete—a bystander and innocent citizen—raises a bitter irony not assuaged by the epigraph that implies Pete is a king. The promise of glory holds no appeal for Clay, who at this stage believes that The Wisdom that Comes with Age is synonymous with pessimism. He articulates his bitter outlook on the idea of reuniting the band as a whole when he reflects that going to rescue Rose “would be just like old times, except that Moog was dying of an incurable ailment, Matrick was hideously out of shape, Gabriel—their proud and fearless leader—had gone meek as a newborn kitten, and Clay wanted nothing more than to go home, hug his wife, and tell his darling daughter stories to grand exploits that were all, thankfully, far behind him” (193). This gloomy outlook underlines the sense that their quest is impossible, creating tension and suspense.
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