'Neath the pumpkin patch

Hello!

Today I am reviewing ‘The Heroes We Never Were’ by Thomas Howard Riley. I was lucky enough to beta this one last year, and it was my book of the year even before it had released – and it has stuck in my thoughts all that time. I remember getting it in my inbox, and going oh I will read a chapter or two before bed just to get started… and then just never going to bed, because I couldn’t put it down. Ever since I have been counting down to this one coming out into the world, and this review by no means does it justice.

An aging drunk former knight who cannot escape the wreckage of his warlike past, and his lord’s headstrong magick-wielding young daughter with a pet dog named Horse discover there may be an assassin among the guests visiting their castle. But when those guests are made up of their House’s most ruthless enemies, it is more difficult than it seems to narrow down to just one. 


War is the only thing Everan Caid was ever good at, and he yearns to return to his old ways. Long ago stripped of his knighthood and all but exiled from the castle of Oldmeadow, he is drunker by dawn than most men can manage all day. Peace, with the lack of killing that it brings, never sat right with him, especially due to the fact he fought on the losing side of the last civil war over Olbaran’s distant throne and has been forced to watch for years as his bitter enemies prospered at his expense. Yet even in the ruin after the war, his loyalty is unwavering to House Kederan and the Knights of Oldmeadow he fought beside, but with the castle suddenly full of visitors who support the usurper king he spent half his life fighting against, the limits of Everan’s oath of peace may soon be reached.


Sera Kederan, on the other hand, rarely finds time for serious things between climbing trees and running about the castle with her favorite bearhounds. Her father may be Lord Kederan, but Sera has little patience for the politics of distant courts…at least until suspicious visitors from those courts arrive at her doorstep. And when she discovers she might have a connection to certain arcane powers, she suddenly feels like she is being hunted in her own home.


With everyone hiding secrets, and a traitor in their midst, the race is on to stop a deadly plot and save their family from a looming war. Yet the deeper they both dig, the more it seems they have uncovered something far worse than they ever could have imagined.

This has been one of the hardest reviews to write. Not because I didn’t love the book, because I do. But because it has been so hard to put my finger on all the things this book and these characters have made me think and feel, and the fact that it continues to occupy my brain. (I am also wholly incapable of just reading a little bit of this book, I picked it up to reread a certain bit for this review, and it turned into a whole other reread and I can guarantee this is going on my frequent re-read pile).

But first things first…. I BLOODY LOVE THIS BOOK. It hurt me to the point of tears. It infuriated me, because I loved these characters (well…not the Kursts etc…) and I wanted them to have their peace, and successes and I should have known better, because I know Riley gives us characters to steal our hearts and then destroys them. It was a book that complicates all emotions – I cheered at certain murders and fights, I shouted at others, I wanted to take characters and lock them in a room until they actually spoke.

And there is one character above all others, that I would see suffer every single injury and death that happened in this book a thousand times over and still would not be satisfied. BECAUSE they were one of my favourites, they crept into my heart along with all the characters and the betrayal was one that ripped through everything.

This book devastated me the first time I read it, and every time since.

I love it.

‘We don’t get to write our own stories. The ones who defeated us get to decide what we are. They made us the villains.’

History is written by the victors. That has always been a painful truth, in history and in fantasy where we read about wars and battles, victories and defeat. Yet, I don’t think I’ve ever felt it as intensely as I did with the Heroes We Never Were, because it is absolutely layered into every aspect of this corner of Riley’s world from the worldbuilding, to the characters and the event that unfold. It certainly contributed to this book being such a chonk, and yet I was utterly engrossed in all the detail about the punitive measures against Oldmeadow and its Lord and knights, and the lands around them, from taxes and resources, to limitations on alliances and marriages, and the oaths that had been sworn on bended knee in the aftermath of war that had already stripped so much of them; and the fact that it was not just limited to the generation that had fought in the war, you saw its claws in the next generation too, in the warriors trained by the veterans, to children in love.

At the same time, we got to see the personal impact of that loss on the characters. From the trauma and grief that came from war, deep scars on their psyche manifesting in so many different ways; cracks that could at time threaten even the deepest of bonds and friendship. Although, alongside that we see it in the bonds between the characters, especially the knights, and the Kederan family, those who had survived the worst together, who had done the worst; and some of the most poignant moments in the entire book was between them, delicate moments that always tread the line between reminiscence, grief and fury.  We see it culturally, in the way they remember their fallen King, the way they cling to the truths that the world would erase, even beneath the weight of a world that tells a different truth. And if how they see themselves, and the questioning of who and what they are, especially with the enemies trampling on their very heart.

It also led very much into one of the central questions of this book.

What is a hero? And to a slightly lesser extent, how do you become a hero?

Both questions are given myriad answers and non-answers in this book. The one that made me laugh in the moment, and cry later was that ‘you end up dead’, and yet it is also very true, we see it when both sides of the divide revere the same warriors (although through very different lenses). Yet, even as they are set up on pedestals, we see the spotlight turned towards ‘living heroes’, to the knights and lords who gave everything, but ultimately lost. In the eyes of their own, they are heroes – we see the younger generations looking up to them, chasing the old stories, we see the children wanting to create their own legends separate of those shadows.

“The men you think we were back then, they didn’t exist. Those ideals of our glory were distractions given to us to blind us to the horror of what war demanded of us. The truth is we never could have been those men.’

But, amongst the reminisces, the moment where the characters cling to the old glories or the way things had been and could have been if the war had ended differently, Riley lifts the mirror and asks whether they were really heroes, these men who had gone to war for family, for honour, for duty… for a love to kill… and survived to tell their own legends. The ‘right side of a war’ is always going to be a matter of perspective, whether in the moment or in the aftermath; and good men doing what they need to do, can be just as bad as the monsters and enemies they are facing; and flip a coin and the other side could say the same. At what point does that tip over into a legend? Into being a hero? Or is that just dependent on who is looking at it? I don’t think there is an easy answer to that, and this book doesn’t offer one – when it all comes crashing down at the end, there are undoubtedly heroic acts, sacrifices made, and yet in the stories that will be told, will they be heroes?

Is Everan Caid a hero?

Everan would say absolutely not. He’s a drunkard, who lives in the shadow of that very question, chased by the ghosts of what he had done in the war and who he was in war, and the longing to go back to that world, and by an oath broken to his lady. In many ways he is the most un-heroic character I have ever read, and Riley writes him perfectly as a drunk man who has utterly lost his way; we have him waking up in random places, forgetting events that have happened, with stashes of alcohol all over the place. If that was all there was to him, he might have been a loveable, but ultimately forgettable character. But Everan in many ways is the heart of all those questions of what it means to be a hero and how you become one, and also of the darker question, of what horrors can be masked by that title. Riley gives us glimpses of him at his best, as the hero that people whisper he had been, and at his worst, and yet at the heart of it all – Everan is a man who cares fiercely for his Lord and his family.

Oaths have power over him, and yet ultimately, he is willing to risk everything to keep them safe. And it sends him on a delicate, wavering dance between honour and dishonour; and as a reader you are there willing people to listen to him, even as you understand why they don’t. It is also fascinating to see the variety of relationships he has with those he fought alongside and trained, from those who cannot see past the man he has become now and how low he has fallen, to those who remember who had been and hold onto that respect. To those that understand and would hold out a hand to support him when needed. Everan absolutely stole my heart, even on those occasions when I did want to douse his head in coffee and tell him to go and tell someone right there and then, before it disappeared into the haze of the alcohol.

Sera is a wonderful counterpoint to him, because she dreams of freedom, adventure and becoming a hero and in some ways, she is experiencing the beginning to his own story, while starting her own. She is also an absolute menace. Riley perfectly balances a sheltered, much-loved child, with one who had grown up in the shadow of that loss and the weight it leans constantly on her family, and in the shadow of her mother’s ghost. She is our key to Oldmeadow beyond the warriors, because we get to see so much of it, and the people who live and work there through her eyes. It is Sera that makes the fortress very much a home, and because of that we feel the invasion of the ‘guests’ so strongly.

I also love the fact that of everyone in Oldmeadow, Everan was the one she would not disobey (and to an extent Riley flips that later in the book). Sera is also in many ways our connection to the wider world that Riley is playing in throughout his books, because she has magick – and we get to see that discovery, and the effort to learn that in secrecy and where it might be her only weapon against the storm that is coming. Riley does an absolutely stellar job of showing a child being forced to grow up at a rapid rate of knots, while balancing that with a child who is struggling to process the way her world is changing, but with the resilience of a child who knows what they want and is determined to get it.

Horse is the best boy. No notes. (All the doggos are amazing, but Horse is the best).

The secondary characters were rarely secondary, whether they were ‘guests’ or not; and while it was a very large cast, I never had any difficultly telling them apart or of keeping track of which ones would have had me spitting on the ground and cursing their name if I had been in this world. Slane Kotter and Razer Kean were two of my favourites, for very different reasons; and again, were different sides of the question of what it meant to be a hero, and to have survived through the war. And some of the conversations and moments between Razer and Everan were some of the most poignant and profound; two men who had seen done horrors and were facing its aftermath in very different ways. Donner Kederan was another favourite, although in some ways he infuriated me more than all the other characters combined, and yet you understand why he was acting as he did, especially after a revelation towards the end; and ultimately this man was Oldmeadow – the link between the past and the present and the future through his children.

At times it felt like being on a chess board but not knowing how to play the game. You could see the pieces moving, some obvious, some so stealthily that they could have moved a single square or a dozen, and you couldn’t tell the difference; you could try and guess the next move, could go with the character’s next move and guess, and still not know what the next play would be. And when it all comes to a head, even the obvious elements were cast in a completely different light and there are moments when the pieces settle into place, that are just devastating. It also kept us as the reader just as on edge as those living through it, and there were moments where I felt just as suspicious of everything and everyone as Slane Kotter – to the point where I was even side-eying those our characters trusted.

The last three hundred off pages are where the gloves come off. The pebbles that had been falling throughout, become an avalanche, and Riley brings it all down. If the rest of the book is engrossing and impossible to put down, this is the rollercoaster where you can do nothing but hold on for the ride. As detailed as the intrigue and the worldbuilding have been, now the action takes centre stage, and Riley lets us feel it all – every bolt, every blow, ever drop of blood spilt. Every betrayal. Every loss. There were moments of hope, where you got to believe that maybe something could salvaged, only for it to be ripped away. There were also some of the most devastating moments in the entire book.

What hurts. What makes the ache and grief linger most, is how much could have been changed or saved, if a single decision had been made differently. If a hand had been held out in trust, if a secret had been shared, if a dot had been connected to another dot. Yet, each and every character had made their decisions based on what information they had, believing they were doing what was right and protecting what needed to be protected; and again, most of them could have succeeded, if only for a single beat change.

“Revenge is more reliable than hope.”

This was only the beginning, and Riley has set us up for a story that could have the power to bring this kingdom crashing down; and I can’t wait to see where this story goes, because as much as history might be written by the victors and those in power, it is absolutely shaped by everyone caught in its jaws. And this time, they might have bitten off more than they can chew.

The Heroes We Never Were is a story of heroes and villains, a story of family and friends, it is a story of loss and victory and survival. It’s the story of a drunkard, and a girl and a giant dog. And one of the easy recommendations I can ever give for anyone who loves epic stories, and a story where heroes are not the dashing, white knights of legend, but bad men dressed as good men, good men doing horrible for the right reasons, and a drunk man who will murder the world.