Swimming with sharks, jailbreaks, and exploding volcanos: Another day in Alera

On to the fourth book in the Codex Alera and we are in a situation where Tavi is fighting a holding battle against the Canim invaders, and the realm is doing the same against the forces of High Lord Kalare. Obviously things go wrong…

Tavi is tricked into losing command and facing charges of treason when a Senator in the pay of the Aquitanes is given oversight of his forces. Tavi will not kill Alerans who are just trying to survive behind enemy lines, but luckily he manages to give control of his forces to Crassus, the half-brother of his friend Max, who as heir to a High Lord cannot be easily bypassed. It’s noted by people that if the senator tried to jail Crassus his father would take the senator to pieces in a duel, if there was anything left after Max got there first.

Tavi instead decides to stage a jail break to get the Canim leader out of prison in Alera Imperia in order to ask him to end the war. To this end, he, Araris, Isana, Max, and Kitai head off by boat. Inevitably things go wrong, there’s a sea battle which results in Isana realising she has more power than she thought (particularly when Araris is seriously injured and she uses healing magic greater than any we’ve seen from a High Lord because she didn’t go to all that effort a book ago keeping him alive only to let him die now), and the jail break gets a bit loud too.

But in the end Tavi wins through, gets the Canim forces to stand down, and challenges the Senator to a duel. Luckily he’s been practicing with Araris to learn how to use his emergent magic, unluckily he’s facing a crazy person in the senator’s aide, so he instead uses psychology to do half the work to win the fight. For Tavi, this book is a triumph as he gains new allies in the Canim, learns to use fury craft, and finds out he has a mother. And also Valiar Marcus (revealed as Fidelius) picks a side and resigns from the Aquitanes service via a poisoned arrow through the back of High Lady Invidia Aquitane (spoiler: it unfortunately doesn’t do the job). Sadly, the secondary plotline this time is a drag…

In the B-plot Amara, Bernard, and the First Lord Gaius trek on foot to Kalare to end the war. The slog through the mountains and marshes felt endless and didn’t bring enough character notes to make me care. I still knew at the end that Gaius would do whatever it took to keep Alera and Tavi safe, and that Amara would never believe that sometimes you have to do bad things for the longer term good. I knew that before they set out and it didn’t change after Gaius blew up a volcano – the only change was that Amara resigned as a Cursor.

This is probably the weakest book in the series. Still a good read, but I admit I skipped quickly through the B-plot sections.