Daughter of the Empire recap

Mara, seventeen and about to take vows as a temple novice, is called home when her father and brother are killed on the barbarian world in a battle engineered by the Minwanabi, leaving her Ruling Lady of a house reduced to a handful of soldiers. Guided by her old nurse Nacoya and her Force Commander Keyoke, she rebuilds by breaking Tsurani convention: she recruits masterless grey warriors, bargains with a cho-ja queen for a hive on Acoma land, and takes the spymaster Arakasi into her service. To gain protection she marries Buntokapi, the least promising son of the Anasati, so his family must defend her house, then manoeuvres him into a position where honour leaves him no choice but to take his own life, leaving her ruling for their infant son. Finally she attends the Warlord's celebration at the Minwanabi estate, where her enemy Lord Jingu means to kill her without breaking guest-right. Papewaio dies protecting her, but Mara exposes Jingu's treachery before the Empire and he is forced to take his own life, leaving his son Desio sworn to destroy her.

This book runs alongside the Riftwar Saga and tells the story from the other side of the rift, on the world of Kelewan. What a reader needs going in is the setting rather than any earlier plot. Kelewan is ruled by the Empire of Tsuranuanni, a rigid, ancient society in which honour is public, absolute and more valuable than life, and in which suicide is an accepted answer to disgrace. Below the Emperor, called the Light of Heaven and treated as a religious figure rather than a governing one, real power belongs to the Warlord and to the great houses, who compete endlessly for position in what they call the Game of the Council: a contest fought with marriages, trade, assassination and manufactured accidents, in which whole families are erased and the winners are congratulated. Above the law entirely stands the Assembly of Magicians, the Great Ones, who answer to no lord. For some years the Empire has been fighting a war on another world, reached through a magical rift and inhabited by people the Tsurani call barbarians. The Warlord runs that war, and the great houses send their sons and their armies to it, knowing that it is being used to raise some families and bleed others.

Mara, seventeen, is pulled out of the temple of Lashima on the morning she is to take her final vows: her father, Lord Sezu of the Acoma, and her brother Lanokota are dead on the barbarian world, killed in a battle deliberately arranged to expose them. She is now Ruling Lady of the Acoma, a great house reduced to a name, an estate and a few dozen soldiers, with almost all of its strength buried on another world. Her enemy is Lord Jingu of the Minwanabi, whose family has been at feud with hers for generations and who intends to finish the work this season. Her assets are an old nurse, Nacoya, who becomes her adviser, a Force Commander, Keyoke, who is one of the few survivors, and the soldier Papewaio. Everyone expects her to be dead or married off within months. Mara, who has no training in politics whatever, decides to play the Game of the Council instead.

Mara begins by doing things no Tsurani ruler would consider. She sends Keyoke to make contact with grey warriors, the masterless soldiers whose lords were destroyed and who are held to have lost all honour and all place in the world, and offers them service under the Acoma: hundreds accept, among them a quick-witted distant cousin named Lujan, and the house's strength grows in secret. When Papewaio is caught by the letter of the honour code and condemned to die for an act that saved her, she circumvents the sentence by declaring the condemned man's black headband the badge of a new honour guard rather than a mark of death. She also opens negotiations with a young cho-ja queen for a hive to be founded on Acoma land, bargaining for warriors, silk and craftsmen, and paying in courtesy that other nobles are too proud to offer.

Strength alone will not save the Acoma from the Minwanabi, so Mara buys protection with a marriage. She approaches Lord Tecuma of the Anasati, her father's old rival and Jingu's ally, and asks for one of his sons, then deliberately chooses Buntokapi, the coarse and slow-witted second son whom Tecuma values least. The bargain works exactly as intended: with Anasati blood ruling the Acoma, the Anasati must defend the house they had been helping to destroy, and Jingu's alliance is broken. The price is that Buntokapi becomes Ruling Lord and Mara becomes a subordinate wife in her own house, subject to a husband who is loud, violent-tempered and pleased with his new power. She endures him, bears him a son, Ayaki, and waits. During this period Arakasi, the surviving Spy Master of a house destroyed years earlier, brings her his intact intelligence network and enters Acoma service.

Buntokapi rules badly and hates the paperwork, so Mara encourages the parts of his character that will get him out of the way: she buys him a town house in Sulan-Qu, where the wrestling matches and the gambling are, and where a beautiful and ambitious courtesan named Teani makes herself indispensable to him. To keep the estate running in his absence he grants his wife written authority to act in his name. Mara uses it. Acting with her husband's seal she manoeuvres the Acoma into positions that damage the Minwanabi and set the house at odds with the Warlord's interests, decisions Buntokapi would never have permitted and which, once made, cannot be unmade. She then arranges for him to discover exactly what has been done in his name, at a moment of her choosing rather than his.

Buntokapi comes home and learns everything, and finds that Tsurani honour has closed every exit. He can kill his wife, but that would put his infant son under Anasati regency and hand the Acoma to his own father, ending the house's independence and his own standing with it; he cannot disown decisions taken lawfully under his own authority; and he cannot outmanoeuvre the woman who arranged the position. He takes his own life by the sword, in the correct form, and dies as Lord of the Acoma. Mara is Ruling Lady again, with Ayaki as her heir. Lord Tecuma understands perfectly what has been done to his son and will never forgive her, but Ayaki is his grandson and Anasati blood, so he must go on protecting the house that killed Buntokapi. The Acoma have survived the year, and the Minwanabi have lost their ally.

Mara is summoned to a celebration for the Warlord held at Lord Jingu's own lake estate, an invitation she cannot refuse and which Jingu intends to be her last journey. Under Tsurani custom a guest cannot be harmed by her host, so Jingu's plan is to have her killed in a way that cannot be traced to him, and the household is full of his agents. Mara arrives with a small guard and spends the visit under continuous attack. Papewaio is killed defending her. Rather than run, she forces the matter into the open before the Warlord and the assembled nobility of the Empire and proves that murder was attempted under Jingu's roof. The disgrace is absolute and public, and Jingu takes his own life to spare his family total ruin. His son Desio inherits a damaged house and swears a blood oath to destroy the Acoma. Mara goes home the season's clear victor, ruling for her son, with an army, a cho-ja hive and a spy network she did not have a year earlier.

Mara survives the Minwanabi trap and turns it. Attending the Warlord's celebration at Lord Jingu's own estate, protected only by the guest-right that Tsurani custom makes absolute, she is hunted through the house by his agents; Papewaio is killed defending her. Rather than fleeing, Mara forces the matter into the open in front of the Warlord and the assembled nobility, and demonstrates that Jingu attempted murder under his own roof. The dishonour is total and public, and Jingu takes his own life. His son Desio inherits the Minwanabi with their alliances weakened and their standing damaged, and swears a blood oath to his god that he will destroy the Acoma. Mara goes home the acknowledged victor of the season's Game. In one year she has taken a house of a few dozen soldiers and rebuilt it into a power with thousands of men, a cho-ja hive, an intelligence network under Arakasi, and a reputation nobody expected. She rules for her infant son Ayaki, whose Anasati blood obliges Lord Tecuma to protect him even though Tecuma will never forgive her for his son's death. The war beyond the rift continues, the Warlord's grip on the Empire is unchallenged, and the feud that has consumed both houses for generations is not over. The story continues in Servant of the Empire.