"The Witches Road" (2025) by Kate Elliott, can be summed up as The Apothecary Diaries x Shannara x Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress.
In typical Kate Elliott style, there is extensive world building that experiment with novel norms and social structures unfamiliar to many readers, there are richly developed characters, and cliche tropes and genre conventions are frequently turned on their head.
It is part of a two book series, with the second volume to be released in November, and while it is not her magnum opus, something reserved for her seven volume pair of series in the Jaran universe, or her seven volume Crown of Stars series, it is still a very solid and immersive slow burn high brow fantasy romance in a lovingly crafted and fully realized world.
In this post-apocalyptic world, deadly instantly mutagenic spores associated with the "Pall" have enveloped huge swaths of land in a rigidly hierarchal empire with vague East Asian vibes. The empire is organized at almost every level to permit civilization to survive in the face of the scourge that is the Pall. It isn't entirely clear what lies beyond the oceans and the ocean-like barrier that is the Pall.
The part of the empire that we see, far from the emperor's palace in the heartland, is predominantly agricultural and organized around other primary industries like farming, herding, fishing, forestry, stone quarrying, and mining. The empire is a rigidly hierarchical, but intrigue filled, feudal society where aristocrats jockey for power united under a single emperor who has united all territory up to its natural boundaries. Many key professions like surveying, engineering, and serving as soldiers and as archivists, which one must enter something like a holy order at age seventeen, are also limited to children of aristocrats, above the level of servants assigned to support the professionals who may be commoners, although some professions, like couriers and midwives, need not be aristocrats, and meritocracy is creeping into upset the privileges of aristocratic rank within those professions. Education is limited mostly to aristocrats and the very promising commoner students of liberal aristocrats, with literacy being perhaps about as common as a college education was in the 1960s in the U.S. Themes of found family, sexual identity, servitude, child exploitation, overcoming trauma, and the role of single, adult, childless women in society, are explored in detail.
The empire has pre-industrial, roughly 17th to 18th century level technology (without gun powder, but with fairly easily available contraception and midwives that can safely assist women in obtaining abortions). It has steel, bows, crossbows, spy-glasses, portable fire starting kits, finely crafted clothing, precious metal coins (but not paper currency), accurate surveying and extensive written record keeping, carriages, Roman era grade plumbing and civil engineering, ships that can travel along ocean coasts, libraries but not printing presses, traveling theatrical companies, and significant amounts of travel and trade with all roads leading to the capital in the heartland.
There are isolated elements present in the empire, like ancient triple towers of stone and a set of roads magically immune to spores and the Pall that are also conduits for telegram-like messages, which pre-date the empire and are associated with a legendary era associated in lore with ancient sorcerer-kings. Silk road style hostel-cities (also similar to inns along ancient roman roads), provided for when the roads were built, dot the ancient "witch roads" in enclaves that are also engineered to be free of the Pall and its spores if properly managed, although rural villages have far inferior defensive measures, and it isn't safe to travel at night due to spores, various forms and races of marauding bandits, and deadly wild animals.
The current empire has a class of fairly modestly potent magic users under the strict control of the empire via its dominant religion, the Heart Temples, which is more pagan than quasi-Christian. But the people of the empire, who are apparently all nominally adherents to this religion, are not meaningfully more superstitious or religiously minded than their more magical than ours world warrants. Other, mostly lost and forgotten, magic exists as well.
While humans are predominant, their are minorities of several other sentient races - a race of indestructible giants that can read and write and understand human language but not speak it who go dormant at night, a race of three horned dwarves who ride wild cats in small groups through forests and sell themselves a mercenaries, a race of elf-like folk who can be hard to distinguish from humans broken into two hostile groups called the Sea Wolves and the Blood Wolves, and a more peaceful group known as Forest Wolves, and a couple of other sentient races who are mentioned by name in passing, but are not described or introduced in the first volume. Some of these humanoid minority races are refugees, sometimes more recently but often generations ago, from areas devastated by the Pall (as are, we eventually learn, our main character and her deceased sister). Aristocratic messengers riding griffins provide limited air mail service. A few kinds of fantasy creatures, as well as magically powered animal golems, fill the place of heavy machinery, for example, pulling fast carriages. The more advanced, prosperous, and magical days of the sorcerer-kings of legendary history also apparently had dragons and various kinds of powerful chimeric warriors.
The visible presence of, and attitudes towards, LGBT folks (several of whom are important or secondary characters) is comparable to that of the 21st century in the U.S. (with attitudes mixed between more liberal and more conservative aristocrats), although acceptance of concubinage, indentured servitude, roles of women, and the like are more or less in line with those of 17th-19th century East Asia albeit with gender equality approaching late 19th century to early 20th century Western levels or what is seen in modern Islamic countries, and attitudes towards psychology and appropriate interpersonal interactions to deal with people's emotions that are very modern.
Refreshingly, the main character is neither the 17 year old young man about to declare his profession, nor the handsome but arrogant prince who is second in line, together with his sister who is trying to undermine him, to the throne, after the incompetent and ill tempered young crown prince. Instead, it is the young man's 31 year old never married aunt who has served for ten years as a deputy courier, delivering messages by foot over a route that takes weeks to walk while keeping her eye open for spore outbreaks in order to stop them immediately before they get out of hand, and reporting generally on local conditions to the local junior aristocrat who runs the local way station along the imperial road and provides county-level type governmental supervision to the local rural villages.
Most of the characters, including our main character's sister who died a couple of years earlier in an avalanche while on bad terms with her child, have deep dark traumatic pasts that are only revealed bit by bit.
The nominal core plot revolves around our main character guiding the handsome prince with a secret mission on a shortcut past an avalanche blocked canyon (a problem his rival sister hid from him in an effort to one up him, or to create an opportunity to assassinate him in royal succession politics), off the safe and ancient witch roads, together with her nephew, both of whom are urgently escaping their dark pasts trying to catch up with them. But this mission gets a new twist when a charming, wiser, more open minded, and ancient "haunt" temporarily possesses the prince so it can travel to the same destination as the one where the prince was bound on a mission of its own.
I have no quarrel with the fact the she introduce many important terms and concepts long before they are fully explained. But, a small nitpick is that she invents many proper names and creature type names that it is hard to know how to pronounce, such as Xilsi, for which the pronunciation is the "X" is unclear. Given the neo-East Asian setting, I pronounced it in my mind as if it was a transliteration of Chinese with an "sh" sound, rather than the "ch" sound used for X as an initial letter in words of Greek origin. But the proper pronunciation of this name, and several other names and terms used in the book, is less than clear.
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