A forbidden romance and an exploration of the complexities of duty.
Specificity is not always a virtue. Fantasy readers often disdain the generic medieval fantasy setting - and with good reason, given how overdone it is - but that doesn't mean that sometimes, a light hand on the worldbuilding tiller can be just as effective, or even more, than one that digs into granular details. Fate's Bane, the new novella from C. L. Clark, is a great example of exactly that.
The story follows two young women, one, Agnir, a hostage taken to ensure her father's good behaviour (read: not making war on the hostage-taker) and the other, Hadhnri, the daughter of the clan she's been taken into. Unsurprisingly, they fall in love. But Agnir is never truly one of Clan Aradoc, and Hadhnri cannot seem to see that her father will never let them be, and that Agnir is never so sure and comfortable of her place among them as she is in Hadhnri's affections. Clan Aradoc, and particularly their leader, expect of her the duty and loyalty of one born to them, but don't afford her the trust that would naturally go alongside it, denying her the weapon she yearns for as she goes into adulthood.
But in that imperfect childhood, the two girls-then-women find a magic that allows them to create, to influence the world beyond the realms of the mundane, the use of which brings them as close as their burgeoning feelings, until Agnir shies away from the risks that Hadhnri wants to take.
And so in the early part of the story, this tension is built up - two parts of the relationship with very different positions in the world, and thus very different outlooks, and very different ways of measuring risk and cost/benefit. Sitting within Agnir's perspective, it is easy to see all the dangers and problems that afflict her life that Hadhnri misses, blithe in her own security. And so, when Agnir's own clan steals her back, the reader sees easily how conflicted she is. On the one hand, she has all of her childhood experiences, the affection of Hadhnri and her brother Gunni, the food and shelter and care given, but on the other, the knowledge of how that situation came to be, and the ties that predate it all, to Clan Fein, her blood siblings and her father. To them she owes the loyalty of family, even if, after years of being raised elsewhere, they are nearly strangers to her. Clark makes clear - without belabouring the point, but in showing us in little snippets of life in these two clans - how clearly those blood ties and their sense of honour and duty matter to those in this world, these Fens. Agnir's divided self is set up and grounded just enough for it to feel a part of this setting, so that the story can then shift on to studying the (necessary, tragic) outcomes of that division of loves.
And that light touch embedding of the sense of this world's mores truly is one of the virtues of the book. It's a novella, and so such setting and groundwork as it does needs to be conveyed quickly, so the fact that Clark more evokes than explains stands it in good stead. I infer from words like "fens" and "seax" where and when in the world this is meant to be implying. Reference to the baneswood, and its stories, make clear the pagan nature of this culture, and so when outside forces come in wearing robes of a certain shape and worshipping a different god, it's easy to nod along and think "ah yes, the coming of Christianity to the British isles" and know roughly when and whereabouts this draws its inspiration from. It doesn't need more than roughly, because it is also very clearly a fantasy world - there are little shifts in culture, along with the clear magic, that take us a step outside of the bounds of reality. What Clark gives us instead of specificity, though, is coherence. We may not get a thorough explanatory guide to this place, but every single little detail we do get - the love locks courting couples share, the training grounds, the material culture, the clans and their quarrels - feeds into that sense of time and place, and helps to make it feel whole. It's a delicate line to walk, but one I think Clark has done phenomenally, in this instance.
Some of that is, of course, that the slightly abstracted historical period being evoked isn't the traditional-unspecified-north-west-European medieval. It's not taverns and wenches and kings and castles, and so gets points for rarity. But the skill Clark uses in sketching a sense of place in these clean lines with little moments of clarity is critical too. They know exactly when to give the reader a touch of something real, to ground the more nebulous whole and give it the semblance of greater depth.
It helps too, that the shape of the story owes a little to older traditions of "romance" as well as to modern, and that genre-shape helps guide how the story is read and make it feel of a piece with its setting. There are echoes of modern tropes, don't get me wrong. I recognise these lesbians from plenty of fiction. But there's also plenty of moments that draw on older myths and stories too. Which is to say that... happily ever after may not be the thing to be seeking here.
And, having read The Unbroken, I am not exactly surprised. Thematically, they're treading very similar ground here again, exploring how a person can have their loyalties owed in different ways to very competing people and powers. Both books examine the way that the deeper tie of family can be suborned and complicated by other forces, and that a person can quite blamelessly find themselves torn in two by the loves and duties they owe to the two different parts of themself. It's a very compelling theme, and one I think bears up under this repeated scrutiny. Interestingly, the story I found myself most reaching to for comparison however was one of the other yellow lesbian books of the same cohort - She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan. There's a lot of thematic overlap between the two, don't get me wrong, but the particular love between someone raised by an enemy, and the child of the enemy, echoes really well between the eunuch Ouyang and Fate's Bane's Agnir. Both feel compelled to act against their personal desires in service of a duty greater than themself, and are pulled into a vengeance that can do nothing but hurt them. And both are extremely compelling for it. Agnir gets much less page time to get to a place of complexity than Ouyang does, but Clark does an excellent job of skimming where skimming needs to happen and lingering over personal moments to give us the shape of her personal feelings and dilemmas.
Again overlapping with Ouyang's story, as well as The Unbroken, Clark is clearly interested in thinking about power and powerlessness, agency and how that can be suborned or denied. Agnir is a symbol more than a person for much of the book - a token of her father's good behaviour and then, later, a symbol of the crimes of Clan Aradoc to her own people and those whose support her father seeks. Even to her beloved, sometimes, she becomes as much a token of rebellion against her family and their expectations as a real person with loyalties of her own. As with Ouyang and Esen, Agnir cannot seem to quite make Hadhnri see that she has ties outside of the ones that bind her to Clan Aradoc, and that what they have done to her has plenty of marks in the "bad" side of the ledger to balance out such good as there may be.
Much of this tension is built early and clearly, leaving an amount of the story's direction quite obvious to the reader. This is not a criticism - rather than the twists of an adventure novel, this again invokes older-style doomed romances, with the car-crash experience of watching two people bound by circumstances walk into a doom they cannot escape. Of such things is the entire tragic genre built, and for good reason.
It is not, however, a perfect book. I have two points to highlight that don't quite fit the otherwise excellent storytelling. The first is much more minor (though doesn't sound it), and that's the place of magic within the story. Despite the unexplained magic being the force that binds the characters to that tragic fate, its infrequent appearances within the story undercut its dramatic weight. Unlike so many of the other parts, here Clark's light hand doesn't quite do justice to the role that magic needs to play in the story, and leaves it feeling remarkably tacked on for what is, in essence, the motive force of the entire plot. And yet... I mostly couldn't bring myself to mind all that much. The character work is sufficiently compelling that it was easy to handwave in my head the course they were heading onto, rather than need it all spelled out. It's not missing, either, just a little thin, perhaps a casualty of the rather short length of the story and the greater focus (which has worked excellently) on character development. Given that it's a story that rides heavily on the strength of one character's own internal dilemma, this feels like a sacrifice that can be accepted, on the whole.
The second is more significant, but also one about which I've not quite made up my mind. For the majority of the book, the story follows a fairly linear standard structure. There are a few brief deviations into the mythic, but they are short and fairly closed off, and do not seem to say much to the shape of the story itself, rather instead to feed into the texture of it. But the ending takes something of a structural turn from all that. Clark opens up something of a wider possibility space for the shape the ending might take, and I cannot quite decide if this is a stroke of genius - leaning into the doom that has been shadowing the story the whole way to remind the reader that some stories cannot have a cleanly good ending - or a step away from that doom that undercuts some of its heft. Whichever way I find myself leaning, however, I cannot deny that the choice is an interesting one, and is one of the things that I suspect I will remember most clearly about the story when I look back to it in future. And I would rather that, I think, even if I come to a resolution that the ending does not work for me, I appreciate that it's such a distinctive stylistic and structural choice. I would always rather read a book that takes a punt than something more staid.
And I certainly couldn't call Fate's Bane that. In light sketches and deft moments of personal intimacy and turmoil, Clark has drawn out a story that manages to feel mythic and tragic, as well as with the more personal level of character work that is the best of what I like in modern story telling. It's an extremely competent novella, and one with a strong thematic core that helps give some of the lighter parts a greater narrative gravity and make it feel more than the sum of its parts. Alongside a prose voice that is distinctive while unobtrusive, and which feeds very neatly into the coherent atmosphere of this fantasy-but-slightly-historical world, the compelling chemistry and tragedy of the romance at the story's heart make this a novella well worth reading.
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The Math
Highlights: Interesting setting with cohesive atmosphere, compelling main characters, interesting tension between duty and romance
Nerd Coefficient: 7/10
Reference: C. L. Clark, Fate's Bane [Tordotcom, 2025].
POSTED BY: Roseanna Pendlebury, the humble servant of a very loud cat. @chloroformtea.bsky.social
