Rating: WORTHY!
Butcher mistakenly titles this with an apostrophe as though Princeps s a plural. It is not! If he were titling it correctly, it should be Princeps's Fury.
Princeps's Fury takes off right after the previous volume. Tavi crosses the ocean on the ice ships and learns of the tragedy which has unfolded in the Canim homeland. Cursor Ehren, Tavi's friend, and the First Lord of Alera take the battle to the Vord, which is now revealed to be the biggest threat to Alera, beyond anything else they've ever faced. On this same front, the Lady Amara and her husband Count Bernard, Tavi's uncle, must try to discover how it is that the Vord can now use fury-crafting! As if they were not an evil enough foe to begin with. Finally, Isana, who is Tavi's mom, is dispatched to the north, where an entire Aleran army is effectively trapped because they must ward off the ice giants from even further north.
Perhaps the most interesting thing in this novel (apart from the always enthralling Kitai, whose humor, devotion to Tavi and skills as a horsewoman, spy, and warrior just keep on growing and growing) is Isana issuing a Juris Macto of her own! She wins, and forges a truce with the Ice People, which frees up the entire army there to battle the Vord, who are now seriously threatening to overrun Alera as they did the Canim homeland.
We learn that the reason that the Vord have fury-crafting skills is that they've taken the Lady Aquitaine on board. She is effectively one of them and they now have access to her skills. In return, she gets not to die from the poisoned balest with which Fidelius shot her. The Vord queen also has learned skills from Kalarus Brencis, who died at the First lord's hand in Captain's Fury so that she can now turn anyone into a Vord zombie.
The First Lord comes out big time here. He is dying we learn, because of his age, his stressful life, and the fact that his second wife was slowly poisoning him, so when he makes the ultimate sacrifice, and massively degrades the Vord at the same time, it's not surprising. What is surprising is that he has contact with a power which no other Lord of Alera has: he has tapped into Alera herself - the fury of the entire nation. He asks that Alera devote herself to Tavi now - that whatever allegiance she had to the First Lord be transferred to his grandson.
Tavi travels with Kitai (and other Alerans) to the homeland of the Canem (which is not next door to Panem!). He's transporting the Canem home, but upon arrival they discover that Canea has been overrun by Vord. For a while, Tavi and his small traveling team, separated by design from their main party, are held captive (across country from the coast where they arrived) by the leader of last outpost of the Canem, which is on the verge of being wiped out. When he's finally asked for help by the local Cane leader, Tavi is granted access to the battle reports from all the Canem tribes, one of which held out much longer than the rest.
Tavi slowly comes to the realization that the Vord not only operate through direct instructions from a queen, but also that the queen does not operate alone. Each time she moves to a new location, the queen spawns two daughters. This triad then wages war on the local populace until victory is won. Each of the three queens then moves to a new area and re-spawns, making a new triad. Thus the geometric progression of the assault.
The cane leader who held out longest had apparently discerned this pattern and changed his battle plan to address it head on. Instead of standing still and steadfastly trying to repel wave after wave of almost overwhelming Vord attacks, he went after the queen each time they managed to pinpoint the location of one of them, stemming the tide and forcing the Vord to regroup. But even this plan was doomed to failure because he did not have enough troops to overcome the massive attrition rate and he did not know how to overcome the Vord queens' ability to sense and control the thoughts of those enemy who were within a certain close range. He tried to win by sheer force of large numbers applied surgically, but even this was a doomed strategy in the end.
Tavi hatches a plan to overcome the Vord queens' mind-reading abilities, and also convinces his followers and the Cane alike to follow the lead of the successful Cane strategy, modified with his new twists. If you have seen the movie Push, you will recognize Tavi's contribution to the plan, but Princeps Fury was released in December 2008, before the release of Push in 2009. Is it odd that two separate writers both came up with the same idea around the same time?!
Meanwhile, back in Alera, the Vord are also mounting a full scale assault, and slowly beating back the Aleran armies towards their capital, despite a massive battle led and fought by Alera's finest lords and citizens. After Gaius's overwhelmingly massive blast of the Vord ground forces, the defenders suddenly discover that they've been had by the Vord. The local queen never intended the ground forces to succeed, but instead sacrificed them in order to wear down the Alerans and give away the location of Alera's best defensive personnel before unleashing her hitherto unencountered and certainly unexpected airborne force to wipe them out.
Meanwhile, Isana is dispatched by Gaius north to the massive wall designed to hold back the fearsome Ice People. She is to make peace with them (even though after 300 years of war, no peace has ever been struck). She makes far more progress in two meetings than anyone else has made. She discovers that they have fury-crafting skills and because of these, the natural (and unconscious) reaction of Aleran soldiers to their proximity was fear and loathing on the campaign trail. This irrational reaction is why no peace could ever be struck. Unfortunately, just as she's making progress, Lord Antillus launches a sneak attack upon the senior Ice People leadership, and all but destroys Isana's hard work and the value of her astute insights. Through sheer force of will and expert use of her now more powerful grasp of fury-crafting, Isana defeats Antillus's plan and saves the lives of the Ice leaders.
Amara and Bernard act as spies in this volume, also picking up useful knowledge of Vord practices, but this couple is the least interesting to me of all the various people we follow in this series. I don’t know what it is, but maybe it’s that they are far too sickly sweet, sappy, and intense for my taste, although I respect Amara's skills.
My two heroes, Kitai and the Vord queen aren't that interesting in this volume, either. Kitai is always worth reading about but she has no stand-outs here. The Vord queen becomes really fascinating only in volume six, where she's a treat. This is still a worthy read though.
