A tale of scheming and manners and swordplay set in an unnamed city that features a society that encompasses a sort of Elizabethan underworld and a Regency upper class, where the aristocracy answer insults, offences and challenges by hiring swordsman to do their fighting for them. The best swordsman is Richard de Vier, who hangs around an insalubrious part of the town where the City Watch fear to tread with his lover, an ex-scholar with an aristocratic accent, a caustic tongue and an apparent death-wish. After an unusually bloody fight at a winter party, events and plots are set in motion that will make life very uncomfortable for de Vier indeed.

This is a fundamentally romantic tale of manners and conspiracies, a drama of social and political maneuvering. Despite being central to the plot and part of the core concept, the sword fights themselves are not treated as thrilling climactic conflicts. The focus is very much on the personal and the political. If CJ Cherryh wrote a Regency novel, it might be a bit like this.

Interestingly, the homosexuality and bisexuality of the main characters came as a shock to me. Not because of the sexuality itself, but because it was presented without fanfare or elaboration, as if completely normal, and I can't remember when or whether I've read a genre novel that did that, and I wonder if that speaks to my conservatism in reading choices or the genre's conservatism in general. Anyway, it's all quite matter-of-fact, as is much of the worldbuilding, which is a masterclass in telling you as little as the narrative can get away with and still evoke a fantasy setting, eschewing infodumps and lessons in history and geography and whatever to avoid bogging the story down.

It took a while for the story to really grab me, but in the end it did, and the three stories at the end were pretty good, too.