Lioness Rampant

What's inside (9 sections)

1. The Dominion Jewel
2. Sarain
3. The Roof of the World
4. What waited at home
5. Coronation day
6. The catacombs
7. The desert and after
8. Key takeaways
9. FAQ

Lioness Rampant opens with Alanna of Trebond sitting in a tavern in Berat with a cat and an old soldier, and nobody in the room knows she is a knight. That is the joke Pierce has been building toward for three books. The girl who spent a decade pretending to be a boy is now a woman with a shield, a sword, and a reputation she cannot quite spend, and the last book of the quartet starts by putting her in a room full of strangers who underestimate her.

Atheneum published it in 1988, it runs 320 pages, and it closes the Song of the Lioness quartet that began with Alanna: The First Adventure in 1983. Pierce has said she wrote the series because she wanted a girl hero who got to do the things boy heroes did. By this volume the argument is settled and the question changes. What does a woman do with the life she fought to be allowed to live?

That question is why the book still works for me, even with its hurry and its thin spots. It is not a story about earning a place. It is a story about coming home to a place that changed while you were gone.

Pierce was writing these books in the 1980s, when a girl on a horse with a sword was still a small act of defiance in American fantasy. The quartet has aged unevenly. The gender politics are blunt, the class politics are mostly absent, and the villains want power because they want power. None of that stopped me from reading the last hundred pages in one sitting.

The Dominion Jewel

The quest is simple to state. Alanna, her cat Faithful, and Coram are looking for the Dominion Jewel, a gem that gives a monarch enormous power. Whoever holds it can steady a kingdom or break one. Alanna wants it for Jonathan, who is king by now in everything but ceremony, and she wants to be the one who hands it to him.

In Berat she meets Liam Ironarm, the Shang Dragon. He is a martial arts champion, famous, cocky, and immediately interested in her. He joins the hunt and starts teaching her the Shang fighting style, which is unarmed and close and demands a kind of discipline her knight's training never asked for. The training scenes are the best part of this stretch. He throws her, she gets up, he corrects her feet, she gets thrown again. Pierce writes the pleasure of learning a new physical skill without making it mystical.

They become lovers, and the book is honest about what that is. It is attraction and respect and two people who are good at moving their bodies, and it is not built to last. Liam does not want to be a knight's husband. Alanna does not want to be a Shang fighter's wife. Neither of them says it that plainly, which is why the affair has a shelf life.

The Jewel itself is one of those fantasy objects that does exactly what the plot needs, which is both its appeal and its problem. It has no personality. It is a battery with a crown on it, and the search for it is mostly a reason to move Alanna through Sarain. That is fine. The object is not the point. The point is what she is willing to climb for.

I will say now that the romance is the weakest thread in the novel. Liam is charming and then he is convenient, and the book needs him to be a teacher and a complication more than it needs him to be a person. Readers who love him are responding to a few good scenes and a lot of promise. Readers who shrug at him are not wrong.

Sarain

The party crosses Sarain, and Sarain is on fire in the slow way. A civil war is building between the K'miri tribes and Warlord jin Wilima, and the travelers are walking through the argument. Alanna does not want to take a side. She wants a jewel and a road home.

They pick up two companions anyway. Princess Thayet jian Wilima is the warlord's daughter, and she has left her father's house because she does not accept what he is doing. Buriram Tourakom is her K'miri bodyguard, and she is the one who decides whether Thayet is safe, which means she decides a lot. The pair of them change the temperature of the group. Thayet is educated, stubborn, and used to being handled, and Alanna likes her almost immediately.

Thayet is also the book's clearest mirror for Alanna. Both women were raised to be decorative and both refused. Thayet's refusal costs her a father and a country. Alanna's cost her a decade of lying about her body. Pierce never puts them in a room to compare notes, which is a shame, because the scenes they do share are the most interesting political writing in the novel.

The Sarain section does two jobs. It shows Alanna choosing people over a mission, which is the pattern of her whole life, and it sets up Thayet for the throne. Pierce is not subtle about the setup. Thayet is brave, decent, and royal, and the book has a king who needs a queen. You can see the destination from a long way off, but the walk there is pleasant.

Buriram is the character I wanted more of. She is blunt, competent, and completely unimpressed by Alanna's legend, and every scene where she gets to be dry about the quest is better for it. She also gets very little to do after the coronation, which is a waste.

The Roof of the World

The pass at the Roof of the World is where the quest stops being an adventure and becomes a test. Blizzards close the route. The group is stuck, and Alanna feels something wrong in Tortall, a pull toward home that she cannot explain and cannot ignore.

So she does the thing that defines her. She puts the whole camp to sleep with a spell and climbs alone. The climb is a physical trial, cold and thin air and no audience, and at the top she faces Chitral, the immortal guardian of the Jewel. He does not hand it over because she is worthy in some vague way. He sets her a trial, and she wins it by endurance and nerve. The cold is written well. Fingers stop working. The rope becomes a nuisance. Alanna's body, which has been the tool of her ambition since she was a girl, turns into a thing that can fail her, and that is the first time in the quartet her strength reads as borrowed rather than owned.

Then she comes down and Liam is furious. Not because she risked herself. Because she used magic on him. Liam fears magic in a way the book never fully explains, and being put to sleep without consent is a violation he cannot laugh off. He is right to be angry, and Alanna is right that she had no better option. The argument ends the romance, though not the friendship, and the book handles the separation with more maturity than it handled the affair.

What I like about this section is that the trial is solitary. Every other victory in the quartet happens with someone watching. This one happens in snow, with a cat and a guardian, and Alanna has to decide on her own whether she is the person she has been claiming to be.

What waited at home

Back in Tortall, Raoul of Goldenlake gives her the news in a rush. The king and queen are dead. Jonathan is king but not yet crowned. And her twin brother Thom has done something unforgivable: he has resurrected Duke Roger of Conte to prove he is the strongest sorcerer alive.

That last detail is the engine of the whole book. Thom is not a villain. He is a brilliant, arrogant boy who wanted to win an argument with a dead man, and he won it in the worst possible way. Roger is back, and Thom is linked to him in a way he did not plan for. His own magic is poisoning him as it interacts with Roger's, which means the person Alanna most needs to save is the person who caused the crisis.

Alanna rides to Jonathan, gives him the Jewel, and he names her King's Champion. It is the honor the whole series has been aiming at, and Pierce gives it about a page. There is no feast. There is a kingdom with two dead monarchs and a coronation to stage.

On the eve of the coronation the Great Mother Goddess warns Alanna that the ceremony will be a crossroads in time. It is a strange, quiet scene in a book that is about to get loud, and it does what prophecy should do. It raises the stakes without explaining them.

Coronation day

Roger strikes during the coronation, and the attack is not a knife in a crowd. He uses his power and Thom's to shake the palace apart. Earthquakes roll through the city. Walls come down. The ceremony turns into a rescue and then into a battle.

Traitors come out of the woodwork. Delia of Eldorne, beautiful and cold, has been Roger's creature since the second book. Alex of Tirragen, Alanna's childhood friend from page training, has chosen Roger and is now a skilled and bitter swordsman. Claw, also known as Ralon of Malven, is the bully from the first book, grown into something worse. Pierce has been stacking these resentments for four volumes, and the coronation is where they all get spent.

Delia gets the least satisfying treatment of the three. She has been a presence since book two, all silk and insinuation, and here she is mostly a name in a list of traitors. For a character who shaped so much of the court intrigue, she deserved a scene where she had to answer for it.

Jonathan holds the earthquakes back with the Dominion Jewel. That is the job of a king in this book. He stands in the middle of a falling palace and keeps the ground still while his friends fight, and it costs him, and he does it anyway.

Thom dies. He is drained by Roger, used up as a battery, and his death is the one that hurts because it is so stupid and so avoidable. Alanna's twin, the prodigy, the boy who had to be the best, dies because being the best was the only thing he knew how to want.

Alanna kills Alex in a duel. It is a clean fight between two people who trained together, and Pierce does not let it be triumphant. George Cooper kills Claw. Josiane of the Copper Isles kills Si-cham and Faithful, and Alanna kills Josiane. Faithful's death is the blow the book barely lets you feel before the next thing happens. The cat has been Alanna's companion and comic relief and conscience since book two, and he dies in a corridor, and there is no time to mourn him.

That is the cost of this sequence. Pierce kills the funny one and the brother and the friend in the same hour, and she does not slow down to comfort the reader. Some people find that brutal. I find it honest. Battles do not schedule grief.

The catacombs

Roger is waiting in the catacombs, by a Gate of Idramm. He is not gloating. He is explaining, which is worse. He survived his earlier death through a Sorcerer's Sleep, and he has been moving pieces for years. He also had a hand in the making of Alanna's sword, Lightning, which means the weapon she has trusted since she was a girl has a history she did not choose.

Alanna is exhausted and cut off from her Gift. She has no magic left, no allies in the tunnel, and a sword that may not be entirely hers. Roger summons Lightning toward himself, reaching for the blade, and Alanna lets it fly. The sword impales him and kills him.

It is not a clever trick. It is surrender and trust in the same motion. She gives up the weapon and the weapon does the work, and the book is careful not to explain whether that was skill or luck or something older. After four books of Alanna winning by being better, she wins this one by letting go.

Then it is over. The death is treated as final. No body vanishes, and no prophecy hints at a return. That is the other thing about the ending: the great enemy dies in a tunnel, quickly, and there is no speech. Pierce has never been interested in giving Roger the last word.

The desert and after

Alanna goes back to the Bazhir desert to recover, because that is where she goes when the world has taken too much. Delia is imprisoned for life. Jonathan has married Thayet, the match Alanna encouraged, and the kingdom has a queen who can hold it.

George Cooper comes to the desert. He is a baron now, which is a sentence that would have been absurd in book one, and he has been in love with her since she was a page. Alanna tells him she loves him. They walk out of the tent together to announce their betrothal to the Bloody Hawk tribe, and the book ends there, on a wedding that has not happened yet.

I find that ending satisfying in a way the big battle is not. Alanna has spent four books refusing to be owned by anyone, and the man she chooses is the one who never tried to own her. George knew her secret before almost anyone and kept it. He also let her go, more than once, without making it a debt.

The complaints are worth listing. The plot moves in a hurry, especially in the last third, where deaths land so fast that you barely register them before the next one. Some supporting characters are sketched rather than drawn, and Buriram and Raoul both deserve more pages. The Liam romance is underdeveloped, and the magic system bends when the plot needs it to. Pierce's prose is plain and sometimes clumsy, and the book relies on your affection for these people more than on its own craft.

But the ending is earned. The quartet began with a girl asking to be trained as a knight and being told no. It ends with a woman knight who has buried her brother, her cat, and her king, and who still walks out of a tent holding hands with a man she chose. That is not a fairy tale. It is a life, and Pierce lets it be one.

FAQ

Is Lioness Rampant the last book in the Song of the Lioness?

Yes. It is the fourth and final book of the quartet, published by Atheneum in 1988, and it closes Alanna's story as a knight.

Does Alanna end up with George Cooper?

Yes. George comes to the Bazhir desert at the end, and Alanna tells him she loves him before they announce their betrothal.

Do I need to read the first three books first?

Yes. The coronation brings back characters and grudges from all three earlier books, including Ralon, Alex, and Duke Roger.