A Kingdom Of Courage And Cruelty

A Kingdom of Courage and Cruelty is A. P. Beswick's 2023 third installment in The Levanthria Series, introducing the character that many readers of the series have come to consider its emotional centrepiece. Orjan Varega is a fallen knight - not fallen in the comfortable literary sense of a good man brought low by circumstance, but genuinely compromised: a man who made a sacrifice that saved others, was cursed for it, and has spent the time since struggling to hold onto the last fragments of the person he once was. The curse is not metaphorical. Orjan walks the world in a half-lizard form, physically monstrous to everyone who encounters him, scorned and feared in equal measure. The gap between what he looks like and what he is trying to be is the engine of everything this book does.

Following on from where A Sea of Sorrow and Scorn expanded the world of Levanthria across the open ocean, this third entry returns to land and to the political heart of the kingdom - a realm on the edge of ruin, with power vacuums, warring factions, and the ever-present shadow of a corrupt empire whose tyrannical rule has left ordinary people with no good options. Into this world Orjan stumbles almost accidentally. He comes across a young boy being beaten in the streets and cannot walk past it. That single moment of instinct - the knight in him refusing to allow the injustice to continue - pulls him into the fate of an entire kingdom, an entanglement with the sorceress Morgana, and a bloodlust he has spent years trying to contain.

The redemption arc here is the most psychologically complex the series has offered so far. Vireo Reinhold's redemption in the first book was about a selfish man discovering obligation. Zerina Redfearn's in the second was about a traumatised woman discovering resilience. Orjan's is about something harder to name: a man who is not sure whether the darkness inside him is the curse speaking or simply who he is without the restraints his knighthood once provided. A. P. Beswick refuses to answer that question cleanly. The brutality Orjan is capable of is presented without mitigation - and the question of whether brutality deployed in service of something good makes it acceptable, or merely more complicated, runs beneath every action he takes.

The morally grey characters surrounding Orjan are among the series' most carefully drawn. Morgana in particular - the sorceress to whom Orjan finds himself indebted - operates according to a moral logic entirely her own, and the mentor and mentee dynamic that develops between them is one of the book's richest relationships. She does not exist to guide Orjan toward goodness. She exists to pursue her own ends, and the fact that those ends occasionally align with his does not make her safe, trustworthy, or predictable. The loyal companions Orjan accumulates across the story are similarly complicated - people drawn to him not because he is admirable but because circumstances have made them useful to each other, and who become something more despite themselves.

The magic system with consequences that has defined the Levanthria Series since its opening book takes on a new dimension in Orjan's story. The elven curse that transformed him is itself a form of dark fantasy magic with costs built into its very nature - it did not simply change his body, it altered his relationship with violence, with restraint, and with the part of himself that once knew who he was. Every time Orjan gives in to the bloodlust the curse amplifies, he moves further from the man he is trying to reclaim. The gods and demons mythology of the series edges closer to the foreground here, as the forces shaping Levanthria's descent begin to reveal themselves as something older and more deliberate than political corruption alone.

The betrayal that runs through the book - in allegiances, in identities, in the assumptions characters make about who can be trusted - maintains the series' consistent refusal to offer its readers easy footing. Nobody in Levanthria is entirely what they appear, and Orjan, whose appearance is the most dramatically altered of any protagonist so far, is the character best positioned to understand what it means to be judged entirely on surface. That irony is never laboured, but it gives the book a thematic coherence that extends beyond its plot. A Kingdom of Courage and Cruelty is the entry in The Levanthria Series that proves the anthology structure was never a limitation - it was a long game, and by the third book, the pieces are unmistakably beginning to align.