A Sea Of Sorrow And Scorn

A Sea of Sorrow and Scorn is A. P. Beswick's 2022 second installment in The Levanthria Series, shifting the world's focus to an entirely new protagonist and a darker, more visceral folktale at its core. Where the first book placed readers inside the perspective of a man who had chosen his moral failures, this entry centres someone who has had violence chosen for her - and must find a way to survive the consequences of a power she never asked for and a world that would rather see her dead than free.

Zerina Redfearn has grown up sheltered, largely innocent of the cruelty that governs the kingdom around her. That innocence ends brutally when the king's forces drag her and her sisters from their home and haul them before a trial for witchcraft. The choice offered is no choice at all: enslavement in the king's military forces, or execution. What follows strips away everything Zerina thought she knew about herself, her magic, and the world of Levanthria - and the woman who emerges from those early pages is a fundamentally different person from the one who entered them.

The witch hunts and persecution at the heart of this book tap into some of the oldest and most resonant darkness in British folklore. Beswick does not soften the violence of what Zerina witnesses or the terror of what she survives. The trauma is rendered with the same unflinching directness that characterised the first book's treatment of moral compromise - and as with Vireo Reinhold in A Forest of Vanity and Valour, the result is a protagonist with trauma whose psychological reality feels genuinely inhabited rather than used for dramatic decoration. Beswick's background in mental health nursing is particularly evident in how Zerina processes what has happened to her: not cleanly, not quickly, and not without cost.

The magic system with consequences established in the first book finds its most punishing expression yet in Zerina's story. Her powers, unleashed for the first time in a moment of extremity, do not come free. Every use ages her prematurely - the magic she wields to survive is simultaneously working to kill her, and the vision of a cure she has glimpsed may be unreachable before her body gives out entirely. This ticking-clock dynamic gives the novel its relentless forward momentum. Zerina is not simply fleeing an enemy; she is racing against herself, against the cost of the only weapon she has.

The setting expands the world of Levanthria significantly. Where the first book was largely landlocked and forest-bound, this entry takes to the open ocean, joining two refugees in a desperate flight with enemy ships in pursuit. The maritime environment brings new threats, new alliances, and a new texture to the high-stakes survival that defines the series. The found family dynamic that emerges between Zerina and her unlikely companions is hard-won and believable - forged not through shared values or easy affection but through the particular intimacy of shared danger.

As a dark fantasy retelling, the book draws on the tradition of the persecuted woman with hidden power - the figure who appears throughout British folklore as witch, cunning woman, or outcast - and rebuilds her as a fully realised protagonist whose gifts are both her salvation and her sentence. The corrupt empire and tyrannical rule that condemned her sisters remains the backdrop against which every choice is made, and Beswick never lets Levanthria's institutional cruelty feel abstract. It is present in every pursuit, every impossible decision, every moment when survival requires Zerina to reach for magic she knows will cost her dearly.

Following on from where A Forest of Vanity and Valour introduced the world, this second installment broadens both the geography and the emotional range of the series. Readers who arrived for Vireo's story will find a protagonist whose journey rhymes with his in interesting ways - both begin in a kind of innocence, both are stripped of it brutally, both are forced to become something harder - while being tonally and experientially distinct. A Sea of Sorrow and Scorn is the point at which the Levanthria Series announces that it will not repeat itself, and that every protagonist it brings to the page will be worth the time.