Although this is the third book of the Chalion series, it is very different, still set in the 5 God world but almost nothing of Chalion and it's related countries. I was thrown at the beginning trying to sort out this new world and characters and the story took a good amount of time to settle in. I thought the story was going to work more towards a conflict of the old Weald religion with it's magic and spirit animals and the 5 Gods but they ended up working together in a way I both didn't expect and didn't find that interesting, once it was all said and done. Like the two other Bujold books I read, it never fully created a different world that I got swept into and I was mostly confused at the double dealings and magic and the entire history of the region that I seemed to need to know already to follow the story.

However, I am not trying to trash it because I did enjoy the read, just not as much as the other two of the series and perhaps not as much as some other fantasy novels.

Note that the cover says this is narrated by Kate Reading, which is not correct. The narrator is Marguerite Gavin. It is the actual cover though; I have this in my Audible library.

This fantasy novel is the story of Ingrey, Ijada, and Wencel, three people with spirit gifts that the inhabitants of the World of the Five Gods are wont to possess. The three live hundreds of years prior to the events of The Curse of Chalion and Paladin of Souls, and their exploits have no bearing on the later two books.

Their story is long and complex, and I regret going the audiobook route; I’m not a fan of the narrator (who is, again, NOT Kate Reading), and the convoluted spirit acrobatics (wolves, horses, dead kings, etc) would have been much easier to follow in print. It’s my least favorite book by this author to date, but still not completely terrible. I rate my experience of the book with a grudging three stars. ( )

(Review on first reading 2011-10-21&22) 2 stars.
Marginally more interesting than "Paladin of Souls".

(Review on second reading 2022-09-22 to 24) 4 stars.

I decided to re-read this book since it is an "historical" precursor of the author's current (2021) series about the Learned Divine Pendric and his demon Desdemona.

Well, what a difference 11 years makes!
This time I found the story engrossing, the characters entertaining, and the wit up to Bujold's high standards.
The milieu I always did like (from "The Curse of Chalion"), but it is much richer than I remembered. ( )

This one lacked just a little something that the first 2 volumes in this series had. Maybe it was that the main character wasn't quite as engaging or maybe it was that the world building was a little confusing. Maybe it was because the two main characters or the hero and the woman he was interested in didn't solve this thing together. I mean in neither of the first two did the hero and heroine solve the crisis together but here it just seemed like they should have considering how it was set up. Also the hero here didn't seem to be in charge of the run away team. He was more acted upon than acting. Still it was good but Ms. Bujold sets a pretty high bar for herself. ( )

While not as strong as the Chalion books, well worth the read. ( )