Paladins of the Saint of Steel are blessed with a divine rage, giving them the strength to strike down the wicked while sparing the innocent. Until one day, when their god died. And they had no choice but to seek a more... mortal source of purpose.
A series of "fluffy paladin romances" by T. Kingfisher:
- Paladin's Grace (2020) (Stephen and Grace)
- Paladin's Strength (2021) (Istvhan and Clara)
- Paladin's Hope (2021) (Galen and Piper)
- Paladin's Faith (2023) (Shane and Marguerite)
Part of The 'Verse with the Clocktaur War duology and Swordheart, loosely referred to as the World of the White Rat.
Contains examples of:
- Annoying Arrows: Averted, for the most part. If a character gets shot and doesn't have some serious protection, it is an issue. Earstripe nearly dies of a crossbow bolt to the leg.
- Beauty Equals Goodness: All paladins for the Dreaming God are unfairly good looking people. They claim it's so demons can't tempt them by offering to make them beautiful, but since most demons are gibbering terrors that prefer to possess animals, Galen suspects the Dreaming God is just a little vain.
- The Berserker: When the Saint was living, his Paladins battle rage was tempered by his divine judgement. Without him, the only thing that prevents them from killing the innocent is the brute force of other paladins. It turns out that at least some of this is just from how upsetting the loss was, not inherent to entering the state without him. Stephen is able to enter a milder form where he can remember that Grace is friendly and even follow her instructions. But he still tries to fight random objects when he bumps into them. In Paladin's Hope, It's more of a problem for Galen, who if he's awakened from a nightmare may simply throw a punch at whoever's touching him, but may also actively get up, draw his sword, and try to hurt people who aren't a visible threat, his own Love Interest included.
- Blessed with Suck: Piper can see a person's last moments by touching their corpse. Since he does autopsies for a living, this is a pretty useful talent to have—but since he does autopsies for a living, it's also incredibly traumatic. Plus, it isn't limited to humans, so he can't eat meat without getting nasty images like having a fishhook through his mouth.
- Big Damn Heroes: Just when it looks like it's about to come to a showdown between the Saint of Steel's paladins and the priests of the Hanged Mother in Paladin's Grace, the Prince shows up, perfectly alive, to inform them that Grace did not kill him (thanks to Marguerite, who broke into his quarters to give him a browbeating about putting Grace in danger). It was his supposed loyal servant.
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday: This is the main reason Marguerite can't get the Red Sail off her back. While she's technically a loose end, she's not an important loose end, which actually makes her less safe than the other option. Because she's not a priority but a mere target of opportunity, she can never plan for the next attack on her life—any operative doing any mission in her general vicinity might decide to "take care" of her for extra brownie points, or they might decide it's not their problem, and she has no way of knowing which until someone's trying to plant a knife in her back. And since the Red Sail doesn't care enough to plot her death specifically, they also don't care enough to make sure the many, many amnesties she's negotiated actually stick across all the different parts of the organization.
- Break His Heart to Save Him: Galen dumps Piper because he fears his issues make him too dangerous to have as a lover. Basically everyone calls him an idiot for trying to do this, and it ends up causing a lot more problems than it solves.
- Continuity Nod: Ashes mentions the events of the Clocktaur War.
- Cranial Processing Unit: Zig-zagged with the Smooth Men. On the one hand, they literally are their heads. On the other, they don't have to steal a body by replacing the head; they can stick themselves anywhere as long as the original owner is dead. Istvhan gets a nasty surprise when he realizes the "zombies" he's fighting are Smooth Men set into the bodies' chests—a place most swordfighters instinctively avoid aiming for, because they don't want to get their blades stuck in a rib.
- Cyanide Pill: The young would-be assassin early on in Paladin's Grace takes poison when Grace, Stephen, and Marguerite find him. However, in a subversion, he had already been poisoned by his superiors, presumably because they weren't sure he was brave enough to actually go through with it on his own.
- Dark and Troubled Past: The paladins in general, obviously, due to the death of the Saint, but in particular Judith, who seems familiar with torture implements and has never mentioned her past in the then ten years Galen had known her. Also Grace, who escaped an abusive marriage in Anuket City with nothing but the clothes on her back, her perfume notes, and a civette named Tab.
- Faking the Dead: The Prince is not actually dead. He caught the poisoning attempt and went into hiding to trip the murderer up.
- Fantastic Racism: Gnoles are treated as second-class citizens. This causes a lot of trouble in Paladin's Hope, when Earstripe catches on to the pattern of the bodies in the river before anybody else, but Captain Mallory won't listen to him because he's a gnole, leading to a lot of mortal peril that could have been avoided. Worse, after Earstrip leads the effort to catch the killer on his own, they trump up charges of vigilantism and throw him in jail, right after he's had major surgery.
- Foreshadowing:
- The serial killer in Paladin's Grace leaves a lot of severed heads, but no bodies, and the characters spend some time speculating about exactly where they went. Because the killer is actually a special type of golem that's just a head piloting a headless human body, and it's getting bodies for all its friends.
- In Paladin's Strength, Istvhan and Clara hear several tales of scuttling, spider-like things with faces on their backs surrounding the case of the decapitating serial killer. This is an early sign the Smooth Men don't have to replace a body's head to control it.
- Piper idly wonders if he could figure out what happened to the Saint of Steel with his powers. He ends up accidentally doing just that.
- From Nobody to Nightmare: The Hanged Motherhood were an obscure little priesthood with not much history (compared to the Temple of the Rat, which is over eight hundred years old) or power until the most recent Archon was appointed, at which point he made showered them with riches and made them the unofficial state religion. The 'nightmare' part is because the Motherhood is very passionate about burning what it sees as corrupting influences, which occasionally take the form of people. The other temples do their best to keep it in check.
- Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!: Beartongue gives Stephen a tonguelashing when he's beating himself up for losing his temper during Grace's trial. She points out that it is a completely normal human reaction to be angry when someone he loves is being harangued and slandered by her abusive ex, not a sign he's about to fly off the handle and murder everyone, and he needs to quit freaking out about every emotion he feels.
- Gladiator Games: This is why Clara's sisters were kidnapped. A powerful pirate lord wants werebears to show up his opponent's zombies in the ring.
- God Is Dead:
- The Saint of Steel died three years ago (at the time when the series opens). This was traumatic for his paladins, and disturbing for everyone else—gods being mythically dead is normal (the Hanged Mother is literally hanged, for one), but gods being actually, no-fooling, straight-up gone is unheard of.
- Discussed by Lady Silver, a member of the dog-headed People. Most of their gods are year-gods, which is exactly what it sounds like—born at the beginning of the year, and dying at the end of it (People years seem to be much longer than human years). The People find it strange that humans keep their gods around on a permanent basis. She's also surprised that the paladins of the Saint didn't immediately realize his death must have been foul play from the sheer violence of how He was torn out of their souls—the chosen of gods who die naturally are totally unharmed when the connection breaks, like Silver herself, whereas the Saint's paladins are chock-full of scar tissue.
- Happily Ever After: As befits a romance novel.
- Hive Mind: The Warrenmind in Paladin's Strength, a Hive Mind of rabbits. It's a benevolent example capable of peaceable communication and trade, which doesn't make it any less unsettling.
- Jerkass Has a Point: In Paladin's Grace the Motherhood priests do their best to prosecute Grace as a poisoner and unrepentant murderer. The case against her was dubious, but painting her as a lone madwoman and organizing her swift execution was the surest way to avoid war with a powerful neighboring kingdom whose crown prince had (supposedly) just been poisoned to death. The Bishop of the White Rat begrudgingly admits they were trying to do something approximating the right thing given the circumstances (a single unjust execution is a small price compared to the horrors of war), but still thinks they were being assholes about it and should have been more concerned with finding the actual guilty party. To their credit, the priest who was leading the prosecution got demoted for overstepping his authority when things went off the rails during the trial.
- Meaningful Name: The order of St. Ursa, whose members are were-bears.
- Meatgrinder Surgery: Played for Drama; Piper ends up having to do emergency surgery on Earstripe in a wine cellar, complicated by the fact that he's exhausted from spending several days trapped in a deadly obstacle course, and he has no idea how gnole anatomy works. Luckily, he's able to stabilize his patient long enough to reach a more experienced surgeon, but it's very much touch and go.
- Moment Killer: A very charged moment between our lead couple in Paladin's Strength gets bluntly interrupted by their host bursting into the room yelling "We have to save the newts!"
- No Ontological Inertia: It takes an extremely strong wonder-worker to create anything that will survive past their death. This is why the Smooth Men keep such a close eye on their creator—and ultimately what does them in when he chooses to make a Heroic Sacrifice.
- Obliviously Evil: Clara and Istvhan are somewhat surprised that the people who work at the Gladiator Games don't seem to consider that the fighters might not like being there, and seem to think they're all friends. (They eventually learn that the economic conditions in that area are so bad that being forced to fight for the amusement of pirate lords is actually a step up because at least there's guaranteed food and lodging, plus if you actually manage to win, the rewards are really good.)
- Orgy of Evidence: Marguerite is extremely skeptical of the poison and letter that point so obviously to Anuket City on the dead assassin, noting that no competent operative would have been so ham-handed. She says it's so over the top she wonders if it actually was Anuket City, and they deliberately set things up to make it look like they're being framed.
- Omnidisciplinary Lawyer: Averted in Paladin's Grace. Zale is very clear that they are a property lawyer, not a criminal lawyer, and they only end up representing Grace at her murder trial because it's an emergency. They do a pretty good job anyway, but their main tactics are to delay and try to get a mistrial declared.
- Refuge in Audacity: Grace's friend Marguerite cheerfully admits to everyone that she's a spy for Anuket City. This works amazingly well at keeping her out of trouble. Turns out that she is a spy, but she doesn't work for Anuket City and her name's not Marguerite.
- Saintly Church: The White Rat are all-around good guys, providing everything from free legal representation to disaster relief.
- Sole Survivors: Only seven of the Saint of Steel's paladins survived His death: Stephen, Istvhan, Galen, Shane, Marcus, Judith, and Wren. It's never mentioned outright how many paladins the Saint had in the first place, but twelve of them were spared to meet with the locals near the town of Hallowbind, so it's implied that there were quite a few.
- Super-Persistent Predator: Averted. If a werebear's animal side takes over, they run away from fights if at all possible — the bear side only wants to take the risk if it's about something like immediate survival or cubs, and especially does not want to tangle with things it feels are unnatural. Like the Smooth Men. Luckily for Istvhan, when this happens to Clara he doesn't actually need her help, so it's merely inconvenient. It's much more dangerous when this happens in the gladiatorial arena while they're surrounded by Smooth Men.
- Third Wheel: Piper and Galen end up having a very important conversation about their relationship while Stephen is right next to them. He takes to loudly commenting on some nearby friezes to remind them he's there.
- The 'Verse: With The Clocktaur War and Swordheart.
- Wham Episode: "Paladin's Faith" reveals that the Saint of Steel didn't just die - they were murdered; Judith, the most mysterious of the Paladins, is revealed to have a secret agenda of her own; and almost incidentally, there is a new technology which will massively destabilise the entire world's economy.
- Wham Line:
- The last line of Paladin's Hope. Piper touches the altar of the Saint of Steel. With his bare hands. "And suddenly Piper knew what it felt like when a god died."
