soupçon/ˈsuːpsɒn,ˈsuːpsɒ̃/ noun
1. a very small quantity of something; a slight trace, as of a particular taste or flavor

Sunday Soupçons is where I scribble mini-reviews for books I don’t have the brainspace/eloquence/smarts to write about in depth – or if I just don’t have anything interesting to say beyond I LIKED IT AND YOU SHOULD READ IT TOO!

Two very different, but also very excellent, queer fantasies!

Daggerbound (Swordheart #2) by T. Kingfisher
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Romantic Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Brown gay MC, gay MC, M/M
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; dual PoVs
Published on: 25th August 2026
ISBN: 1250400090
Goodreads

New York Times bestselling author T. Kingfisher returns to the charming fantasy world of Swordheart in this delightful and unexpected new romantic adventure.

Learned Edmund, a disillusioned scholar, is transporting yet another precious relic from one stuffy temple to a different stuffy temple. Another great adventure for the ages…
But when Edmund is set upon by bandits, in desperation, he breaks the cardinal rule and grabs for the relic, an ancient sword. To his surprise, instead of unsheathing a rusty, ancient weapon, an alarmingly handsome man appears, wielding daggers of blue steel and cutting the thieves down.

This man is the Dervish, an immortal warrior who’s been trapped for centuries in a sword of enchanted steel, and is angry as hell about it. He hates the curse that put him there, and he wants to hate Edmund, just as he has hated every wielder before him.

But the damned scholar is just so sweet and clever and kind. And while the Dervish may be able to protect Edmund from bandits, cultists, dragons, and strange inhuman diplomats, he may find it much harder to protect his own heart.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I find myself without anything clever to say about this one. I had a wonderful time with it! It is delightful! If you loved Swordheart, you absolutely need to keep reading this series, it just keeps on giving!

I admit, I enjoyed it less than I expected – a bit less than I enjoyed Swordheart. I think that was down to the lack of Halla, who is perfection incarnate; I found myself less interested in Edmund as a protagonist, even though he’s perfectly lovely. He’s just less ‘odd’ than Halla was.

But that is not to say that I did not have a freaking WONDERFUL time with Daggerbound, because I very much did! Edmund may not be Halla, but he is still a great protagonist – not least because he’s such a perfect avatar for bookworms everywhere! Some of the highlights of the book were his Bookish Moments – distraught because someone stepped on a book, or seriously considering allowing himself to be killed if it allowed some immensely important text to be magically translated. Things like that! This is not just a man who loves books, he also loves and holds sacred the sharing of information – that’s what books are primarily for. (I would love to know what he’d think of fiction books, but I’m pretty sure the printing press hasn’t been invented yet in the World of the White Rat, so it’ll be a while before book-making is easy enough for books of fiction to become a thing.) It’s a big part of why he breaks from his church in the opening chapter.

If you’ve read the Clocktaur duology, you have of course met Edmund before. (If you have not read it, then no worries, you don’t need to have done so to enjoy Daggerbound.) It was both a delight, and heartbreaking, to see him again in these circumstances; a delight because HI EDMUND, I DID MISS YOU; and heartbreaking because when we last saw him he was so sure he could change the misogyny of the Many-Armed God’s order…and Daggerbound opens with him, not broken by trying, but definitely having given up. Because one person just cannot change a big institution by themselves. This is something we don’t often see in SFF, especially SFF on the cosier end of the spectrum, but it’s the kind of…blunt, practical approach to Life, the Universe and Everything that T Kingfisher is so good at, and that I appreciate so much. No, one person can’t fix an institution, and you should get out before the effort does break you. THANK YOU FOR SOMEONE FINALLY SAYING IT!

The Dervish is everything I expected him to be from the glimpses we got in Sarkis’ memories back in Swordheart – quick, funny, better at taking things lightly than seriously, fully aware of how awesome he is. I did not expect the metric TONNES of trauma Kingfisher decided to drop on him. In an awful way, I think that made him a much better character, though; I suspect the Dervish without trauma might come across as a bit shallow, less interesting. Unsurprisingly, Kingfisher handles the trauma really well and respectfully; it’s never dismissed or magicked away, but it also doesn’t drag Daggerbound into grimdark territory. This is still a fundamentally fun book, but it has depth and teeth, like all of Kingfisher’s books.

The minor characters are all treasures. We get a new gnole character! And Francis, who I should probably not talk about at all for fear of spoilers, but who is my new favourite! Even the mule had a distinct enough personality to be very, very funny.

The plot is Edmund and the Dervish travelling to a scholar who wants the magic sword the Dervish is bound to; the hope is that this person may be able to undo the binding. And just as in Swordheart, the journey is not all that simple: they stumble into various small-scale adventures, including the one that gains them the new gnole and also Francis. I did enjoy these mini-adventures less than I did Halla and Sarkis’, but they were still entertaining.

I think Daggerbound is a decent bit darker than Swordheart, though. There’s the Dervish’s trauma, there are some horrible betrayals, other stuff. There’s a – a bite to this one. Something about the way the Dervish has learned to manipulate the loopholes in the sword’s binding is so…bitter, but also viciously triumphant? And that’s something that suffuses his part of the novel (he and Edmund are the two PoVs of the book). It’s there in the way that the Dervish, in particular, ignores the flashy swordwork and goes in straight for the kill, whatever that is in a given situation. I adore that quality in a character, I love how Kingfisher used it to just straight-up ignore various tropes or expected twists – but you know, and can feel, that the Dervish didn’t become this way because he’s been surrounded by rainbows and puppies for the last few centuries. There’s an undercurrent to it… I don’t know how to articulate it. It’s really, REALLY well-done, though.

Daggerbound is not quite newbie-friendly – it doesn’t rehash the origin story of the three magic swords, so if you haven’t read Swordheart, you won’t have all the details of that. (Though bit by bit, Daggerbound does fill in most of the backstory, you can pick it up from things the Dervish says and thinks and so on.) But like I said in the beginning: if you loved Swordheart, you HAVE to read this one too.

And if you haven’t read Swordheart yet – well, go do that! And then you can get to Daggerbound, as you very much should!

Rogue & Vagabond by Wendy Palmer
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Historical Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: M/M, gay love interest with asthma
PoV: Third-person, past-tense
Published on: 21st August 2026
ISBN: 1763711579
Goodreads

Tasked with the care of Liza, a young girl who must be protected from her own father, journalist Gabe Ward seizes on the opportunity to exchange London for the isolated Northamptonshire estate of a minor baronet.

He doesn't expect to come face to face with a man he spent a pleasant evening with at the Rogue and Vagabond eight months ago. A man who seemed to have a good time then...and who is none too thrilled to encounter Gabe again in the middle of an extended family gathering.

It's not exactly an unalloyed delight for Gabe, either, no matter how tempting he finds the prickly Highlander. Between watching over Liza, biting his very opinionated tongue amongst his gentry hosts, and wondering what on earth is scuttling through the undergrowth in Lamport Hall's gardens, he barely has a spare moment for Tor MacLeod's hot-and-cold flirtations.

Well, you can always find a spare moment or two, can't you?

As Gabe and Tor inch ever closer to an understanding, dangers both mundane and supernatural draw closer, too, threatening their chance of a future together - and Liza's safety. The bickering pair must learn to trust each other before it's too late for them, and too late for Liza.

But is putting his faith in a Scottish toff one bridge too far for an argisome workhouse bastard?

I did get to read this before the official pub date, but only because I bought it early-access from the author’s website – this was not an advanced reading copy.

Rogue and Vagabond is Wendy Palmer’s newest novel, a standalone historical fantasy – albeit a lot less fantastical than most of her books. Which would usually mean I was bored – I don’t usually do well with not-SFF – but that was absolutely not the case here!

Because Palmer just consistently hits it out of the park with incredible characters and intensely more-ish prose. Character dynamics, relationships, are something she especially rocks at, which is fully evident by the will-they-won’t-they going on between protagonist Gabe and love interest Tor. Tor is asthmatic, which is an even harder thing to be in the 1800s than it is now, and I cannot express how much I appreciated a disabled love interest, especially how that has shaped Tor’s mindset and personal philosophies. I think every disabled reader is going to perfectly understand Tor’s frustration with being ‘coddled’ and his certainty that he’s a burden. Sometimes I’ve seen this written in a very boring woe-is-me way, but Tor isn’t like that at all. He’s not a stereotype, a cliche, or a caricature – he’s a fully-developed character who has very believable feelings about his disability and the way others treat him because of it.

Palmer warns in the author’s note at the beginning that this novel deals with the 1885 Maiden Tribute Babylon controversy, although it is mostly background. I had no idea what this controversy was, beyond Palmer’s note that it involved ‘the organised trade in young girls’. And it turns out to be even worse than I thought! Thank the gods, there’s nothing graphic on-page, but Gabe, our main character, was involved in the writing-up of all those horrors, and his ward was nearly a victim of them, so it does come up several times – especially in regards Gabe’s trauma; he’s been deeply scarred by what he saw and learned doing investigative journalism into it, but, like quite a lot of people, thinks that feeling that way is selfish and ridiculous, maybe even actively terrible. How can he be not-okay, when he wasn’t a victim himself? Hinting that he might be not-okay would take attention away from the Real victims. This is something I don’t think I see a lot of in fiction, but is very much a real problem for all kinds of activists – that witnessing atrocities can, and often is, traumatising, and maybe more importantly, that our society isn’t great at recognising and dealing with that. It felt…very necessary? And extremely poignant.

All of that is a secondary arc within the plot, though: the main one is that Gabe has been hired to research into and write a history of a noble family. For various reasons surrounding his ward Liza, Gabe was quick to take the job, despite his proudly socialist opinions of the nobility. There are several secrets and a lot of undercurrents going on in the manor house when he reaches it, though, and Gabe eventually gets entangled in all of them. I guess most of them are relatively small-scale – this is an intimate story that is interested in people and the connections between them, rather than involving magic swords and Dark Lords – but Palmer is so great at making us care about even the minor characters, quickly getting us very invested indeed.

The romance is magnificent. No surprise there: I have yet to read a Palmer book that did not have me shipping the couple involved so hard. Gabe is fantastic: an optimistic socialist in the late 1800s, with zero patience for toffs or conservatives. He has a wonderful sense of humour, and loves to argue and be argued with, to tease and be teased; his favourite kind of people are the ones who give as good as they get. I want to stress that he’s not a naive optimist; he’s well aware that most of the things he wants the world to become are not going to happen during his lifetime. And for all that he has a fiery temper, he’s still very aware of the consequences of things like punching a lord – his temper is not the explosive, out-of-control kind (which I’m glad of, because I don’t find that kind of character interesting at all). He’s gruff and delights in playing to people’s expectations in order to mock or tease or manipulate them. He’s SUCH FUN.

Tor is superficially reserved, but incredibly warm and funny underneath that. He and Gabe make excellent foils for each other – especially because Gabe insists on talking about things, rather than let misunderstandings or the like stand.

What about the magic? Well…there’s a reason there’s a garden gnome on the cover. They, too, are mostly background until the climax of the book, but I never felt like I was impatiently waiting for the magic to show up – I was having far too good a time to feel like anything was missing. Rogue and Vagabond is one of those books I had to keep taking a break from to explain to my partner why I was giggling, or kicking my feet, or gasping (all three of which happened several times). I do wish the gnomes had featured more, and I really would have liked to hear Teo’s theories about them – that’s the only thing knocking a half-star off my rating.

But this was bloody fantastic, and with the caveat that, even without being explicit, the Maiden Tribute Babylon controversy really is fucking dark – with that caveat, I’d recommend it to anyone and everyone looking for a queer historical!

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