Paladin of Souls
by Lois McMaster Bujold
Summary
Ista is forty, a dowager royina, and everyone around her believes she is mad. She spent years cursed, watched her husband and her house destroyed by it, and has been kept since in a quiet castle by attendants who mean well and will not let her out of sight. The curse is lifted. Nobody has noticed that the person underneath it is still here.
So she announces a pilgrimage she does not believe in, mostly to get out of the door, and takes a small party of guards, a courier and a devout companion out onto roads she has never travelled. Within days they are attacked, and the trip becomes something else entirely: a border war with a neighbouring princedom, a fortress holding a secret about a brother and a sister, a demon in a body that should not have one, and a set of gods who have unfinished business with Ista specifically.
Bujold's real subject is second lives. Ista is a middle aged woman who was defined entirely by other people's disasters, who is given a great deal of power and a genuine romance, and who has to decide what she wants when nobody is asking her to be a mother or a widow.
Her companions are excellent company: a dedicat who signed up for a quiet life and gets none, a divine with a demon problem, and a march lord's brother whose situation is the hinge of the whole plot.
The theology is the unusual part. Bujold's gods can only act through people who let them in, and sainthood in this world is a job with terrible working conditions rather than a reward, so Ista's negotiations with a deity read like a difficult employment discussion.
It follows The Curse of Chalion and reads perfectly well alone, since Ista's history is explained as it becomes relevant.
Around four hundred pages, warm, witty and genuinely serious about faith. Best for readers who want fantasy about an adult with a past rather than a youth with a destiny.
Historical Context & Significance
Paladin of Souls won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Novel, the Nebula Award and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.
Lois McMaster Bujold is among the most decorated writers in the field, with multiple Hugo wins for Best Novel across the Vorkosigan science fiction saga and this fantasy sequence, and she was named a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master in 2020.
The Chalion books draw their geography and politics loosely from medieval Iberia, and their five god theology, in which each deity claims a season and the disputed fifth is the Bastard, is worked out in enough detail that the plot turns on doctrine.
Bujold has said she wrote it because middle aged women in fantasy were usually somebody's mother, and she wanted one who got the quest.