Goddard’s turned characters into galaxies. Artorin's split interior POV?? The ruler vs the man?? I love that! I love him!! Clever, clever. Anyway this is one of the best meet-cutes I’ve ever read. Kicking my feet the whole time lmao. ( )

It was so nice to read a story told from His Radiancy’s point of view. (Also, it was interesting to have more detail about the chaos after the Fall and the broken magic.)
That constant switching between second and first person narrative was very cleverly done. Knowing what I know about the emperor after The Hands of the Emperor and At the Feet of the Sun, I could understand where it was coming from and why it was there…

“Up fifteen strides, down twenty-five, ten back to your desk.”

There is no privacy in the life of the emperor, and a lot of loneliness. So, the emperor paced.

“It was better, proper, courteous to keep your thoughts to yourself and your expectation for companionship low.”

One day, a new secretary arrives, one Cliopher Mdang. It was absolutely lovely to see the beginnings of the friendship to be and how the emperor is… saved.

This is a wonderful short read and Victoria Goddard’s writing is brilliant. Be aware, though, that this is a companion novella to THOTE, so it cannot really stand on its own.
Give me more, please!
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THEM ( )

In this novella, we get the emperor's perspective on the hiring of Cliopher Mdang as his personal secretary -- the calm proficiency, the underlying humor, the potentially disastrous eye contact -- and the early days of their work together. (We still don't get to know what the joke was -- I suspect that, like the Noodle Incident in Calvin & Hobbes, the author believes that our imagination will be better than any specifics she could provide.) Since these events are discussed in [The Hands of the Emperor], this book is treading familiar ground, but it's lovely to drop back into that world. I don't usually like second-person narration, but when I realized that the narrator is using it to differentiate between himself as the emperor ("you") and himself as a man ("I") it made it more interesting to me. Recommended to fans of the author who want just a little more of that story. ( )

https://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2023/01/2023013-petty-treasons-victoria-goddard.h... ( )