“Look, if you can’t laugh about the homicidal fits that make you a menace to society, what’s even the point?” [loc. 3002]
Stephen used to be a paladin, a precision berserker fighting on behalf of a god. Then that god, the Saint of Steel, died: and Stephen and his fellow paladins went mad.
Paladin's Grace is set three years later. Stephen and his few remaining fellows serve the Temple of the White Rat, making themselves useful, repaying their debt to the order which saved them. Stephen, for instance, has been assigned to loom menacingly in the background while a healer makes his rounds in a poor quarter of the city. Then Stephen sees a woman being harassed by a couple of boorish acolytes, and steps in to help. (Not to rescue.) The woman is Grace, a master perfumier with a pet civette ('perfume weasel') who's stifled by the aftermath of a toxic relationship, despite the new life she's made for herself.
Stephen and Grace are both rather hapless when it comes to romance, and out of their depth when they become enmeshed in a sordid assassination attempt and an unpleasant series of murders. (As Kingfisher notes in her afterword, 'there are generally fewer severed heads and rotting corpse golems in fluffy romance'). Luckily for them both, help is at hand, in the shapes of Zale (non-binary lawyer-priest of the White Rat) and Marguerite (Grace's landlady, a glamorous spy).
Paladin's Grace is a fluffy romance, between two likeable, damaged (and somewhat timid) protagonists: but it also deals with abusive relationships (and how relief can look like happiness), the unpleasant Order of the Hanged Mother, the downsides of being a berserker (ruined trousers), and the practical difficulties of decapitation. There are some pretty horrific concepts here, but then there is also a paladin who likes to knit socks, and a perfume-weasel who likes to curl up in Grace's hidden clothing-stashes.
Takes place in the same world as The Clockwork Boys (I really must read the second volume of that story!) and Swordheart, somewhat later than the events of those novels but not requiring any knowledge thereof.
I don't think I was in quite the right mood for this novel when I read it, but I do think I'll come back to it -- and I did laugh out loud at 'inexpert slobbering'.
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