“Galen, I’ve never tested how many rabbits I could fight off at a time. It just hasn’t come up.” [loc. 1025]
When Istvhan (former paladin of the Saint of Steel and now muscle-for-hire) meets Clara (former lay sister of the Order of Saint Ursa, now functionally a slave), he is surprised to encounter a woman almost the same height as him, blonde and heavily built, and remarkably level-headed for someone who has effectively just been awarded to a strange warrior as forfeit after he killed a youth who challenged him.
Clara is heading east to find the nuns of her order, who have been abducted by raiders, the convent burned to the ground. She has a Dire Secret: but that's okay, so does Istvhan, and in fact their Secrets are (at least etymologically) the same. And conveniently, Istvhan and his party are heading east too, though at first they only give her vague explanations and ask seemingly-casual questions about decapitated corpses.
As with the first in the series, Paladin's Grace, this is a sweet and often humorous romance with some darker elements. Also like that novel, it's a romance between equals. Clara is more than capable of holding her own in a fight, making the first move, or dealing with unsettling bunnies. (Really. There are also some rather sweet amphibians, including a toad named Maude, and some mules: the mule driver is Brindle the gnole, who also featured in Swordheart.)
There was a little too much vacillation ('he/she wouldn't want me if he/she knew the Awful Truth') amid the UST: but there was plenty of actual plot, some of it quite horrific and some of it rather sad, to balance the romantic elements. The villains were deeply unsettling, but that wasn't entirely their fault... and their justification for villainy was unsettlingly reasonable.
I do love the world-building, too. The Order of the White Rat, who are effectively social workers; the gnoles, who don't do pronouns; the ways in which queer and trans people are simply accepted. There's a fascinating exchange near the beginning of the novel, when Clara is telling Istvhan that one of the sisters of the young man he killed will 'swear as a son, and then he will take up the sword' -- and warns Istvhan against doing something that might mean he has to fight 'his brother who had been his sister the day before ... [who] would have had about twelve hours to learn to use a sword'. [loc. 206].
A very enjoyable read with characters I hope to encounter again in this series: my only reservation is that the story ended suddenly, which made perfect sense but still jolted me.
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