Treasures from the Hoard: Fortune’s Fool by Mercedes Lackey

Welcome back to the Five Hundred Kingdoms, where the greatest fortune is the one you make…

The seventh daughter of the Sea King, Ekaterina is more than a pampered princess—she's also the family spy. Which makes her the perfect emissary to discover secrets in the neighboring kingdom…and nothing interests her more than Sasha, the seventh son of the king of Belrus. She suspects he's far from the fool people think he is, but before she can find out what lies beneath his façade, she runs into trouble…

Kidnapped and trapped in a Jinn’s castle, Ekaterina knows her chances of being found are slim. Now fortune, a fool and a paper bird are the only things she can count on to escape—along with her own clever mind and intrepid heart.…

Review

The third book in Mercedes Lackey’s Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms series, Fortune’s Fool is an enjoyable if eclectic remix of a number of fairy tales. Lackey takes a wide assortment of elements drawn from Russian, eastern and northern European, Japanese, and Middle Eastern folk and fairy tales, and mixes them up, higgledy-piggledy. In these pages you will encounter: a Seventh Son (who is also a wise or fortunate fool), a sea-king’s daughter (who is also a Clever Little Vixen), a brave kitsune, a bereginia, a willi, several Rusalkas, some swan maidens, a snow maiden, several shapeshifters, Baba Yaga, and the Little Humpback Horse. Add in the tale of the Queen of the Copper Mountain and a wholly-out-of-its-milieu djinn, and… well, you get the picture. Altogether, it’s a charmingly varied melange. That the book works at all is due to Lackey’s excellent storytelling skills and a pair of bright, clever, and sympathetic main characters—but it does work, and as a whole, the novel is delightful.

The story alternates between the points of view of the two main characters, Katya (Ekaterina), seventh daughter and fourteenth child of the Sea King, who serves as his secret agent in the Drylands, and Sascha, seventh son of the King of Led Belarus, who serves as his family’s and his country’s Fortunate Fool. The two have several adventures separately before meeting and falling in love. Alas, they are soon separated when Katya’s father sends her on another mission. When Katya allows herself to be captured in order to gather more information, Sascha sets out to find and rescue her, and (as always happens in a Fortunate Fool story), he gets a lot of help from those he aided or befriended earlier in the book. The dangers are significant, and the main adversary is formidable. But fear not, all ends well (as it does in all the best fairy tales), with evil routed, true love rewarded, and new friendships forged.

Can you read it as a standalone? Readers familiar with the first two books in the series, The Fairy Godmother and One Good Knight, will recognize some references and characters from those two books. (Keep your eyes out for a familiar pair of dragons, in particular!) But for the most part, the characters and situations in this book are new, and you don’t have to read the first two books to enjoy Fortune’s Fool… although it might help you get a jump on understanding the worldbuilding and magic system, which are not explained as thoroughly in this book as in The Fairy Godmother.

Rating: When I first read Fortune’s Fool, I gave it 3.5 stars because of the episodic nature of the story. Over 15 years later, I’m bumping that up to a solid 4 stars, because I keep on rereading it, and enjoy it as much or more than I did the first time I read it.

Challenges: COYER Unwind, Chapter 4

About Mercedes Lackey

Mercedes Lackey is perhaps best known for her bestselling Valdemar, Elemental Masters, and Tales of the 500 Kingdoms series. Her books now total well over 100, not counting anthologies. She writes (or has written) several other popular series as well as stand-alone novels, both on her own and with collaborators including Larry Dixon (her husband and illustrator), Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, Rosemary Edghill, Marion Zimmer Bradley, James Mallory, Roberta Gellis, and others.

Lackey graduated from Purdue University in 1972 and worked as a computer programmer before quitting to write full-time. A strong storyteller and a prolific writer, she turns out four to six books per year. She has also written lyrics and recorded songs (many of them based on her stories) for Firebird Arts and Music. Music is a prevailing theme throughout her work, and a major element in the Bardic Voices and Bedlam’s Bard series.

Mercedes Lackey lives with her husband in Oklahoma. She keeps parrots and has been active in raptor rehabilitation. She has also been active in the Society for Creative Anachronism and the MRPG community.

(sources: Goodreads, author website, and Wikipedia.)

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Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• COYER Unwind (2024) – Chapter 4

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