Sagas & Sass covered The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty in 2021; this is our summary of book 3 – Empire of Gold – as it was written to introduce Episode 29, covering the entirety of that novel.
When Empire of Gold begins, it’s with a doozy of a prologue that finally puts us in Manizeh’s head…and y’all, she is somehow even MORE evil than we thought she was – without going into too much detail, she straight-up offers Nahri’s true, given name to the ifrit, knowing that this will likely lead to her daughter becoming a slave. Perhaps that should have given us an inkling of what was to come, but we’ll get into that a bit later…
Because first, we meet back up with Nahri and Ali, who are alive – and eventually even kind of WELL – in Egypt. They spend some time with Nahri’s apothecary friend Yaqub, but eventually go on their not-so-merry way because Ali finally convinces her that eventually they’ll be discovered, anyway. So they head off to Ta Ntry and his Ayaanle family, only to be attacked along the way by an ifrit…but thankfully saved by a marid named Sobek.
Oh, and they also have a run-in with some pirates, but they convince the enslaved shafit from the crew to mutiny and then bring them to Ta Ntry.
When they arrive at Ali’s mother Hatset’s home, it’s clear she wants to keep her son safe and sound there, but it turns out the other marid are none too happy with what’s been going on and threaten to decimate Ta Ntry unless Ali surrenders to them. Now, part of this is because they want Suleiman’s seal, but Ali convinces Nahri to remove it from him…and not only does she succeed, but it turns out that she can wear the ring after all, despite what Marizeh claimed in Kingdom of Copper.
So Ali does surrender to the Marid, who hold him captive for a while and eventually try to force him to fight to the death with Sobek. But this doesn’t go the way the marid thought it would, and they are forced to release Ali.
Meanwhile the peri send a shedu to Nahri to bring her to meet with them, because as it turns out they’ve finally decided to get involved in the Daeva war. They give her a special blade and tell her to kill Dara, so guess it’s back to Daevabad for our [somewhat?] unlikely heroine.
Speaking of Daevabad, things have gotten really bad there. Like, really really REALLY bad. Without magic the city, its people, its food supplies, EVERYTHING, have fallen into disarray. Manizeh is barely holding on, and then Dara disobeys her to save one of his soldiers, who is being held by the Geziri. Dara is gravely injured in the process…and in order to save him, Manizeh uses the Nahid corpses that were found in the secret palace vault…and also binds him to her. Which all seems bad enough…but then she later uses this bond to straight-up enslave him.
See what we mean? Now that Manizeh is clearly all ‘whatever’ about Daeva being enslaved, we probably should have seen this coming. Also, she’s the absolute worst.
In the end, everyone meets back up in Daevabad for the fight of the century. Or should we say centuries? Either way, for a time it seems as if the ‘good guys’ will lose, considering the immense amount of power Dara is wielding and the fact that he is completely in Manizeh’s command. But in the end he is able to trick her, though not before she reveals that Nahri is actually her niece, the daughter of her brother and a shafit woman who had worked in the palace.
Nahri is also able to trick the peris and doesn’t have to kill Dara after all – which probably doesn’t bode well for some far distant future when the peris want to get their revenge, but for now, she is alive and well, divorced from Muntadhir, and able to work in her hospital, while Ali begins building a ruling council and Dara hies off in search of the Daeva relics that an ifrit stole with the intent of releasing them into the human world. Plus, Muntadhir and Jamshid get to be together, and Zaynab gets to go on adventures with her friend-turned-probable-love-interest Aqisa!
We guess it’s understandable that most people (including us) call this ending ‘bittersweet’…
QUOTES WE LOVED
“I do not believe ambitious men who say the only route to peace and prosperity lies in giving them more power – particularly when they do it with lands and people who are not theirs.”
“She told me to keep myself whole. That there wasn’t any shame in taking care of yourself in order to help those who needed you.”
“She survived trauma by suppressing it, by shoving back the grief and rage that would otherwise swallow her whole.”
“…there was no moving forward without addressing what had gone so terribly wrong in the past.”
“I find that those who look on politics with contempt are usually the first to be dragged down by them.”
“Indeed, the first time the Afshin had tried to steal her away, it had been to stop Nahri from marrying Muntadhir. It might be a controlling, terrible kind of love, but it was there. And it was dangerous.”
“He had never felt this way about someone before – this mix of loyalty and dread, love and revulsion.”
“How are you feeling? Truthfully?”
“I am exhausted and would like to no longer experience emotions, but besides that, I’m fine.”
