Sagas & Sass covered The Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty in 2021; this is our summary of book 2 – Kingdom of Copper – as it was written to introduce Episode 28, covering the entirety of that novel.
Welcome to what might be our shortest summary yet, because there were only two of us there to read it!
AAAAAnyway, Kingdom of Copper opens with a quick aftermath-of-City-of-Brass prologue that touches first on Ali, who was separated from his caravan thanks to an attempted assassination and is rescued from dying in the desert because he unwittingly creates an oasis with his newfound water magic and draws the attention of some Geziris, who take him in. Next up is Nahri, who we see marrying the Daevabadi emir Munthadir, and last but not least…Dara, who has been brought back from the dead by Nahri’s mother Manizeh! Crazy talk!
But when the novel really gets going, turns out it’s years after the prologue. Nahri is still in Daevabad, and has completed quite a bit of training with the help of her mentor Nisreen and become an adept healer, but she is also basically a prisoner in the palace. Ali is living in a small village in the Geziri desert and is well-loved by its people because of how, err, great he is with water, which has allowed them to grow more crops and therefore become self-sufficient. And as for Dara, having his POV is kind of weird, because wow he is somehow even MORE emo than expected? But anyway he’s been training up some new Daeva warriors for Manizeh and they’re planning on attacking Daevabad during Navastatem, which is the celebration of the new century.
Unfortunately for Ali, who really just wants to live his dang life, his Ayaanle cousin shows up and dumps a tax payment from Ta Ntry on him, forcing him to travel to Daevabad so that the Ayaanle won’t suffer for having, ya know, not paid their taxes. Thankfully his friends Lubayd and Aqisa go with him, so hey, at least he’s not alone?
As for Dara, he helps Manizeh make a deal with the marid, who totally weren’t supposed to kill him. Oh and Manizeh has made this awful poison that attacks Geziri relics, and it kind of can’t be contained, so that’s, ya know, bad.
Back in Daevabad, Munthadir is super pissed that Ali is back, while Nahri seems to be kind of torn about the situation. But then she has to save Ali’s life (again!) when someone (::cough cough:: Jamshid) tries to poison him, so she decides he owes her (again!), and thanks to a little side trip princess Zaynab takes her on, she knows how she wants him to work off that debt. See, she discovered an old Nahid hospital when she was hanging out with Zaynab, and she wants to reopen it as a hospital for both djinn AND shafit….with the help of a shafit doctor she discovered, nonetheless!
Not that things can be easy for once. The whole hospital thing seems to be going well, until Kaveh arranges a fake shahit-on-Daeva attack that leads to riots and Nahri has to go around healing a bunch of shafit that were injured. So now the king, Ghassan, is mad, Kaveh is mad, and Ali is forced to remain in the hospital and Nahri in the palace until Navastatem and the hospital’s grand opening.
Eventually the big day arrives, but Nahri , Nisreen, and Jamshid are in a parade that gets attacked by shafit. Sadly, Nireen is killed, and Jamshid is legit set on fire, but his tattoo that keeps his Nahid abilities in check is burned away, so his body heals itself and welp, guess the cat’s out of that bag! But while Jamshid might be okay, Ghassan of course decides to use the attack to his advantage and sends out an order for the shafit district (and therefore the shafit themselves) to be destroyed. Ali mounts a successful mutiny that keeps this from happening, but then Kaveh uses Manizeh’s poison to kill Ghassan! And of course the poison then spreads, killing every Geziri in its path unless someone is able to warn them to remove their relics first.
That’s not even the worst of it – the deal Dara made with the marid lead to them destroying the Royal Guard’s citadel, which kills a huge portion of the Guard. Then Dara’s soldiers and the ifrit and their ghouls arrive, and when Dara himself shows up and has a confrontation with Nahri, Ali, and Munthadir, Munthadir is fatally injured. Nahri and Ali escape, only to run into Manizeh as they are trying to retrieve the ring that controls Suleiman’s seal from Ghassan’s body. However, Nahri being Nahri, she is able to outsmart her mother, shove the ring onto Ali’s finger, and escape by jumping off the parapet and into the no-longer-cursed lake.
Okay, let’s take a DEEEEP breath, because that was a lot, and the book isn’t even over yet! Buuut okay it almost is, because once Nahri and Ali disappear into the lake, magic leaves Daevabad, which is bad for a lot of reasons but good for Munthadir because his wound was only fatal because of magic. So turns out he’s going to live, and oh, by the way, Nahri and Ali do too – only they’re in EGYPT, now?
QUOTES WE LOVED
“You are far too clever to believe the Ayaanle are the only reason for Daevabad’s financial problems. We are a scapegoat; a slight diminishment in taxes does not do the damage I know you’ve seen. Keeping a third of the population in slavery and squalor does. Oppressing another third to the point where they self-segregate does…People do not thrive under tyrants, Alizayd; they do not come up with innovations when they’re busy trying to stay alive, or offer creative ideas when error is punished by the hooves of a karkadann.”
“He doesn’t hate you. He’s hurt, he’s lost, and he’s lashing out. But those are dangerous impulses when a man has as much power as your brother, and he’s going down a path from which he might not be able to return.”
“I’ve had enough of men hurting me because they were upset.”
“I’m tired of everyone in this city feeding on vengeance. I’m tired of teaching our children to hate and fear other children because their parents are our enemies. And I’m sick and tired of acting like the only way to save our people is to cut down all who might oppose us, as if our enemies won’t return the favor the instant the power shifts.”
“I would be lying if I said there weren’t times I feared I’d taken the wrong path. That I never dreamed of something else, never mourned the other lives I might have lived. I don’t think that’s an uncertainty anyone loses.”
