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Reviewed by Jamie Michele for Readers' Favorite
In The Iron Tithe by Robert W. Riley, we meet Knight Commander Cedrik Theramond, who serves as the King’s Shield and has the grueling charge of collecting mandatory grain levies. The crux is that these come from famine-struck villages to supply the King's army of Alcia. In Doirin, Cedrik stands beside Magistrate Creel as they enforce the Crown’s quotas against Torin, who cannot surrender the harvest he has reaped without condemning his family to crippling starvation. When the hidden stores are discovered and seized, sheer anger and resentment follow the royal column into Blackwood Pass, where the villagers make a desperate attempt to reclaim what was taken. Cedrik must secure the cargo and maintain order under the strict authority of King Lorindan’s law. As pressure from those above him clashes with the desperation in the countryside, Cedrik is left to reconcile the widening divide between his duty to the Crown and responsibility to the people he was sworn to protect.
The Iron Tithe is a fantastic prequel novella that sets up Robert W. Riley’s Blood of Tomorrow. The world-building is excellent, with villages bound to a distant throne. Alcia is governed from the top by King Lorindan, who demands fixed grain quotas to sustain his army against the Xencid hordes. Cedrik is the anti-hero main character who stands at the center of this moral storm, and is remarkably well developed. This full fleshing out extends to ancillary characters, like Specialist Fintan, who emerges as a quiet counterweight to Cedrik’s hardened persona, where an order to kill a terrified boy definitely shows readers that he has a conscience still forming. Creel is the novel’s most chilling antagonist, and Riley paints a perfect picture of a man capable of reducing starvation to arithmetic, demanding death in a way that exposes the law eclipsing mercy and raw ambition. Riley is brilliant with cinematic settings, from the mud of Doirin’s square clinging to armour, to Blackwood Pass, steeped in rot and early winter rain. There is no question that Blood of Tomorrow will be a worthy successor, and I'm excited to see where Robert W. Riley takes us.
