Captain's Fury by Jim Butcher

Book Four of the Codex Alera. More fighting, more intrigue. Tavi finally announces himself as Gaius Octavian son of Septimus, etc. More crises, more of everything. This one spent a good bit of the end blatantly setting up the next book. I find that I didn't resent that as much as I have with some others. In large part, I think, because the characters are so satisfying. And, too, although the story has become fragmented, the individual story lines are still satisfying and their joint focus is always apparent. AND they actually tie together at the end, even though two more books are coming.

Character development is always an issue in a mmvfs*. I am cautiously optimistic about this one - oh, hell, four volumes in is too late for caution. I am optimistic about this one. The qualities that made Tavi an interesting character as a young boy in book one - his stubbornness, his innate sense of right and wrong, his refusal to accept limitations - persist in the young adult Octavian. He is still all of that, but with maturity and perception of necessity. As a boy, he runs off to fetch home the sheep that he neglected when he chose instead to get flowers that a girl asked him for. The result is that Bernard, his uncle, is gravely injured and Tavi himself is nearly killed in the storm which follows. Octavian, as Captain of a legion, mourns every man that he puts in harms way, but bows to the necessity - and leads them.

Even the side characters grow. One of the more interesting is Marcus/Fidelias. He is Amara's master in Cursor training and betrays her and the First Lord to the Aquitaines. He appears then as Aquitaine's chief spy and assassin. And in this book and the previous one as the First Spear (appears to be the senior noncom) in the First Aleran Legion of which Tavi becomes the Captain. He, of course, was put in place by the Aquitaines to assassinate Tavi if he seems likely to become a threat to their plans. However, the back story on Fidelias is that he betrayed Sextus, the First Lord (read King), because he believed quite honestly that he had become a danger to the realm. Serving in Tavi's legion convinces him that Tavi is the future and when he is in place to kill Tavi, he kills instead both the senator who is a tool of Aquitaine and Lady Aquitaine herself. Except that she wasn't as dead as all that, but that is part of the set up for the next book.

*massive multi-volume fantasy series