It looks like a promising start to a series, my problem is just that nothing.....really happens in this book. The climax really doesn't feel like anything, there's a few pages of fighting and that's all. The first half of the book is just a lot of traveling around villages, the second half is a lot of talking with kings and nobles and such, and introducing questions that are never immediately answered. Being the prologue to a larger series, I guess it works, but standing alone there's really not much here. At least the characters are really well written