Swordheart is the solution if you’re fed up with 19-year-old sassy FMCs who are the chosen one, hate the MMC they’re stuck with, and aren’t like the other girls. Instead, Halla is grounded and mature and just like any of us.
She’s a prisoner in her own home she just inherited, after distant relatives try to marry her off to her cousin with clammy hands. When Halla unsheathes an ancient sword she’s stuck in the room with, a grumpy, immortal warrior trapped inside appears, bound to her as the new wielder. So this warrior and housekeeper set off to reclaim Halla’s inheritance.
This cozy fantasy romance is almost a genre of its own, because it’s absurd, hilarious, and full of giddy banter. It will be what I forever judge cozy fantasies against.
This post contains spoilers.
Swordheart
Description
Halla is a housekeeper who has suddenly inherited her great-uncle’s estate… and, unfortunately, his relatives. Sarkis is an immortal swordsman trapped in a prison of enchanted steel. When Halla draws the sword that imprisons him, Sarkis finds himself attempting to defend his new wielder against everything from bandits and roving inquisitors to her own in-laws… and the sword itself may prove to be the greatest threat of all.
Tropes
- Cozy Fantasy
- Forced Proximity
- Grumpy x Sunshine
- Bodyguard
- Mature FMC
Review
Overall Impressions 😊
Swordheart had no business being as funny as it was. I thought I was juuust about to hang up my hopes on cozy fantasy because I kept finding myself being bored, but turns out what I needed was some stellar comedy in it.
It is very slice of life, or more like a slice of adventure as Halla, Sarkis, Zale, and Brindle set out on the road (very Brigands & Breadknives in that manner), but it’s also thoughtful and authentic to being a widowed woman in a medieval land. Like, this is exactly what I would imagine being widowed in a magical medieval land would look like.
It was very enjoyable, cozy, and hilarious, full of some heartfelt romance, great banter between the two main characters, and just lots of zingers amongst everyone, even the gnole. I really enjoyed it. Can’t wait to start my ARC of Daggerbound in July!
Perfect For Fans Of… 🌟
It’s hard to fill Swordheart’s shoes, because it just became my favorite cozy fantasy of all time.
But if you liked found families, especially with magic and in a bit of a medieval setting, you should give Legends & Lattes and Brigands & Breadknives a go. While both books feel a bit more slice of life than I would’ve liked, the cozy fantasy and found family are pretty comparable, and it’ll make you feel all warm and fuzzy.
For those of us who are a bit tired of stabby, edgy FMCs and want to change things up with a soft, clever FMC, The Road of Bones by Demi Winters (who can ever forget Silla and her chickens) might be a good fit. The Road of Bones is more on the darker and spicier side as a romantasy than Swordheart but still a good transition if you’re into that!
If you’re looking for a lot of spice or more of an angsty romance, this one isn’t for you.
Characters 👥
Halla is a GEM. I didn’t realize how much I wanted to read from a witty, mature FMC’s perspective until I read Swordheart. She’s resourceful, clever, a ray of sunshine, and just a bit insecure and silly. I could relate to her very much and I would’ve read a hundred books of her confusing men with her speeches about cauliflower.
Sarkis is grumpy, yes, but who wouldn’t be grumpy if they were stuck in a sword for eternity? He’s a bit of a barbarian, which works great with Halla’s gentle spirit. It’s a charming story of opposites attract, and just like Zale says, Halla is trusting enough and Sarkis is skeptical enough that the two of them make just the right couple. I hope they show up in Daggerbound, which sounds like they will based on the premise.
T. Kingfisher, if you’re reading this, I need to know more about Zale, Brindle, and everyone’s favorite ox, Pretty Foot. Please make them regular characters in future books because I must know what happens to them next!
Plot 🗺️
I loved the story. Halla, Sarkis, Zale, Brindle, and their ox on the road, introducing us to this world (my first T. Kingfisher) and them running into all kinds of trouble while they became this tight unit was very fun. The world was developed just enough to make me wonder more (like their gods).
It’s definitely got that cozy fantasy slice of life vibes, and it worked pretty well for me because I read this in about a month, so I didn’t have a chance to get bored, but I can see it might become cyclical.
I thought the reveal was obvious, since Sarkis thinks Halla is going to hate him when she finds out.
Length wise this was pretty good. For cozy fantasy, I prefer shorter books rather than long, and this was about 12+ hours of audio, which was just the right length.
My Favorite Quote📣
“What would you say if I tortured you?” asked the bandit leader conversationally.
Halla blinked at him.
“Err, ‘Ow,’ probably. ‘Stop, Stop, Stop,’ something like that?”
What a bizarre question. What does he expect me to say?
T. Kingfisher, Swordheart
Full Synopsis of Swordheart (Spoilers)
Meet Halla
Halla is a respectable widow in her thirties. Her husband was a decent man and it was never a love match, but the marriage was fine while it lasted. After he died, she became a housekeeper for his great-uncle Silas, a cranky old man who liked her well enough and let her look after him as he got older. When Silas dies, he leaves her everything. The house, the money, and the whole pile of antiques and magical objects he spent his life collecting.
Her husband’s family is not happy about this. They pull her back into the fold and try to marry her off to her cousin Alver so the inheritance stays with them. When Halla refuses, her aunt Malva locks her in her room and keeps her there for days on end.
Halla looks at her options. Marry Alver, or stay locked up. Both of those are a prison, so she decides the only way out is to end her own life. There’s an old sword hanging on the wall. She takes off her clothes, works out how to use it on herself, and pulls it free of the scabbard.
Sarkis Comes Out of the Sword
She doesn’t die. She gets a man instead. As the blade clears the scabbard, a warrior appears in the room. His name is Sarkis. He’s an immortal swordsman, bound to a magic sword and sworn to protect whoever draws it. The binding holds until the sword is sold, the wielder dies, or the wielder lets him go on purpose.
The way Sarkis tells it, he and his two commanders fought a long war for their people, and to try to win it they had themselves bound into the swords. They lost anyway, and he’s been passed from wielder to wielder ever since. There’s more to the story than that, but he keeps it to himself.
Sarkis doesn’t waste any time. He fights off Alver and the house guard, swears himself to Halla, and gets her out of the house. The two of them set off for the Temple of the White Rat, where Halla is hoping the priests can help her sort out the mess with her family and hold on to the inheritance.
On the Road to the White Rat
The two of them walk, and share meals, and slowly get to know each other. Sarkis is carrying a lot from the war, and it’s clear something about how he ended up in the sword still eats at him. He thinks his two commanders blame him for it, since they got bound the same way he did and lost everything for it.
Halla asks questions the whole way. She doesn’t have much confidence, and she doesn’t think she’s pretty, which Sarkis flatly disagrees with. He isn’t sure whether it’s just been too long since he was out of the sword long enough to notice a woman, but he finds her attractive and easy to be around.
They stop at an inn and share a room, with Sarkis passing as her hired guard. He sleeps on the floor. It gets cold in the night and the two of them end up cuddled together for warmth. Halla frets about him being down on the hard floor, and it gets to Sarkis that a woman would worry about him at all.
Back on the road, Sarkis has Halla put him in the sword. Out walking she falls in with a kindly-seeming woman who turns out to be working a robbery with a partner. The second they move on her, Halla draws the sword and Sarkis handles them, and after that he stays out and the two keep on together.
They also cross a pair of priests of the Hanged Mother, a mean religious order that takes an interest in them. When the priests start questioning her, Halla plays dumb, rambling about vegetables and nonsense until they decide she isn’t worth the bother. Sarkis asks why she talks like that, and Halla tells him that stupid women get discarded easily.
Bartholomew the Collector
Their next stop is the home of Bartholomew, a collector of rare antiques and an old associate from Silas’s world. He’s glad to have them and puts them up for the night. Sarkis passes himself off as Halla’s guard again, and they keep quiet about what the sword really is.
Bartholomew tells Halla her best move is the Temple of the White Rat, where the priests can help her claim what’s hers. He also floats the idea that she could have just married her cousin and spared herself all the trouble. Halla makes it clear that is not something she wants. Sarkis can’t shake a bad feeling about the man, but they thank him and move on.
The Temple of the White Rat
At the Temple of the White Rat, Halla lays out her situation and they show the priests what Sarkis can do. That earns them a meeting with the bishop, who interviews the pair at length and keeps testing the sword, watching Sarkis go in and come back out. He talks to Sarkis alone, too, and asks whether he wants to sell the sword. Sarkis says no.
Then the temple makes an offer. For a twenty percent commission, their lawyer-priests will travel with Halla and help her win the estate in court. One of them is Zale, a lawyer of the White Rat, who is nonbinary. Driving the wagon is a gnole named Brindle, and there’s an ox along too. They load up and set out together.
On the Road with the White Rat
Halla makes friends with everyone along the way, the priest, the gnole, even the ox, and she never stops asking questions. The group starts poking at the rules of Sarkis’s binding to see how it actually works. Out of the sword he still has to eat and sleep and pee like any man. Back in the sword, all of it resets, the full bladder included.
The Hanged Mother priests won’t leave them alone. They stop the wagon more than once to demand what the group is hauling, and at one point they search the whole thing top to bottom. They turn up nothing, and the party carries on.
Somewhere in the woods they wander into the Vagrant Hills, a place where the land moves on its own and the mountains rearrange themselves so the road never stays put. For a while they’re stuck. Sarkis is thrown by it and even Zale is out of ideas, and then they figure out the hills are crawling with flying, slimy things that drink blood, so they get out fast.
Getting out doesn’t lose the Hanged Mother. The next time the priests stop them, Halla has had it and climbs down off the wagon to tell them off to their faces. One of the soldiers with the priests knocks her to the ground.
Sarkis sees her go down and loses it, killing one of the soldiers while Brindle drops the other with a crossbow. Now they’ve got two bodies on their hands, and they settle on sinking them in an ice-cold lake where no one will come looking.
Some days later they’re stopped again, this time by bandits, and the woman leading them is the same one who tried to rob Halla months back. Word has gotten around that people go missing wherever Halla goes, so now she stands accused of making people disappear. She tries to talk the bandit leader down. It falls apart when one of them pulls the sword from the scabbard by accident, Sarkis cuts through them, and the rest of the bandits scatter.
The Trial at Rutger’s Howe
The group finally reaches Rutger’s Howe, Halla’s town, to settle things with her family in court. Zale lays out the legal case. Malva and Alver push their own version, that Halla has lost her mind and was kidnapped by Sarkis.
Bartholomew turns up for this part, with his assistant Nolan, and testifies that Halla is perfectly sound of mind. The court sides with Halla. The estate is hers, free and clear, and the relatives walk away with nothing.
The Truth Written on the Sword
That night the whole group celebrates, Zale, Brindle, the ox, and Sarkis, and Halla and Sarkis finally hook up.
The next morning, Sarkis has Nolan read the words engraved on the sword, and the inscription tells a very different story from the one Sarkis has been telling. It says he is a war criminal, and that being sealed in the sword was his punishment. The whole story he told about the war and binding himself to save his people was a lie. Halla is devastated.
Still reeling, she pulls the sword out one more time, draws Sarkis out, and lets him go. She tells him he can belong to himself now, that she doesn’t want him. Then she heads out for a walk to clear her head.
Locked in the Attic
Halla doesn’t get far. Malva and Alver grab her off the road and lock her in the attic, and this time Zale is up there with her. Zale had overheard the two of them scheming, which made Zale a loose end, so the plan now is to force Halla to marry Alver, clammy hands and all, and get rid of Zale for good.
While that’s happening, the sword has changed hands. When Halla let it fall, Bartholomew picked it up, which makes him Sarkis’s wielder now. Sarkis won’t cooperate, and Bartholomew is left pleading with him to fall in line. At one point Sarkis nearly kills Nolan.
Nolan makes an offer instead. His order will step in and help Halla, as long as Sarkis plays along. The reason his order cares is that the Smith who sealed Sarkis into the sword to begin with is the same person who founded it. Somewhere in here Sarkis has to tell the true story of how he became bound to the sword, and getting the words out is hard for him.
Up in the attic, Halla and Zale work at getting loose and manage it. Halla gets a blade into someone on the way out, and the two of them get clear of the house.
Sarkis, meanwhile, comes to with Nolan standing over him. Nolan has killed Bartholomew, who was never going to honor his side of the deal, and Nolan is holding the sword now. Sarkis belongs to him.
The Road to Amalcross
Once she’s free, Halla sets out again with Brindle and the ox to go find Sarkis. On the road they come across three paladins, and Halla ends up tending to one of them who’s been hurt.
Leaving an inn to go meet Sarkis at the crossroads, they get stopped by the Hanged Mother priests one more time. The priests accuse Halla of being a witch, going off whatever the bandit woman told them. She denies it, of course. Before it can turn into anything worse, the three paladins from earlier turn up and run the priests off.
Swordheart Ending Explained
Halla catches up to Sarkis and Nolan in Amalcross, and it goes bad in a hurry. Nolan orders Sarkis to kill her. Rather than obey, Sarkis turns the blade on himself and falls on his own sword, both to avoid hurting Halla and to throw the whole moment into chaos.
It works. With Nolan caught off guard, Halla gets her crossbow up and puts a bolt through his leg.
She stands over him and makes it clear she will finish it if she has to. Nolan gives up his claim on the sword, hands it over to her, and he is arrested. With Bartholomew dead and no heir left to speak of, his estate passes to Halla as well, and Zale is the one who brings her the news.
Sarkis is in bad shape after falling on the sword, so he heals the only way he can, inside the blade. Halla waits it out. About two weeks later she draws him back out, healed, though he is still bound to the sword exactly as he was before. He is not free of it.
Once he’s out, he asks Halla to marry him. In his people’s custom the man pays a bride price to the woman rather than the other way around, so there is a price to settle, and Zale handles the negotiating and talks him up to a steep one.
The book ends in spring. Halla and Sarkis are married and living in the estate she inherited from Silas. They are getting ready to go visit their niece when a letter arrives from Zale.
Nolan has died in prison, and there is another sword out there like the one Sarkis was bound to, with people already looking for it.
Spicy Chapters
How Spicy is Swordheart (Swordheart Book 1): 🌶️🌶️
Whether you want to get to the heat or want closed-door modifications here’s the list of spicy chapters below.
- Chapter 44
- Chapter 59
A widow pulls a sword and a grumpy immortal warrior falls out 🐀⚔️
Swordheart is the most hilarious comfort read I’ve picked up in forever. There might just be a cozy fantasy out there for me. If you’re tired of sassy 19 year old chosen ones who are also lost heirs, Halla and her grumpy swordsman are the mature, hilarious change of pace, and I already miss the whole wagon and can’t wait for Daggerbound.
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