Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks

[othercat]

I tend to dislike the plotline of “band of patriots versus the evil invaders,” so one of the things I like about Fire Logic is that it does not really use that trope. I have also gotten slightly tired of the “lost heir” trope. Instead, we have “non-evil but slightly stupidly desperate refugee soldiers versus equally desperate patriots who are slowly alienating themselves from their own people because their own people are deeply sick of the fighting.” There is also a “lost heir,” but the aforementioned desperate patriots judge the lost heir unfit to be the heir.

Our protagonists are three “fire blood” elementals who are at varying points completely bonkers by anyone else’s standards. One is a woman of a border tribe that was wiped out by the Sainnite invaders, one is a Shaftali Paladin, and the third is a half-Sainnite seer. People with “fire logic” tend to be wildly intuitive, subject to dreams and visions and spend a lot of time seeming to talk to themselves a lot. They approach everything as a metaphor for something else. (The air element is described as extremely sharp and analytical. Air and fire do not get along too well because air talents are driven completely bonkers by fire talents and their seemingly random intuitive leaps.)

Fire Logic