M's Media Menagerie

The epic conclusion to the internationally acclaimed Captive Prince trilogy.

Damianos of Akielos has returned.

His identity now revealed, Damen must face his master Prince Laurent as Damianos of Akielos, the man Laurent has sworn to kill.

On the brink of a momentous battle, the future of both their countries hangs in the balance. In the south, Kastor’s forces are massing. In the north, the Regent’s armies are mobilising for war. Damen’s only hope of reclaiming his throne is to fight together with Laurent against their usurpers.

Forced into an uneasy alliance the two princes journey deep into Akielos, where they face their most dangerous opposition yet. But even if the fragile trust they have built survives the revelation of Damen’s identity – can it stand against the Regent’s final, deadly play for the throne?

We’re here at last, the final book in the Captive Prince trilogy. I kept saying that I would write my longest bit here, so I’m going to do my best to crush all my thoughts into this one.

Let’s start with: damn, bro, Laurent and the Regent were playing a different game than the readers and Damen. The reason I’ve been tagging these with the “unreliable narrator” trope is that it’s all from Damen’s limited perspective. He doesn’t see just how far these two have been reaching with their plays, so he doesn’t anticipate a huge chunk of what happens. Reading from Damen’s perspective gives the reader an emotional, straightforward view of events. Two chapters that feature Laurent’s POV are as evasive as he is, analytical and self-sacrificing in the same way; I heartily believe that the entire series would have been different if Laurent was the narrator the whole time.

Now, it isn’t that Damen is dumb. He simply doesn’t play on the same court, where politics are the same as waging war with another noble. He was born in a privileged position that ensured that he did not need to struggle immensely, and he believed the face that people showed him. As a warrior, he is strong and clever. He’s got royal pride and until he has his feet kicked out from under him in book one, doesn’t even realize what sort of privilege his position affords him.

When he’s plunged in, he doesn’t understand that there are some things that have been engineered in certain ways to push certain outcomes. I guessed from the beginning that Laurent actually knew who Damien was— the sheer vitriol he had for him in the beginning was telling. Being from Damen’s perspective, though, he was hiding the fact in order to survive and did not anticipate that the Regent could have been the one pulling the strings.

The reader often is given the clues from the beginning, some hearkening back to book one, as to the true nature of the game being played. It’s like infusing a political story with a mystery: can you guess why Laurent did this? Why is he acting this way? Is this going to end up falling into place or has the Regent foreseen this already?

The result is a real struggle for power that hangs by a fucking thread in the end. It’s cathartic. It’s poetic. It’s beautiful.

And one of the saddest things I’ve seen trawling around for how others look at the series is that some groups of people reduce this story to the spice level. Really??? You have an awesome book with fantastic court politics, incredible war scenes, fun chases, and dramatic twists and turns, and you want to reduce it to the boning?

And even if you want to reduce the story to the boning, how about talking about how well the sexual tension was done here? From book one, I was telling Karen, “I want them to kiss!!” You can tell the evolving level of care that Damen and Laurent have for one another and how it affects the comfort level between them. In fact, part of the level of care results in Laurent absolutely icing Damen out.

Although it wasn’t explicitly stated, I’m convinced that when Laurent turned his back on Damen, it was partly out of an interest of driving the pair apart so that Damen would not be seen as just a slave, or a traitor bowing his head to Laurent. In exchange, Laurent is elevated because it appears he personally engineered the situation of the two armies coming together to defeat the Regent, and that he holds some level of respect for Damianos the King instead of kicking around Damen, the slave.

I mean seriously: the fucking slave wrist manacles. Those two become symbolically bound to one another, almost like fucking wedding rings for the reader. From Damen it’s both a loving and hurtful gesture. Laurent keeps the manacle on because it really does do what Damen says: it brings them to the same level. They’re not operating on a power disparity anymore. They’re equals, both trapped in the climax of their own stories.

It’s also my opinion that Laurent’s offering to Akielos, the whipping, was more than just to make Damen flinch in memory of his own whipping. On the one hand, Damen’s interpretation was that it was supposed to be like a snake in the grass: earning Akielos’ trust while being backhanded to him. On the other, I think it could be interpreted as giving Damen the power he took away from him. He gave Damen the whip that nearly killed him and had men whipped on his behalf. It’s a little thing that says he couldn’t do it again. He gives Damen that part of their past to do with as he wishes.

As we work our way through the reason that Laurent truly, truly hates his uncle, it casts everything in a different light as well. Hindsight shows Laurent being cut a thousand times by innocuous words, him sitting in a gilded cage that he was never permitted to own, his reputation soured and damaged until he was reduced to the person Damen believes he is meeting in book one. Everyone sees him as spoiled, privileged, ruthless, and cruel.

Meanwhile, he’s fighting for his very existence. Even he is not the cruelest person he could be— book one, even when he is having the shit beaten out of Damen, there’s this ridiculous opening that he shows him. A way out. He is daring Damen to leave. An escape route, complete with a disguise, is literally just sitting there. It’s only mentioned off-handedly that Laurent would have known where Damen would leave by, but it’s enough.

(pounding the concrete) I want to reread the series. I am considering buying the books and then annotating things I notice now that are foreshadowing or purposefully engineered by a character. It would ruin it for whoever reads it after me, but there’s just so much to talk about that I can’t line my thoughts up enough. It’s all about the relationship between Laurent and Damen, the poeticism that keeps them apart and then unites them, the trauma that crushes them, the atonement, the love, like damn dude!!

(I’ll be reading more of Pacat’s books after this…)