Summary: Iron Flame

The GIST

Iron Flame by Rebecca Yarros is the second book in the Empyrean series, the dragon-rider saga that began with Fourth Wing and is planned to run to five volumes. It arrived on November 7, 2023, only seven months after its predecessor, and sold more than half a million copies on its first day. Two hundred Barnes & Noble stores held midnight release parties. Amazon MGM Studios had bought the screen rights to the whole series a week earlier. Few sequels have ever been so eagerly awaited.

The book is romantasy, fantasy with a strong vein of romance, and it picks up at the very moment Fourth Wing left off. Violet Sorrengail, the small, breakable general's daughter whom nobody expected to survive her first year at Basgiath War College, now knows that her kingdom has been lying to its people for centuries. She has to go back to school and pretend that she does not. Yarros comes from a military family. Both her parents were lieutenant colonels and her husband flew Apache helicopters for the United States Army, and he helped her with the scenes of aerial combat. She has said that this background is why loss is so real in her books: "I can tell you: when you go to war, your friends don't always come home."

The Story

Where things stand

A word on what came before, since the sequel assumes it. In the kingdom of Navarre, young people who want to ride dragons train at Basgiath, where failing usually means dying. Violet survived, bonded with two dragons, the mighty Tairn and the young golden Andarna, and developed a signet, a magical gift, that lets her call down lightning. She also fell in love with Xaden Riorson, the son of an executed rebel leader.

At the end of her first year, a training exercise turned out to be a trap. Violet and her companions were sent to a remote outpost and came face to face with venin, corrupted humans who gain power by draining the life from the world around them, and with the dragon-like wyvern they create. Navarre's leaders have always called such creatures a myth. Friends died in that battle, among them Liam, who had been Violet's protector. Violet nearly died too.

A brother back from the dead

She wakes in Aretia, a town officially destroyed and now being secretly rebuilt by a movement of rebels. The man who healed her is her own brother, Brennan, believed killed in battle years ago. He is alive, he is a senior officer of the rebellion, and his gift is mending.

In a few days Violet has learned that the history she was taught is false, that monsters are real, and that the kingdom next door, Poromiel, whose gryphon fliers she was trained to see as enemies, has been attacking Navarre's borders only because it is desperate for the one metal alloy that can kill venin. Xaden and his friends have been smuggling weapons to them all along.

Now a choice has to be made. The survivors can stay with the rebels, which would mean open war with Navarre, or they can go back to Basgiath and act as though nothing happened. They go back. Their cover story is that they were attacked by gryphons. Brennan tells Violet as little as possible about the rebels' plans, because there are people at Basgiath who can read memories.

Second year

One of those people is Dain Aetos, Violet's oldest friend. He has a signet that lets him see another person's memories with a touch, and he used it on her without asking. What he saw went to his father, a colonel, and led straight to the trap. Violet holds him responsible for Liam's death and cuts him out of her life. The colonel is demoted and sent away, though not before he leaves Violet and Xaden with a warning: "Secrets die with the people who keep them." Soon afterward the cadets who survived the battle begin to suffer convenient accidents, and Violet narrowly escapes being murdered.

Xaden has graduated. As a new lieutenant he is posted to a distant border fort, and the two of them can meet only for a few hours each week, a privilege they owe to their dragons, who are a mated pair and cannot be kept apart for long. They spend much of that precious time quarreling. Xaden is running a rebellion and will not tell her everything. Violet, lied to by her mother, her brother and her lover, cannot stand one more secret. Her dragon Andarna, meanwhile, has fallen into the long dreamless sleep that young dragons go through as they grow.

The new class brings two complications. One is Sloane, Liam's younger sister, who makes it plain that she hates Violet and blames her for her brother's death; Violet resolves to keep the girl alive anyway. The other is a first-year calling himself Aaric Graycastle, whom Violet recognizes as the king's third son, enrolled under a false name for reasons of his own.

And there is a new vice commandant. Major Burton Varrish has a signet that reveals a person's weaknesses and a reputation for brutal interrogation, and he has made Violet his personal project. He searches her bags and invents punishments for her. He takes a sinister interest in her sleeping dragon. His aim is to show her exactly how powerless she is. More than one reviewer compares him to Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter books.

The secret in the archives

In Fourth Wing, Violet had to prove that her body could keep up. In Iron Flame it is her mind that matters. She was raised to be a scribe, and she sees a problem that only a scholar can solve. Navarre is protected by magical wards that venin cannot cross, powered by a wardstone. Aretia has a wardstone of its own that has never been lit, and nobody alive knows how it is done. If Violet can find out how Navarre's founders, the First Six, raised the original wards, the rebels could shield their own people.

So she begins to dig in secret, with the help of Jesinia, a scribe friend who slips her forbidden books. For a long time she hides all of this from her squad, from her best friend Rhiannon, from Ridoc and Sawyer, and from her sister Mira, in the belief that ignorance will keep them safe. It only leaves her isolated, on top of the grief and nightmares she has carried since the battle. When Rhiannon saves her from discovery during one of Varrish's searches, Violet at last tells her friends the truth, and finds that she is stronger for having done so.

Together they work out that two of the First Six left journals, and that those journals lie in a royal vault that will open only to someone of the king's blood. The disguised prince agrees to help. The heist succeeds, and it also sets off an alarm.

Breaking point

Violet is seized. A drug cuts her off from her dragons and her power, and Varrish tortures her for days. Finally he summons Dain to pull the truth from her memory. What Dain sees there is not what Varrish hoped for: Violet makes him watch the venin attack as it really happened. Dain learns in that instant that he has been lied to as thoroughly as anyone, and he has to decide whose side he is on.

What comes next turns the book on its hinge. The truth gets out. Tairn shares his memory of the battle with the other dragons, who pass it to their riders. Xaden has had wyvern carcasses dropped at outposts along the border, where they cannot be explained away. Violet's mother, the formidable General Lilith Sorrengail, shows where she really stands. A large part of the riders' quadrant, cadets and professors alike, leaves Basgiath and flies for Aretia.

Aretia

The second half belongs to the rebellion. An abandoned palace in the mountains has to become a war college overnight. Violet labors over her translation of the old journals and tries again and again to wake the wardstone, and fails. An opening line of the novel, "Stone doesn't burn," comes to matter a great deal. The rebels also need a forge that can make venin-killing weapons, which requires a device called a luminary, and the man who owns one is a viscount in Poromiel. Violet and Xaden go to bargain with him. His price is that the rebels take in and train a hundred gryphon fliers, who have been the riders' enemies for generations. One of those fliers is Cat, the viscount's niece, who was once engaged to Xaden.

So riders and fliers must learn to live and fight side by side, Violet must learn to aim her lightning as well as summon it, and she and Xaden must find out whether love can survive when it is built on half-truths. Xaden, as it turns out, has kept back more than one secret. Outside the wards the venin are gathering, and Navarre's own generals come asking for help. The book's last quarter is a siege, a sacrifice and a final page that readers have described as shocking. None of it will be given away here.

What It's Really About

Trust. Every relationship in the book is tested by a lie: between lovers, between friends, between parents and children, between a people and their government. One reviewer notes that truth is what Violet values most, and that this is why trust becomes the book's central question. She grows stronger each time she risks trusting her squad, and strongest when she begins to trust her own judgment again.

Institutions that lie. Basgiath carries on as if nothing has happened and punishes those who know better. One critic calls this institutional gaslighting. The story also asks what a safe country owes to people on the other side of its walls.

The cost of war. Characters readers care about are lost, and survivors carry guilt. That is deliberate, and it comes from the author's own life.

Being heard. People keep discussing Violet as if she were not in the room. Again and again she has to speak up to make them stop.

Readers love the series for its dragons, who talk, and with a good deal of attitude, for short chapters that end on cliffhangers, and for the heat between Violet and Xaden, a hero who would burn down the world for her. This volume divides opinion more than the first did. Admirers praise the way it turns an attraction into a real relationship, and one gave it ten out of ten. Others found the middle slow, grew tired of the couple having the same argument repeatedly, thought the ex-fiancée a cliché and the dialogue too modern, and felt that the book had been rushed to print. That impression was not helped when some copies shipped with misprinted covers and pages out of order. Almost everyone agrees that the final quarter is gripping and that the ending makes the next book, Onyx Storm, hard to resist.

Who Should Read It

Anyone who finished Fourth Wing and needs to know what happens next; this is not a place to begin, so read that one first. It will suit fans of romantasy, of enemies-to-lovers stories with morally gray heroes, and of school settings where the exams can kill you, and its dragons and battles have also drawn readers who normally reach for epic fantasy. It is written for adults, with explicit romance, torture and wartime violence. Expect a long book, and expect to be left on a cliff at the end.