Mercury retrograde gets blamed for everything from technological meltdowns to regrettable texts to an ex. In Bel Banta’s “The Court of Venus,” the planets have considerably more consequential things to answer for, including royal succession, political treachery, an assassination or two, and whether a courtier gets to keep their head.
Across Banta’s fictional kingdoms, astrologers would be wasted writing horoscopes. The realms’ magicians are born under one of the celestial bodies of classical astrology, each with its own talents. Jupiterborn influence luck, Saturnborn speak to the dead, Marsborn stir hatred and discord, Mercuryborn create codes and read languages, Sunborn have a supernatural ear for dishonesty, and Venusborn read people’s desires. The magicians’ powers shift with the heavens, making star charts instruments of statecraft. Forget consulting CoStar to find out if your Scorpio crush is emotionally available: Alvion’s magicians can see (and influence) who sits on the throne — and who winds up dead trying to claim it.
That’s a tremendously fun and inventive premise, particularly once you start considering the implications. And Banta understands that the most interesting thing about having extraordinary powers is what people might actually do with them, especially people who already have far too much ambition for their own good.
But not even all the magic in the heavens can solve the oldest headache of a typical Tudor monarchy: producing a male heir.
The aging King Richard of Alvion has already sent two wives to the executioner in pursuit of a son, and a third is preparing for her coronation — a position with nice perks and a rather alarming turnover rate. There are family feuds that threaten to become national emergencies, alliances to negotiate, and jousts and masques to attend. I was sold on Banta’s world and premise even before the first head rolled. Banta knows her Tudors, down to the fickle and uneasy dependence of monarchs on the advisers who keep them in power. I kept imagining everything that Thomas Cromwell might have accomplished with a Jupiterborn on his payroll.
Now, Bianca Mortlake, the first Moonborn magician in a millennium, has been invited back to court for a tournament honoring the newest queen. She can change her appearance, massage emotions, and sift through memories, all useful talents for investigating the suspicious death of her childhood friend Prince Hal. Prospero, the magician who trained her, is also dead. And Roland, the infuriating Venusborn boy who studied alongside her, has somehow become lord chancellor. She wants answers, and Roland — infuriating, well-connected Roland — may be the only person who can help her get them.
Don’t lose your head
Banta has clearly done her Tudor homework (a delight for an Anne Boleyn-obsessed reader like me). And the book’s Tudor inspiration goes well beyond Henry VIII’s disastrous love life (divorced, beheaded, died…) to the machinery that keeps a Renaissance monarchy running. The book has noble families with their own candidates for power, competing loyalties, a tournament with political consequences, a new queen under immense pressure to produce a son, and an ailing king running out of time. It’s all delightful. And Banta makes the struggle for the throne a wonderfully tangled affair. After all, what’s the point of being king if someone else can pull all the strings?
The magic fits wonderfully into all this political maneuvering. Banta has imagined what happens when supernatural abilities become another form of influence at court, where knowing the right secret is every bit as useful as being born into the right fancy family. The result has all the pleasures of a good historical intrigue, with the added possibility that someone might be able to manipulate the outcome of a conspiracy simply by being born under the right planet. History could have been considerably more interesting with a few of these magicians around.
But being indispensable to a king comes with an occupational hazard: Royal favor can sour overnight. The court can offer extraordinary opportunities for advancement, but unfortunately, the career ladder has a tendency of ending up right at the foot of the executioner’s block. Even a truly impressive magical résumé offers little job security. Just ask Prospero.
As a whole, Banta’s characters are considerably better at hatching conspiracies than they are at concealing them. Fulke Roet, the king’s nephew and the current heir to the throne, is particularly cavalier about his ambitions, considering that his uncle has demonstrated considerable enthusiasm for sending heads rolling. And while modern astrology may accuse Geminis of being two-faced, Bianca can literally borrow someone else’s. Yet Alvion’s nobles still happily discuss treason with anyone who looks familiar, and other supposedly formidable political opponents aren’t any good at securing their palaces. Alvion’s court is dangerous in theory — but rather toothless in practice. (I have questions about the security budgets of these kingdoms.) That carelessness can be frustrating because Banta otherwise has such a good grasp of how a monarchy operates. A little more caution — and a few consequences that actually stick — would make the conspiracies as convincing as the politics behind them.
Old flames — and older grievances
All the plotting and politics are fun, but some of the book’s best storytelling takes place years before there’s even a throne to fight over.
Through Bianca’s memories, we get to know Roland, Hal, and Prospero before any ambition, grief, and the demands of the court could go and complicate everything. The flashbacks make their relationships feel like they’ve actually developed over years, and they give Hal, whose death sets much of the story in motion, an actual presence in a story he sadly doesn’t live to see. It’s easy to understand why Bianca and Roland are still affected by his loss — because we’ve spent time getting to know him, and we’re affected by his death, too. Meanwhile, it turns out that childhood heroes don’t always survive the scrutiny of adulthood. Prospero was practically a father to Bianca, but the man she adored and the tutor Roland remembers don’t always seem like they’re the same person.
Roland, meanwhile, appears to have missed the memo that, these days, seems to require that male love interests dress in black and spend most of their time brooding. Instead, he’s pink-haired (and -eyed), dripping in jewelry, and possessing of an almost unreasonable amount of charm. He’s perfectly happy to attract attention — and clever enough to know what to do with it. His Venusborn ability to read desire gives him an advantage in both politics and flirting, although Bianca certainly makes him work to win her over with the latter. After all, she’s known him long enough to be thoroughly unimpressed by his peacocking performance. She remembers the sensitive boy he used to be; the man who has made himself indispensable to the king is rather harder to figure out. Their romance more than earns its tenderness, and it’s all the sweeter for the trouble they’ve had getting there.
Banta gives these two years of affection, resentment, grief, and misunderstanding to work through, and she’s in no hurry to let them sort it all out. They know how to get under each other’s skin because of their complicated history, but there’s also a lot of tenderness and care under all their antagonizing. As they spend more time together as adults and their assumptions about each other unravel, their attraction becomes increasingly difficult to ignore. Watching two supposedly smart people take so long to acknowledge the obvious could be maddening, but luckily, Banta makes it a great deal of fun. (Thank Jupiter!)
The book’s celestial magic is a highlight, although it, too, can be awfully convenient — the heavens sometimes seem a little bit too helpful in moving the plot along. Some of the book’s plot points come with an almost supernatural sense of dramatic timing. When characters are rescued from supposedly impossible situations thanks to new powers and favorable alignments, it’s hard to know just how worried we’re supposed to be. Even magic should have to play by its rules. And the pacing could have used a bit of its own heavenly intervention. The book gets off to a fast start, but the middle stretch takes its time getting anywhere, and the final 50-ish pages seem determined to make up for lost ground: complications arrive, conflicts resolve rather quickly, and a late threat doesn’t get the buildup it deserves. I learned only when I got to the epilogue that “The Court of Venus” is the first half of a duology. Oops. At the end of the last chapter, most of the royal business seemed pretty well settled to me.
Still, there’s an awful lot to enjoy in Banta’s particular brand of Tudor fantasy. The historical details are thoughtful, and the magical system leaves this series with all sorts of entertaining possibilities. The conspiracies could use tighter plotting, the palace guards could stand to be a little more suspicious, and the stars should refrain from intervening quite so helpfully. But the characters have wonderful chemistry, and the court is full of the sort of people whose terribleness makes for excellent reading.
But more than anything, I loved spending time in the world Banta has created. And for all my complaints about how easily these people get away with things, I was thoroughly invested in watching them try. Banta has made Alvion the sort of fictional kingdom where nearly everyone has an agenda and almost nobody can be trusted, and I would very much like to be invited back — preferably with a guarantee that my head would remain attached to my body.
For all the characters’ attempts to bend the heavens to their will, Alvion’s most formidable problems remain stubbornly human: No amount of magic can make an aging king any less desperate for an heir, persuade ambitious relatives to stop eyeing the throne, or untangle the feelings of two people who have spent years misunderstanding one another. Banta has taken the familiar Tudor problems of marriage and succession and unchecked royal ambition and introduced a whole other set of complications.
There are only so many ways to keep a king happy or avoid an appointment with the executioner. Banta has added a whole solar system’s worth of possibilities, and somehow, Alvion is still remarkably good at making a mess of things. Its magicians can detect lies, manipulate fortunes, read desires, and tip the odds in their favor, but all of that cosmic knowledge hasn’t made anyone particularly adept at holding on to power. Perhaps Alvion’s astronomers should look beyond Saturn. There might yet be an undiscovered planet that governs common sense.
