Series Review: The Kingston Cycle by C.L. Polk
Greetings and welcome to Reviews That Burn: Series Reviews, part of Books That Burn. Series Reviews discuss at least three books in a series and cover the overarching themes and development of the story across several books. I'd like to thank longtime Patron Case Aiken, who receives a monthly shoutout.
This episode discusses The Kingston Cycle by C. L. Polk.
In an original world reminiscent of Edwardian England in the shadow of a World War, cabals of noble families use their unique magical gifts to control the fates of nations, while one young man seeks only to live a life of his own.
Magic marked Miles Singer for suffering the day he was born, doomed either to be enslaved to his family's interest or to be committed to a witches' asylum. He went to war to escape his destiny and came home a different man, but he couldn’t leave his past behind. The war between Aeland and Laneer leaves men changed, strangers to their friends and family, but even after faking his own death and reinventing himself as a doctor at a cash-strapped veterans' hospital, Miles can’t hide what he truly is.
When a fatally poisoned patient exposes Miles’ healing gift and his witchmark, he must put his anonymity and freedom at risk to investigate his patient’s murder. To find the truth he’ll need to rely on the family he despises, and on the kindness of the most gorgeous man he’s ever seen.
PUBLISHER: Tor Books
LENGTH: ~975 pages (~32 hours) across three books
AGE: Adult
GENRE: Fantasy
RECOMMENDED: Highly
TITLES DISCUSSED
- Witchmark (2018)
- Stormsong (2020)
- Soulstar (2021)
I have previously reviewed all three books in the trilogy: Witchmark, Stormsong, Soulstar
Minimal Spoiler Zone
Series Premise
The Kingston cycle opens with Witchmark, wherein Miles is working at a hospital, hiding the fact that he sometimes uses his magic to figure out what's going on with his patients. This is almost immediately disrupted when a handsome man brings a dying stranger to the hospital and the man transfers his soul to Miles as he passes. This creates a glowing star in his aura, the titular "witchmark" instantly putting Miles in danger of not just losing his job but being discovered as a witch. What could have been a story of an individual working within a broken system quickly develops into a murder mystery set against the background of a racial and class struggle, where common people with magic are declared witches and thrown into asylums. While, secretly, the elites, the Stormsingers, are walking in the halls of power and using more than just their own magic to control the storms which batter their country.
Main Characters
Each book has a different narrator. Miles for the first book, his sister Grace for the second, and his (former) colleague Robin for the third. Miles and Grace are very prominent in the first two books, while Robin Thorpe is mostly in the background until she narrates in Soulstar.
Miles is a soldier and a doctor, he is still traumatized by his time in the ongoing war, letting his family believe he perished on the battlefield so that he can live a life away from his father's control.
Grace is one of the Stormsingers -- raised to believe that she should bind her brother and his magic to her forcing him to do her bidding -- letting her drain him like a battery while she fights the storms.
Robin is a nurse at the hospital with Miles at the start of Witchmark, but by the time it's her turn to narrate she has moved on from that job.
The Kingston cycle is, importantly, a romance series. Tristan, the handsome stranger who brings the dying man to the hospital, develops into Miles' love interest. The two of them continue to be major figures in the second book. By the third they are less prevalent because Robin moves in very different circles than Miles and Tristan do, especially once Miles no longer works with her at the hospital.
How Queer Is It?
The series is very queer, but it wouldn't quite be accurate to say it's a fully queernorm setting. Several major cultural and class divides are in play, and while at least one of those human cultures are queernorm in defiance of the heteronormative state... the other major human faction is the ruling class and the state they are interested in upholding. The first book has an achillean romance, the second is sapphic, and the third book contains a queer romance with a nonbinary love interest and polyamorous minor characters. To what small extent they have identity labels in a modern sense, they are ones which are particular to this second-world fantasy setting, not trying to neatly map onto labels the reader might know already.
Here There Be Spoilers
Later Series Developments
It was apparent fairly early in Witchmark that some deception must be in play for every impoverished person with magic to go crazy and be locked up, but this madness never seems to affect the magical and wealthy. Aeland relies on its Stormsingers to keep the nation from being destroyed by the tremendous storms that batter its shores. At the end of Witchmark, Miles and Grace discover that the electricity which makes their lives easier is derived from the magic of the witches trapped in the asylum, forced to call the souls of the dead and turn them into electrical power rather than letting them go on to whatever lies after.
Character Twists
I knew that all three books were going to be romances, what I did not expect was that it would turn out in Soulstar that Robin was already married, and had been from the beginning of the series. Her spouse, Zelind, was one of the so-called witches locked in the asylums. The two of them were only barely married when khe was grabbed off the street and taken away. They are reunited in Soulstar when Robin organizes an effort to get the still-incarcerated witches out of the asylums now that their power is no longer being exploited for electricity. Mid-rescue, Robin discovers that her long-vanished spouse is still alive, in the asylum she is trying to empty.
Queer Awakenings
Miles knew he liked men before the series began, but Grace seems to have never considered dating a woman before the events of Stormsong, let alone one who played so freely with conventions of gender in her clothing and mannerisms. Robin's spouse is nonbinary, but whatever self-discovery accompanied the start of their relationship took place more than a decade before the trilogy takes place. There is a situation which is less an awakening and more a forced coming-out, when one member of a secret triangle marriage is killed, and the widow is accused of cheating with the couple's closest friend. Not only was this relationship not a secret from the dead man, but the friend is revealed to be a second grieving spouse rather than an interloper. This prompts a discussion of cultural practices within a minority group being suppressed by the class and racial majority.
Flow
Following a different main character in each book, the three volumes of the trilogy tell complete stories, with satisfying beginnings, midpoints, and endings. Each focuses on a different phase of the larger story, through the perspective of the person best equipped to handle that moment while still having something to learn. Witchmark is about discovering and facing systemic injustice, Stormsong shows an attempt to try and reform a cruel system from the inside, and Soulstar is about accepting that the whole thing is so rotten that the only remedy is to burn it down and build something that will actually help people instead of exploiting and controlling them.
Miles knows about the Stormsingers already, so once he realizes that not all "witches" go crazy, he can put the pieces together and figure out what is going on with the asylums.
Grace tries to use her position as a Stormsinger to reform the existing structure, playing by the rules as much as possible to change things gradually. Eventually, she has to accept that she can't defeat them with their own rules, and she gives up her political dreams in order to help make something that serves people who aren't just like her.
Finally, Robin has no strong ties to the current political structure, but her connection to Miles (and, through him, Grace) lets her understand the shape of what she's trying to tear down on her way to building something better. She has recent connections to the Stormsingers, but her few ties are a couple of friendships, not decades of relationships, money, and political connections. This is trickier when it comes to things that affect the clans, for there Robin has the deep ties which make it harder to consider new ways of doing things. Finding out her spouse was not only still alive, but put in the asylum by kher own family, gives Robin the motivation she needs to try for something different and better even in ways that might upset some in the clans.
Narrators
Miles came from money, ran away to war, and let his family think he was dead, starting a new life under a new name, because no amount of social privilege was worth the grim future of existing, in the best case scenario, just as a magical battery, and the worst case scenario also being breeding stock, married to someone and expected to produce magical children who would either be Stormsingers or otherwise exploited when they grew up. This is a future made grimmer by the fact of his attraction to men, where no marriage arranged by his father would result in happiness. Miles has powerful healing magic, but the Stormsingers' power as a secret elite is predicated on the weather magic alone being treated as valuable, with any other talents being deemed lesser no matter their actual capacity.
Earlier I alluded to Robin's background being very different from Miles and Grace. Soulstar makes it clear that those differences are more than just ones of money and class status. It was easily understood from Miles' and Grace's descriptions of Robin that in our reality she would be Black, though their descriptions of each other were much less visually-focused. When their perspectives are contrasted with Robin's descriptions of them, it becomes obvious that she is aware of race, racism, and the way that it affects her in a way that they are not. Additionally, race and class are tightly tied together, at least in the city where this story is set. In Robin's narration, aesthetic descriptions are applied much more evenly, saying what most important characters look like, not just how their appearance differs from the speaker. The contrast within the same series, written by the same author, helps make it obvious that for Miles and Grace, no matter how much they might try to understand other people's perspectives, they still don't see things the same way Robin does. For the reader, it's one more subtle thing that helps the three books feel distinct, like they are truly written by other people. Miles, Grace, and Robin have led quite different lives from each other. For all that Miles and Grace grew up in the same house, Grace did so being groomed for power, whereas Miles was dreading the shrinking horizon of a socially powerless future, where running away and possibly dying in war was preferable to staying home and being a pawn. Miles and Grace grew up so rich that even saying that Robin's life was one of relative poverty doesn't convey enough meaning. She grew up with the love and support of her clan, but the clans form a racial and social minority within Aeland's common people. She had magic, but no sign of a specific power, making her strange within the other magic-users around her. Additionally, as a magic-user but not among the Stormsingers, she had to hide her magic or else be taken to the asylums as a witch.
Themes and Resolutions
The Kingston Cycle has strong themes of surviving trauma, fighting exploitation, and chosen family. Polk's characters refuse to settle for something that's merely survivable for themselves when they have a chance to make something positive and lasting for everyone.
Miles' and Robin's traumas are more obvious in their books than Grace's. Miles was a soldier and continues to treat the war-wounded after his return. He was physically injured in ways that continue to affect his mobility, and what he saw and did in the war still gives him nightmares. In addition to her missing spouse, Robin spent her life thinking that she didn't have magic the way the way most of her family did, only to discover that her power to speak to the dead was being thwarted by the way all the departed souls were being drawn into the asylums to create electricity. For her part, Grace was emotionally abused and manipulated by her father, a situation made worse by his position of political power. Even once she knows his part in the creation of the asylums and persecution of the witches, she has trouble playing her role in making sure he is brought to justice.
The only magic considered valuable among the Stormsingers is weather magic. Any other talents are deemed unimportant, their wielders are labeled Secondaries, only fit to be used as secondary stores of power for the Stormsingers to draw upon. To facilitate this process, they are each bound to a Stormsinger, their Primary. This tie makes them unable to disobey their Primary. As a Secondary with a talent for healing magic, Miles dreaded being bound to his sister or to his eventual wife, married off to someone with whom he might breed more Stormsingers to continue this system of magical and political power. Instead, several years before the trilogy begins, Miles ran away to war, served, was wounded, and has returned to tend to those wounded who make it back home. He is living under his middle name and avoiding his father's notice, working at a hospital when the events of Witchmark begin. When he comes back into contact with his sister, Grace, she sees no reason to withhold from their father the news of his situation. A significant portion of Witchmark is spent with Miles trying to get Grace to see how horrible their father is, something made more difficult by Grace's status as a Stormsinger, one of the few who actually benefits from this horrible system.
The future of exploitation that Miles feared was the mere outlines of the imprisonment and abuse faced by the witches in the asylums. He dreaded being used for his magic and being treated as breeding stock. In the asylums, the so-called witches with the power to speak to the dead were chained to the floor and made to put souls into the electrical grid to provide less overtly magical power for the country. Not only that, but once all Aeland's witches were locked up they were paired together by their captors, forced to breed new witches who would be exploited in turn. Twenty or so years of the asylums was enough time to make a generation of people born in captivity who were old enough to be forced to bear children of their own, all without ever setting foot outside. When they are freed in Soulstar, many of the clans take them in, claiming any they can trace by family ties and accepting any whose lineage isn't known but need someplace to land. Because of the way money, class, and race are intertwined in Aeland, most of the so-called witches were poor people of color, those without political or social connections within the Stormsingers. So many people from the clans had been taken that it made sense for them to take in those who didn't have a home to return to, at least partly because they probably were related in some way.
It turns out that, for those born in the asylums and many of those who had been born before their imprisonment but managed to survive it, the bonds they have with each other are stronger than any blood ties to those outside. They decide to form a new clan, Clan Cage, one where they can be with those from the asylums who went through the same thing, bonded by a shared understanding of those years of horror. This choice to be physically separate in a new clan house is not made lightly, and is not denying their heritage. Instead, it honors it in a different way. By making a new clan, they are simultaneously claiming their position as people of the clans more broadly and making a specific space where they can be themselves. There is a kind of relief at being in a space where past horrors are already known, where there's no need to explain what's wrong when the past intrudes on the present. Being with people who get it, whatever "it" is, can bring a kind of peace. Robin gives logistical support to help make their decision a reality but is not part of making that decision.
Current Status
The Kingston Cycle is complete! Since it was published, C. L. Polk has put out several short stories and two more books, both of which are stand-alone. The Midnight Bargain has related but not identical themes to The Kingston Cycle, focusing on sexism where this trilogy focuses on classism. If you like the idea of this series but want an asexual woman as the protagonist, try that one. If something sapphic and a bit tragic is more your thing, Even Though I Knew The End is an excellent read.
If you like this you may like:
- A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske
- Blind Man's Wolf by Amelia Faulkner
- Death by Silver by Amy Griswold and Melissa Scott
More by C. L. Polk
- The Midnight Bargain
- Even Though I Knew The End
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Major Series CWs: confinement, kidnapping, racism, classism, fire/fire injury, mental illness, violence, gun violence, medical content, body horror, slavery, murder, death.
Miscellaneous CWs: coercion, drug use, suicide, torture.
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