When a child dies, who pays the price? This is the question at the heart of Sabaa Tahir's latest novel, Empire.
In the first book of this duology, Heir, exiled tracker S'rsha hunts down a child-heart-devouring monster in the Martial Empire. Set in the same universe as Tahir's Ember in Ashes series, Empire picks up right where the last book left off: with S'rsha attached to the very monster she sought to destroy.
While S'rsha looks for ways to detach the monster, called Div, from herself, her friends in the Empire are under attack. Their attackers are the Kegari, led by Div's previous corporal host, Aiz. Amid these attacks, a resistance has formed — which includes a skilled fighter named Karinna, daughter of Ember characters Elias Veturius and Laia of Serra, and Cero, a gifted windsmither and Aiz's former best friend.
It feels fitting that many of the characters in the Heir duology are the children of protagonists within the Ember universe – children are the heart of this story. There is an emphasis on childhood experiences and the role that adults play in shaping the world children grow up in. From a young S'rsha being asked to carry out an impossible task against another child, to Aiz and Cero's starving upbringing as orphans, to the still gaping wound of young Ruh's death at the beginning of Heir, Tahir makes it a point to highlight the pain of children who lose something, or who are lost, to violence.
A particularly striking example of this is the mass killing of the children of the Jinn — magical beings who live for millenia, and for whom new children are rare. Introduced in Heir, this mass murder lingers like a ghost above every quarrel and every agreement that happens in this universe. The death of the Jinn is treated as a historical tragedy. The pain is there but it's in the past and the world has long moved on. It feels like everything that happens is, at least in part, informed by these deaths. Yet the killings are not often discussed outright, and the characters seem rushed to move past it. Until they can't avoid it anymore.
It's impossible to see a child focused-genocide plot point and not feel connected to our own world's problem with ignoring the issue of children lost to violence. In Gaza, more than 64,000 children have been killed or injured since such violence began in October 2023. Are we, like so many adults in Empire, complicit by the nature of standing by? Like the Jinn, the children lost to violence in our world are not wholly ignored. But like the leaders in the world of Empire, perhaps the adults have not taken enough responsibility for their role in creating a world where such violence and apathy can occur in the first place.
Ruh was a child when he was taken by the violence of heart-eating Div. The monster was attached to Aiz, who tricked Ruh into believing she was his friend. Ruh acts as one of the most direct calls to action in this novel, as he asks Aiz to own up to what she's done. From the spirit world, Ruh visits many of the characters who do not yet understand just how much the death of the Jinn children is impacting every diplomatic relationship, every magical practice, everything they've never thought to question about their everyday lives. Ruh begs them, and in a way, us, to not only acknowledge this violence but also to acknowledge the way we participate in a society that goads it on, or maybe even benefits from it.
When Aiz finally faces Ruh, and her old friends-turned adversaries from the Empire, she must come to terms with the fact that even though she is freed of Div, she may have become a monster herself. She has become a destructive leader, willing to eradicate anyone and anything in the name of protecting her people. As she loses sight of who she used to be, she also loses her relationships with people who once loved her. Even her best friend, Cero, has turned against her, unable to justify Aiz's willingness to wipe a whole nation off the Earth.
As Cero leaves, hoping to move his people away from Aiz's reign of terror and back to their native lands, he also grapples with his own role in the violence Aiz has spread. Maybe he didn't kill anyone for her, but his inventions allowed bombings and looting and murder to take place. Maybe he didn't spread the false prophecy that Aiz was their people's savior, but he never denied it either. Cero cannot change what he's done, but he does more than most who are complicit in violence do: He tries to make amends.
It is a lot to fit in one novel, and it is a credit to Tahir's craft that she does it so well. Empire continues the legacy of Heir with the power of story, both in the plot and the execution of the book itself. For better or worse (for us readers, at least), Tahir is a master of manipulation. The first novel in this duology features one of the most well-executed twists in Young Adult fiction, simply by using a staggered timeline across the perspective shifts that occur in each chapter. Tahir does something similar with Empire, and readers can expect a satisfying shock when the events of the novel finally coalesce in one deep pit.
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