The Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold

I virtually always love Lois McMaster Bujold's books, and I'm happy to report that Paladin of Souls was no exception. It's a follow-up to her Curse of Chalion, set in a fantasy kingdom that is ruled by five gods (although some say only four), in which a curse has come down through the generations and may doom a couple of young people in line to the throne.

In this book, we turn to their mother, Ista. She's in her mid-forties, free of the madness the gods inflicted on her for decades, and finally out from underneath the stifling will of her mother. For the first time in her life, she can actually choose her own path - which naturally cause great consternation in everyone around her - she's the queen's mother, for goodness sake! She should sit meekly in a castle and be unobtrusive!

Ista, fortunately, has other ideas, and embarks on a desperate forgery of a pilgrimage to the holy sites of the Five Gods, mostly in order to get the hell away from people who think they know either who she is or what she should be doing with her time. She enlists a cleric of the Bastard, the most disreputable of the gods, to be her guide, a young female courier to be her handmaid, and a small cohort of soldiers are sent to keep her out of danger.

In this world, demon possessions used to be extremely few and far between, but they're on the rise. As Ista finds out about this, she also starts having prophetic dreams that suggest that the gods aren't done with her yet, which is is very much less than happy about. Then she starts dreaming of a handsome man bleeding in a bed, and after some misadventures, is brought to a castle where he resides, in a sleep that is not natural, but which I will not explain.

The master of this castle is the son of the man who was rumoured to have been her lover, back in her very much younger days, although he was actually her husband's lover. Stories of the triangle between the three have been circulating for decades, and in true Bujold fashion, they are worked through in more thoughtful and interesting ways than you might expect.

The castle's master has a wife as young as Ista was when she was first married, and young Catilara loves her older husband with a fervour that has led her into some very tricky territory, theologically. This, of course, relates to why the other man lies sleeping.

There's an enemy on the doorstep as well, a foreign power who would kill them all merely for acknowledging the Bastard as a god, and the feints they are making look very much like the start of a larger invasion of her daughter's kingdom. So there's a lot at stake as Ista has to try to figure out how to untangle the depths of the snarl that has been created within the castle, while still protecting them all from the dangers without.

It's not done by making her a warrior all of a sudden - she isn't. But she's stronger than she knows, carrying all the experience of her years of madness and choices she made that have haunted her through all the years. It was delightful to have someone like Ista be a hero in her own right, in her own way, without trying to make her fit any usual archetypes. Since I've entered my forties myself, I appreciate the nod that adventures do not end with your twenties. And you don't always know who you are by then, either.