The Court of the Air
Molly Templar and Oliver Brooks — orphans hunted by enemies of the state, drawn toward a mysterious ancient conspiracy.
About this book
The Jackelian sequence begins here. Two young people who do not yet know what they are, in a country that has forgotten what it is, are about to discover that a much older war never ended.
Molly Templar is a poorhouse orphan who has just been targeted for assassination by people she does not recognise and cannot outrun. Oliver Brooks is a country boy registered as a possible feybreed — someone potentially altered by the leylines, kept under indefinite watch by the worldsingers. Their lives shouldn't intersect. They do.
What pulls them together is a secret the Kingdom of Jackals does not know it is keeping. An exiled u-boat captain, a steamman savant on sabbatical from the Free State, a sardonic agent of an organisation that officially does not exist, and a sect of believers who think the world has unfinished business with its old gods are all pulling on the same thread.
The Court of the Air is the most generous front door into Hunt's gaslamp world. It explains itself by being explored: the first half gives you the Kingdom, the Free State, the worldsingers, the Special Guard, the Carlists and the celestial mechanics of celgas-lifted flight — and the second half puts all of it in motion.
This is the foundation novel. The Kingdom of Jackals, the worldsingers, the Special Guard, the Steammen Free State, the Court of the Air itself, the Carlist underground, the buried Hexmachina, and the unsettled relationship between politics, theology and machinery all begin here. Almost every later book draws on something this one sets up.
- you liked the opening of The Lies of Locke Lamora — orphans, apprentices, a wider conspiracy;
- you enjoyed Philip Pullman's Northern Lights for tone and inventiveness;
- you want the worldbuilding density of China Miéville with a more openly adventurous plot;
- you want a Pratchett-adjacent civic register without the parodic frame.