Reviewed by CJ | Rating: 3/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥 📱
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Between Tides and Thunder yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
Opening Hook
We open with enemies-to-forced-marriage-to-stranded-in-a-blizzard-together, and things get more life-threatening from there.
The Full Story — Spoilers Included
We open with Princess Mayah of Tundrayn sparring with her friend Daak, the two of them reminiscing about Sura and Tumaas, friends lost to a war that’s been dragging on for generations against the neighbouring kingdom of Arbinj. Mayah is a healer, and as she’s been patching up badly wounded non-wielders from the front lines, entitled wielders waltz in demanding she drop everything for their minor scrapes. She bites her tongue over the unfair treatment of non-wielders (commoners, if you’re feeling mean), and it made me like her instantly.
Arbinj has storm wielders, and the scariest of them is the Dark Commander, Prince Zevayr, the second-born son of King Varad, the man responsible for most of Mayah’s dead friends. So when Mayah finds out she’s being sent to marry into Arbinj as part of a fragile peace deal to unite the kingdoms against the rebels who are fighting for equality between wielders and non, that’s already a struggle. Then when the men who show up to collect her are led by Zevayr himself, standing in for his older brother Faramir, the one actually supposed to marry, it’s almost too much. Nobody’s thrilled, but the alliance is too tenuous to rock the boat, so she goes.
Once they’re on the road and out of sight, Zevayr has the carriage stopped and puts himself and Mayah in the prisoner carriage instead as a security precaution since everyone would expect them to be up in the royal carriage. Turns out that may have saved their lives, because the convoy is attacked and the entire guard is wiped out before Zevayr can eliminate the rebels, leaving the two of them alone in the Tundrayn wilderness, a brutal, frozen land with the kind of cold that kills. He won’t turn back, because Zevayr doesn’t trust Tundrayn to let him live if he’s caught there alone, so they start walking toward the nearest Arbinj outpost. I’m talking weeks of hiking through rough terrain.
This is where we see the two main leads for who they really are. Huddled together at night to keep from freezing, they slowly go from enemies to something a lot warmer. She takes an arrow for him when rebels attack, he’s the one who helps her heal from it, and that mix of near-death and forced closeness turns into some seriously charged tension between them. They open up about their pasts too; when Zev tells her about losing Lev, she tells him about Sura and Tumaas.
By the time they reach the capital, I was rooting for them despite her being betrothed to his brother (love will find a way, right?) and we’re not kept in suspense long. King Varad announces Mayah won’t be marrying Faramir after all, she’s marrying Zev instead, because Varad’s cut a new deal to marry Faramir with a princess from Volca. Mayah’s furious at first, and for good reason we’re not yet privy to (she’s planning to poison everyone and will have to betray Zev). But underneath the anger, both of them are secretly thrilled, because they’ve been falling for each other the whole way here.
Here’s where we get to that twist: this entire time, Mayah has secretly been plotting to poison the Arbinj royal family. Eventually she starts meeting Daak in tunnels under the castle to plan it, all the while becoming torn about her feelings for Zev. At this point she still believes King Varad and Arbinj is responsible for her mother’s death — she has no idea it was actually her own father. And now that she’s falling for Zev, the plan is starting to break her heart. That’s why she won’t sleep with him after the wedding (more on that below, because it drove me a little nuts) despite obviously wanting to.
Things spiral. Zev catches Mayah with Daak and tries to take her; Daak’s men respond by kidnapping Zevayr. Mayah’s stuck trying to tell Daak she doesn’t feel that way about him anymore, and then it all unravels when Zevayr is freed, except not the way you’d expect. Turns out Mayah’s own father is a storm wielder who’s been torturing her with storms her whole childhood under the guise of “making her stronger,” and he’s the one who actually killed her mother. Not Zevayr’s family. Her own father. So Mayah and Zevayr kill everyone in that camp and escape, only to be captured again, this time by the rebels who are led by Zev’s mother (that was a shock for Zev, because he thought his father had her killed). She’s not his biological, but the woman who raised him, and her big rebellion plan is to put the two of them on the thrones once both corrupt kings are dead. Mayah is crushed by this point by what her father did to her and by how badly she has betrayed Zevayr, and Zevayr himself? he just can’t get past it and knows he can never trust her, so he decides to leave everything behind and go to another kingdom.
Then we get the ending, which might be one of the best twists I’ve read in a while. As he’s walking away, Mayah panics and yells that she hates him. He stops and tells her to say it again. She does, and everything clicks into place for him, because Zev is a truth wielder. He can sense lies, and through this entire journey — the wilderness, the castle, his captivity, every time she told him she loved him or explained her motivations and said she was sorry — he never once sensed a lie from her. He’d assumed she must be shielded from his power somehow, but she wasn’t. She’d been telling him the truth the whole time. Once the second “I hate you” registers as true, he knows the truth. He wasn’t leaving because she’d lied to him, he was leaving because he thought she could lie to him and he would never trust her after those betrayals. Without that standing in their way, he can give right into the deep love he still has for her and we get the spicy scene that some of us were waiting for.
I loved that ending; It was very cool.
** I have to add a note in here, that I did really enjoy this book, so you’re probably wondering why I rated it as a three star read. Well, the direct answer is that I rated it lower than I would have if I wasn’t so pissed off half of the time. It starts with her betrayal, because she did Zev dirty (more than once) and I found it harder to forgive than he did apparently. I know she was conditioned by her father and his people, I know that she believed them to be the enemy, but damn was it tough to keep reading after she met up with Daak in the tunnel to talk about the big plan. Her refusal to sleep with Zev despite wanting to was frustrating, his refusal to forgive her (I completely understood that one, honestly) despite staying by her side was frustrating… I just spent so much of this book frustrated as fuck and couldn’t forgive that when it came to my rating, despite understanding the reasons behind it in the end. It was all necessary and came together brilliantly, but arrrggh!!
Best Part of This Book
Well that’s easy, it was the ending. Zev was ready to walk away for good, until her “I hate you” stops him. He comes back to her with no hesitation once he understands. There’s no lingering doubt, no slow reconciliation.
Worst Part of This Book
Mayah refusing to sleep with Zevayr after the wedding. I get why now, but in the moment it’s just confusing to read, since we don’t know yet she’s planning to poison him and his whole family. She’s been lusting after this man through weeks of wilderness survival and has fallen hard for him, so her sudden ice-wall resistance doesn’t track until we get to the reveal. It works in hindsight, but it was rough to sit through in the moment.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥🔥🔥 — There are sex scenes, open door, but not many with a handful scattered through the book, including one near the end. The romance is central to the plot (arguably is the plot), but the steam itself stays fairly restrained.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Satisfied. The truth-wielder reveal recontextualizes basically everything that came before it, and Zevayr coming back to her without hesitation once he understands is exactly what a slow burn like this needed.
Would We Reread It?
Probably not. It’s a long book, and now that I know all the twists, I don’t think it would hit the same the second time around.
A Moment That Stood Out
Mayah saying “I hate you” as Zevayr walks away, and him stopping to ask her to say it again. That’s the moment everything shifts. Zev being a truth wielder and realizing he never once sensed a lie from Mayah through the entire book. That single detail rewrites the whole relationship in retrospect.
Who Is This For
Readers who love books built on character-to-character interaction. There’s action, but the bulk of this one lives in the dynamic between Mayah and Zevayr with the wilderness trek, the slow burn, the emotional wreckage of the reveal, etc. If you want fast-paced, plot-driven fantasy, I don’t feel like this is it.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon US | Amazon CA
🎧 Audiobook
Audible US | Audible CA | Libro.fm
Ready for more reviews from CJ? Find More Here
Plot Twisted. 🔥
📱 | Genre: Fantasy Romance | Steam: 🔥🔥
TAGS: Enemies to Lovers, Forced Proximity, Hidden Abilities, Magical Abilities, Fantasy Book Review, Romantasy Book Review, Storm Wielder, Water Wielder, Truth Wielder,