It is better to marry than to burn.note
The Iron Covenant trilogy (or possibly duology) is a spin-off of Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels series, set just before Magic Triumphs. It features Hugh d'Ambray and his wife Elara Harper.
The first book, published 2018, is Iron and Magic.
Be aware that much of the setup for this series is full of late-arrival spoilers, given that it takes place near the end of the main Kate Daniels series.
Tropes present in Iron and Magic
- Abusive Parents: Roland is basically Hugh's surrogate father. Roland also treats Hugh like a disposable tool he can put down and pick up at his leisure.
- It turns out that Roland is actually Hugh's uncle, although Hugh doesn’t become aware of this until after Roland casts him aside, arguably making this even worse.
- Above the Influence: After coming out of a healing trance post-allowing Raphael Medrano to beat him senseless/slice him up, Hugh believes Elara's in his dreams again and comes on to her. Elara sends him back to his bedroom, knowing he's not lucid and will be extremely embarrassed when he wakes up.
- A Father to His Men: The Iron Dogs are fanatically loyal to Hugh.
- Arranged Marriage: Since neither The Departed nor the Iron Dogs have the best track record for keeping their promises, their alliance is cemented with a Marriage of Convenience between Hugh and Elara.
- Big Fancy Castle: Baile castle, especially after Hugh adds a moat.
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: Hugh and Elara.
- Beta Couple: Compared to Hugh and Elara, Stoyan and Johanna are having a much easier time. Their main problem seems to be that they're both a little shy about romance.
- Big, Screwed-Up Family: Roland and Kate, and by extension Hugh as well. Literally, as it turns out, since Erra is Hugh's mother, making Roland his uncle and Kate his cousin.
- Black Knight: Hugh. Slightly lampshaded by Elara, who tells him he looks like a movie Evil Overlord in his armor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he likes that.
- Boisterous Bruiser: Bale the berserker. Hugh used to be one himself, prior to his exile.
- Broken Pedestal: Roland to Hugh.
- Call That a Formation?: The Iron Dogs form shield walls several times and perform coordinated maneuvers.
- Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Both the Iron Dogs and The Departed have a reputation for this.
- Cool Horse: Hugh's Percheron, Bucky. (Who may well be part-unicorn.)
- Dream Walker / Dream Spying : Elara has this ability when the magic is up.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Hugh starts Iron and Magic in the throes of alcoholism, as being suddenly deprived of Roland’s mind control/guidance is traumatizing.
- Easily Thwarted Alien Invasion: The fact that most of the Big Bad's troops need to be directly mind-controlled to do more than stand there staring straight ahead really helps Hugh and friends. (What also helps, as revealed in Magic Triumphs, is that the Big Bad only deployed a fraction of them.)
- Eating the Eye Candy: At various points, Elara does appreciate that her husband is a very good-looking man. If only he weren't...Hugh.
- Eldritch Abomination / Humanoid Abomination: Elara is connected to something of this order...something that even Roland doesn't want to tangle with.
- Erotic Dream: Elara walks through Hugh's dreams and conjures up some beautiful naked women to distract him. He makes a beeline for her instead.
- Fallen Hero: At the beginning of the book, Hugh has become a wandering alcoholic who's so blacked out he can't even tell which month it is, making only enough money prize-fighting to rent rooms and buy more to drink. He has to be knocked out of his stupor by being drenched with several buckets of water then presented with his dead best friend's severed head.
- Faux Affably Evil: Landon Nez is obliging and polite to Elara, and also plans to kill her last after making her watch the others die.
- Fighting for a Homeland: The Iron Dogs have nowhere else to go. They don't intend to let Baile fall.
- First-Episode Twist: While he was one of the main villians for the first three-quarters or so of the Kate Daniels series, the fact that he is cast out by Roland is impossible to avoid.
- Flash Step: Elara can do this.
- Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: The control that comes with Roland's blood bond not only forces the subject to obey orders, but makes them happy about it. Hugh describes it as being turned into a "happy idiot" - even if he felt very strongly about doing something, if Roland ordered him to act contrariwise he would immediately feel it was right and correct. Not having that does a number on him.
- Groin Attack: In one of her forays into Hugh’s dreams, Elara takes on her white Eldritch Abomination aspect and bites him...somewhere painful.
- Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: Hugh's armor has a big helmet...which he plans to take off once he gets to the fight. This is exactly the opposite of what you are supposed to do with helmets. (While the helmet in question is explicitly just for looking scary, he doesn't have a backup practical one.)
- Hidden Army Reveal: The Iron Dogs pull this off several times—once by running ten miles in full armor to impress Elara, and once by hiding in plain sight to pull off an ambush.
- Hidden Depths: Bale the beserker is a huge Harry Potter fan.
- Human Sacrifice: The Departed are rumored to do this. Those rumors are unconfirmed, but they definitely sacrifice cattle.
- Incendiary Exponent: The mrog-handlers can also spit napalm.
- Keystone Army: The mrogs are controlled by their handlers...who are also controlled by their officers.
- Lady of War
- Licked by the Dog: Dogs, horses, and small children love Hugh.
- Hugh's stallion Bucky adores him and sulks when Hugh doesn't come to the stables to brush him every day.
- Line-of-Sight Name: Hugh was named after a statue of Hugh Capet.
- Locked into Strangeness: Elara's white hair is the mark of her curse. It won't take dye. At all.
- Manipulative Bastard: Hugh's not just excellent with a sword, he's also good at playing people. Despite being, well, him, he has the nearby sheriffs and mercs practically eating out of his hand. He also kicks himself when he realizes he used the wrong angle on Kate because of his own neuroses—talking it through with Elara helps him realize he should have approached her as an older brother, not a romantic prospect.
- Master Swordsman: Hugh.
- Monster in the Moat: Sort of. The Iron Dogs eventually fill Baile's new moat with a type of bacteria that attack vampires but don't affect humans.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Roland's ability to make Hugh happy about taking his orders prevented him from feeling bad about betraying people he'd promised to protect. Now that Roland has purged him, though, Hugh's getting it all at once. Ouch.
- Our Banshees Are Louder: Johanna is a black banshee.
- Pet the Dog: One of the first signs that Hugh isn't as much of a total jerkass as he likes to pretend to be is that he puts actual effort into picking out a wedding ring for Elara, even though all sides know it's only a financial arrangement and he could just have shown up with something generic.
- Recovered Addict: Hugh starts off Iron and Magic as a suicidal alcoholic and ends the book functional and in a much better place mentally. He still has plenty of issues, but he isn't actively drinking himself to death any more.
- Retcon: A few things from previous books are now altered somewhat so that Hugh doesn't fall off the wrong end of the anti-hero scale (justified, given that readers never got to see things from Hugh's point of view before). For example, him torturing Ascanio by healing and then un-healing him is...well, still torturing Ascanio, but it turns out Hugh was only healing him the whole time, albeit painfully, and he lied because he thought it would put more pressure on Kate to come out.
- Rock Beats Laser: Slight example: the mrog-handler's armor is a sophisticated alloy stronger than steel that the Baile smiths can't duplicate, that resists sword thrusts and cuts better than steel can. Turns out, it isn't proof against blunt force.
- Sarcasm Failure: Elara guesses that Hugh's problems with The Pack stem from Lennart's stealing Hugh's girl and burning down his castle...oops.
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: Guess. (Both metaphorical and literal, as they like it rough in bed.)
- Stunned Silence: Hugh's people have this and a Mass "Oh, Crap!" when Elara accidentally stumbles over exactly why Hugh and Curran Lennart dislike each other.
- Stop Worshipping Me: Elara can't allow her people to worship or pray to her. It’s not just unpleasant, it may well be dangerous.
- Suspiciously Small Army: The Iron Dogs. There's only about three hundred of them. Justified, as Roland and later Landon Nez had been systematically wiping them out after Stoyan refused to slaughter unarmed civilians (and Stoyan had to refuse in the first place because the Rippers, the division that did do stuff like that, was already gone).
- The Men First: Hugh won his men's Undying Loyalty because he believes in this.
- Took a Level in Badass: Former callow, impulsive teenager Ascanio is now mature enough to know that no matter how much he wants to rip Hugh's throat out, as Elara's husband Hugh is now an important ally, especially with Roland camped out at Atlanta's border. Hugh notes that he's going to be a terrifyingly competent alpha one day.
- War Elephants: A magical one used to attack Baile.
- Will They or Won't They?: Hugh and Elara eventually act on their belligerent sexual tension towards the end of Iron and Magic.
