Aliette de Bodard seems fascinated by relationships with huge power differentials – angels and mortals, giant mindships and modest students, dragons and young teachers, etc. Thanh, the protagonist of
Fireheart Tiger, is a princess of Bình Hải, a small Vietnam-like country seeking to gain protection from the more powerful neighbor Ephteria, and Thanh is assigned by her rather too-critical mother to lead the diplomatic negotiations. Those negotiations quickly grow more complicated and personal when Thanh discovers that the delegation from Ephteria includes the princess Eldris, Thanh’s former lover from the time in which Thanh studied in Ephteria, nearly as a political hostage. The prospect of marrying Eldris is a fairly obvious way of forging an alliance between the two nations, though – once again – it would hardly be an equal relationship. Complicating matters even further is the memory of a palace fire in the capital city Yosolis, which Thanh escaped accompanied by a servant girl named Giang – who, it turns out, is actually a fire elemental, not only responsible for the palace fire but for all sorts of little fires that seem to crop up around Thanh on a regular basis. (Eldris may be an old flame, but she can’t hold a candle to – well, I’d better stop this now.) What inevitably evolves is a love triangle, although poor Thanh, as resourceful as she is, finds herself faced with a choice between becoming a political bride to a much more powerful nation, or the lover of a fire demon who can pretty much immolate anything that annoys her enough.