Ruthless Vows

Ruthless Vows is the second and final Letters of Enchantment novel by Rebecca Ross, published in December 2023 by Wednesday Books and Magpie. It picks the war up where Divine Rivals left it, with the city of Oath under threat and the two newspapers that employed the leads no longer the centre of the story.

Iris is back at home, injured and grieving, and the fighting is no closer to ending. Roman is behind enemy lines in the care of Dacre, the god who raised an army, with no memory of his life before it: not his name, not his family and not Iris. He is put back to work on a newspaper for the enemy, and the letters that once connected the pair have to find a new way through the front lines.

Ross uses the second book to widen the divine half of the story. The war between Dacre and Enva draws Iris and Roman into the competing demands of the gods. The alternating narration and the epistolary chapters of the first volume are kept, and the duology is brought to a conclusion rather than extended.

It is also the more political half of the pair, with Iris working as a war correspondent rather than an obituary writer and the fighting reaching places the first book kept at a distance. Ross published both novels in 2023, and this second volume is the ending of a two-book story rather than a self-contained novel.