Conclave of Shadows

About the Conclave of Shadows series

Talon of the Silver Hawk opens with a young tribesman, the sole survivor of his village's massacre, taken in and trained by the mysterious Conclave of Shadows -- a secret order pursuing a decades-long plan that stretches across the Kingdom's underworld, a foreign empire, and a criminal-turned-nobleman's court. Renamed Kaspar's ward Tal Hawkins, the boy is shaped into a spy and warrior in pursuit of the men responsible for destroying his people, in a trilogy that trades the earlier Riftwar books' large-army warfare for a tighter, more personal revenge-and-espionage story: infiltration, assassination plots, and political maneuvering in King of Foxes and Exile's Return rather than pitched battles.

Published across 2002-2004, Conclave of Shadows sits later in the Riftwar Cycle's internal chronology, following an isolated, mostly new cast rather than continuing the Pug/Kingdom storyline directly, which makes it more approachable as a semi-standalone entry point than most of Feist's other trilogies -- though it does connect back to the wider Cycle by its end, and threads from it feed into the Darkwar and Demonwar sagas that follow. Readers who want a smaller-scale, more personal revenge story within Feist's world, without the full weight of the Cycle's continuity, are well served here.

How to read this series

Read in publication order: Talon of the Silver Hawk, King of Foxes, Exile's Return. The trilogy follows Tal Hawkins' training and revenge quest as one continuous arc, so the three books should be read in sequence. It's more self-contained than most of Feist's Riftwar trilogies -- you don't need the full Serpentwar Saga behind you to follow it -- though prior familiarity with the Riftwar Saga and Midkemia's geography helps, and the trilogy's ending sets up plot threads that pay off in the later Darkwar Saga.