Well hello there, my beautiful bi bibliophiles! So, romantasy as a genre is back and more popular than ever these days, ever since the runaway mainstream success of the A Court of Thorns and Roses series by Sarah J. Maas. I confess I’ve definitely read a few of these books and found them silly, escapist, and usually fun. But they tend to be pretty heteronormative as far as the lovers. But then a good friend raved to me about Warrior Princess Assassin by Brigid Kemmerer. Now why would I be bringing that up in this column? Read on, my bi bookworms, to find out.
But before I get going, a few disclaimers: there will be SPOILERS for this 2025 elevated romantasy, the first in a trilogy. Content warnings include war-related PTSD, sex trafficking, enslavement, and graphic descriptions of war and murder. This one is definitely for the grown-ups.
All set? Then off we go.
In Warrior Princess Assassin, we follow three characters with those titular identities — Princess MarJoryana, or “Jory,” of Astranza; warrior King Maddox “Ky” Kyronan of the neighboring nation Incendar; and the assassin Asher, childhood friend of Jory who is banished from court as a teenager and eventually joins the Hunter Guild to become an assassin in order to survive.
Jory is arranged to meet and marry Ky to align their countries in an exchange — Estranza providing food, and Incendar with Ky’s fire magic and powerful army — to strengthen each country against the terrifying and mysterious Draegonis nation. However, soon after meeting and before Jory formally accepts Ky’s marriage proposal, Asher has been assigned by some mysterious entity to kill them both — should he fail, the Hunter Guild will continue to send assassins until the job is finished. Thus starts our story of adventure, political intrigue, explicit romance, and magic.
Pretty typical love triangle for this genre. But here’s where Kemmerer makes it interesting. Because as the three characters travel to Ky’s homeland and avoid a mysterious bounty placed on their heads, we realize that both Ky and Asher are bi — and that the three of them are, in fact, forming a polycule triad.
You’re probably hearing a record scratch in your brain at that setup. I was, too, for this genre. But the author goes about it so well.
Sure, we know within the first few chapters that Asher is still in love with Jory, and there is an instant attraction between her and the king. The author smartly has the chapters rotate between first-person narratives, so we go back and forth between being in Jory’s, Asher’s, and Ky’s minds. This leads to a lot of first-person narration, as Asher and Ky realize their admiration and attraction for each other builds. And since it’s done through narration, the bisexuality felt and explored is undeniable. The men here get to discuss their feelings and attractions for themselves, and that is surprisingly refreshing in literature.
Ky’s narration shows his feelings for Jory and Asher developing side by side. He is intrigued by both of them, feels responsible for keeping them safe, and gradually realizes that his attraction to one is not fundamentally different from his attraction to the other. His concern for Asher also makes him careful about respecting his boundaries, particularly since physical contact causes him anxiety.
Asher’s feelings develop more slowly. He is initially suspicious of Ky and conflicted by the comfort he finds in Ky’s protectiveness, patience, and use of his name. Because of Asher’s past trauma, trusting Ky feels frightening and unfamiliar, but these moments reveal that attraction and emotional attachment are beginning to grow beneath his resistance.
Ky is strong, strategic, smart, observant, protective, compassionate, and surprisingly kind. That doesn’t mean he’s without his flaws — in a crisis, he can switch into warrior mode too quickly and start seeing anything charging at him a a threat. Asher, too, is a well-rounded character — he’s incredibly fast and agile, wry, observant in a Jason Bourne know-every-exit-in-every-room-I-enter way, smart, fluent in political intrigue due to his childhood in Astranza’s court, thinks well on his feet, and is tender towards Jory. He is also — understandably, due to his indentured servitude and assassin training — incredibly paranoid and traumatized, with walls up as high as mountains.
One of the things I love about the romance between Ky and Asher is that it is borne from a mutual respect for their military or violent backgrounds — the skill that goes into their work, the bloodshed they have to face, and the personal sacrifices they make to improve the situations of many. It has a “battle buddy” sensibility to it. Yet Ky is also keenly aware of Asher’s forced past in the sex trafficking brothels he alludes to, and never pushes him on the subject or on his attractions. In fact, Ky shows an understanding of Asher’s trauma, and respects all of his boundaries (spoken or shown in body language) that Asher displays, and never crosses them. Asher is the one setting all precedents here, and it is clear Kemmerer did her research on trauma-informed care.
Something else I love about Warrior Princess Assassin is that queerness is not at all a new concept in this world. In Chapter 16, Ky discusses some close bi soldiers in his regiment, and how they care for each other as well as the women they come across during their tours. It is normalized and accepted — at least, in the country of Incendar. To wit, in Chapter 14 during a discussion with Jory, Ky asks Asher kindly: “He prefers the company of men?” For his own part, Ky notes around Chapter 20 that he has had male and female lovers in the past.
For Asher, queerness is not a new concept to his mind, but more of an awakening within him, through his own sense of agency. Tragically, he has witnessed and been forced into sexual relations between himself and men and women. But it is not until Ky and the novel-long awakening within Asher that his bisexuality comes to bloom — completely separated from his time in servitude.
Perhaps what is most extraordinary about all of this is that, by the end, the triangle becomes a true triad — as Ky has said throughout the book to Asher about Jory, “we are not in competition”. And, after some much-needed consummation between the three of them, it’s clear their attractions to each other and their standing with each other are all on equal ground.
It’s rare to see successful bi polyamory afoot in pretty much any genre these days — and especially not in one that has been dominated by heteroromantic love for decades on end. So, for the novel’s considerate and multilayered development of its bi male characters, and for its pure sense of fun, I wholly recommend Warrior Princess Assassin. It’s escapist, it’s alluring, it’s full of adventure — and more than anything else, it is really, really bi.