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.