Gods Beneath the Ice (Blood & Souls Duology #2) by Alexandra Kennington 
Series: Blood & Souls Duology #2
Published by Ace on February 17, 2026
Genres: Fantasy
Pages: 464
Format: eBook
Source: Netgalley
I received this book for free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.
Heartbroken and grappling with unwanted powers, Revna must work with the person she swore to forget if she's to lead her people and unravel the secrets behind her new magic in this page-turning conclusion to the Blood & Souls duology.
Revna knew ruling would be difficult, but she never anticipated ruling with a newfound Lurae. The godtouched fear her, the godforsaken don't trust her, and her best friend doesn't know the truth she's been hiding. When the war-ending treaty is signed, Revna will reveal her secrets and finally put the Hellbringer behind her.
Except the Kryllian Queen refuses to sign the treaty when she discovers how volatile Revna's bloodsinging is. Desperate for any alliance, Revna begrudgingly agrees to the Queen's if Revna can learn to control her magic in three weeks, negotiations will resume. But there's a catch - the queen's general will be the one training her.
Revna will work with the Hellbringer once more, but she won't make it easy. But when the general reveals that the dead are unable to pass on, they realize there's more at stake than their tangled relationship. Ancient, powerful secrets tie the realm - and Revna and the Hellbringer - together, and their only hope of lasting peace is to unweave them.
It took me so long to finish.
This story picks up where Blood Beneath the Snow left off. When we left off Revna suddenly developed magical powers and thereby won the crown and killed off most of her brothers and her parents. Only one brother survived by running off before the battle. Another was killed before he got to the arena by Soren/Hellbringer. Revna had killed her pseudo-father-figure in a fit of anger after he accused her of hiding her magic and lying to them all these years in order to curry favor with the magicless population. Revna then has her surviving brother, Jack, a shapeshifter, filling in so that Revna doesn’t have to confess to her best friend, who is already wary of her magic, that she killed their friend.
The Kryllian Queen had sent her valued General (Hellbringer) to train Revna to fight so that she could win the crown. The intension was that Revna and the Queen would then sign a treaty ending the years long war between the two sides. When Revna arrives at Kryllia, the Queen decides she won’t sign a treaty unless Revna can control her magic, which she has only had for like a week, and she sends her best scholar home with Revna to help train her magic, which is Soren a/k/a Hellbringer without his mask on. They then have three weeks in order for Revna to master her magic.
While Revna was determined in Book 1 to fight in the arena even without any magic so that she could take care of the downtrodden magicless people, Revna isn’t much of a Queen. She now has the backing of no one: not the magic blessed, not the magicless, certainly not the priests who she ran off. She barely has the trust of her friends any longer. At one point they all leave her decorating the great hall by herself. Why is the Queen decorating the castle by herself? Why is she decorating at all? Doesn’t she have staff? Doesn’t she have policies to write or the people to win over? The only one supporting her is Soren who she won’t forgive for killing her brother–even though she killed all the rest of her brothers…uhm.
This story breaks off from the prior story going into more detail of the “gods” from the prior books, who we kind of find out weren’t really gods. They were mentioned in Book 1 and mostly in reference to the statues and the evil priests the Revna ran out of the Kingdom once she won. Now we get the whole god backstory as well as an introduction to the “Tapestry.” WTF? He came out of nowhere. The Tapestry is a humanoid creature who lives under the icy lake and who is the one who initially gave humans magical abilities to see how they did–which wasn’t well, by the way. We are now introduced to life as a great tapestry and magic as threads in that tapestry to be manipulated. I can’t necessary say this idea came out of nowhere as Revna only got magic at the end of the last story and wouldn’t have seen these threads of magic to be manipulated but I don’t remember anyone mentioning “the great tapestry of life” or any mention of magical threads in the prior story. I don’t like when we are suddenly introduced to a completely new concept in the middle of any story. Instead of finishing up where we were in the arc of book 1, we went somewhere completely different which was very confusing.
I read Blood Beneath the Snow and while I was had a lot of issue with the worldbuilding, I had enough unanswered questions that I picked up a copy of Gods Beneath the Ice to see if I could get answers: why was the Queen so focused on Revna and why did she seem to know so many things about her and Soren? Why did Soren break down and kill Revna’s favorite and most passive brother? Soren has been looking for his missing sister–is her magic foresight? Is she being held by the Queen? Why was Soren/Hellbringer living in an abandoned prison and having to be teleported in and out? As Book 2 of a duology, it shouldn’t have been this hard to complete the ending of a half-finished story but I found myself doing everything but reading each evening in an attempt of avoid this book. Why didn’t I just toss it aside? I wanted to know if I would be getting answers. Mostly I did, but none of those answers were satisfactory.
I was glad that they changed the “godforsaken” and “godblessed” and made up a new term even if it was only lurae (magical) and nilurae (non-magical).
Leave a Reply