Seeing Ester’s life built up around it, despite everyone knowing that it is a marriage of convenience, is what makes this book so deeply moving and sad. Untethered Sky also knows, and never shies away from the understanding that this is a tenuous bond. She may tolerate Ester, may even listen to her, but what is wild will stay wild. Here’s the heartbreak: Zahra is a wild animal. It’s this tension that really drives the story forward as much as the plot is about killing manticores, the heart is in the relationship between Ester and Zahra. The book is full of these mirrors, as Ester and Zahra grow in parallel paths across the page. Told in between feedings as Ester desperately attempts to connect with this wild animal that cannot be tamed, merely satiated for a moment, her heartbreak and ferocity are echoed in the roc’s own journey through the darkness. In the middle of this exploration of the bond in between animal and trainer is the reveal of Ester’s past. Untethered Sky is just the right size for the story it tells, and it tells that story beautifully. There is a strategy to novellas wherein an author expands an idea far beyond the bounds of a short story while avoiding detail bloat that a savvy editor would have cut down.

Writing a novella is incredibly hard–it requires a lot of balance to make sure that the payoff happens at the perfect time, and doesn’t leave the reader thinking that they would have liked it to be longer.

With turns of phrase early on that hint at a future tragedy, Lee expertly lays the groundwork for a compelling story that is both succinct and satisfying. Ester becomes one of these storied ruhkers, and Untethered Sky follows her journey as she trains her roc, Zahra. As man-eating manticores stalk the countryside, giant rocs, their only known natural predator, are trained up in royal mews by ruhkers as the first line of defense against the mythological killers. Combining ancient Persian mythology with the impossible-to-explain bond between pets and humans, Untethered Sky by Fonda Lee captures pain, guilt, and revenge in a single tidy novella.

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