Styria in current year is not doing well. It is in the 19th year of an endless civil war between Grand Duke Orso of Talins, the largest of the city states, and his vassals, and the League of Eight, an alliance of the other eight city states. Our protagonist is a mercenary captain called Monza Murcatto who has been working for Orso for the past few years with a band called the Thousand Swords. She became captain of the Thousand Swords when she was the second in command and the commander, a drunken degenerate called Nicomo Cosca, were effectively running a scam on the various city states by taking money from both sides and pretending to fight each other to a draw, until Orso saw through it and paid her extra to actually fight for him. She, and her brother Benna, who is the company's accountant, are on their way to Orso's stronghold to collect their pay. They go in, and Orso is there and tells them how they have been instrumental in his successes and how the people love her as the city's stalwart defender.
In fact, he explains that they might actually love her a bit too much, and he, his sons, a banker, his in-house general, her second in command, and his executioner garotte her, stab her, and throw her over a balcony and down a mountainside. Ditto her brother (who's also her lover). He dies, but she's saved by some mysterious person and nursed back to health with the aid of some gold coins as a skull graft and a lot of opium.
Now, she goes on a quest to avenge herself against Orso and all the people in the room when they tried to kill her. She teams up with a bunch of very questionable allies, including an autistic savant murderer, a professional poisoner, an assassin, and a recent immigrant barbarian who wants to try to become a better person. And her former mentor Cosca, who is a drunken wreck. One by one, they hunt down Orso and his people, and kill them. Only to find out that it isn't bringing back Benna, and most of them were actually not in on it and actually were trying to argue against it. There's a brilliant scene where she's putting the boot into Faithful Carpi, the second in command, by holding him under a watermill, and he says he never wanted this to happen, he had nothing to do with it, and gives proof that this is so, but unfortunately his cloak gets tangled in the waterwheel just as she decides to spare him and he's dragged under and drowned. There's also explorations as to how her quest for vengeance hurts all the people around her. Caul Shivers, the barbarian (and later her lover) finds that his quest to try to become a better person is failing miserably and worse that he's actually okay with being one of the bad guys. Castor Morveer, the poisoner, has his apprentice turn on him and has to kill said apprentice, and then switches sides and betrays her. Then there's just the bystanders. While attempting to kill Prince Ario, the elder son of Orso, the resulting carnage involves a six-floor brothel in the city of Sipani being burnt to the ground. While going after the banker, Morveer spergs out and poisons every clerk in the building because he wanted to make sure. She also finds out that Orso was the way he was because he himself was previously a mercenary captain like she was and obtained power by overthrowing the previous Grand Duke, and ironically, in his zeal to not go the way of his predecessor he gave her the idea to overthrow him for real. By the end, Orso's alone and trapped in his drawing room, and she comes in, and he tells her to go ahead because it won't give her any satisfaction. She does. It doesn't.
And the novel ends with her, pregnant by either Caul Shivers or Duke Rogont of Ospria (being Orso's greatest rival), having accidentally and indirectly poisoned all the other dukes of Styria at the meeting to have Rogont crowned King of Styria (Morveer offered to poison them all when he went over to Orso and he did this by smearing something deeply horrific on the crown jewels of Styria and Monza escaped because she was the only person who wore gloves to the ceremony), as the last person standing. She has made a desert and called it peace. All hail Monza Murcatto, Grand Duchess of Talins.
(There is a hope spot though at the end. It turns out that the rest of Styria was completely tired of fighting and offered to make peace, which she agreed to, and in later books it's mentioned that she's an extremely capable and competent ruler, and has her son crowned King of Styria by the time the 7th book, "A Little Hatred," comes round.)
See, the reason this works is because character development. Abercrombie doesn't try to subvert expectations for its own sake. Monza Murcatto goes from a literal war criminal (she is partly responsible, alongside her brother, for causing one city in the backstory to have been sacked so hard that the place is pretty much a wreck even years later, and is known as the Butcher of Caprile as a result of this) whose every thought is consumed by the need to stick her blade through Duke Orso's heart, to actually being a competent and caring ruler, because in her journey she actually saw what damage her quest was doing not to her but others. She starts to have misgivings as soon as Morveer poisons all the bankers, and then has even more misgivings when Faithful Carpi gets drowned and as his bloated, drowned corpse comes up the other side of the waterwheel, she feels pretty shit with herself, to the point at which she's prepared to let Orso's younger son off altogether, only to have Caul Shivers come up and axe him in the back because she hired him to kill some people, not talk to them. She even later on has misgivings about taking Orso's fort by undermining the walls and blowing them up with gunpowder because she doesn't want any more randos to die in the attempt. And when she finally does kill Orso, she feels... empty.
Meanwhile, Caul Shivers goes from wanting to be a better man and getting out of the endless cycle of blood-feuds from his homeland to believing actually, he is absolutely fine with being one of the bad guys. We see him again in book 5, "The Heroes," and he's basically the most feared man in the North because of his total lack of any conscience whatever. He clearly learned much from Monza. Castor Morveer is unable to quit his job because there is nothing else for him, and he dies as he lived, of poisoning.
This is how you write a tale of revenge. Drucko should take note, but he won't.
