If the way Danica’s Uskok raids brush up against Pero’s eastern commission, Leonora’s covert mission for Seressa, Marin Djivo’s merchant diplomacy, and Damaz’s divided loyalties hooked you, you’ll love how The Game of Kings weaves a similarly intricate tapestry of intersecting agendas. Dunnett juggles a vivid cast whose plots and counterplots snap together with the same satisfying click as when Leonora’s masquerade upends plans in Seressa or Danica’s bow decides a fate at sea.

All the backroom bargaining that sends Leonora to spy under a false identity, the merchant-council scheming in Seressa, and the delicate tightrope between city-states and the eastern court find a gracious echo in The Goblin Emperor. You’ll slip into a world where every audience, title, and invitation matters—much like when Marin bargains for Dubrava’s interests or Pero’s brush becomes a diplomatic weapon—and watch a beleaguered ruler learn to survive a court as treacherous as any sea lane Danica sails.

If you were absorbed by the layered Adriatic analogues—the canals of Seressa, the hard coasts Danica haunts, the ceremonials of far-off courts where Pero paints and Leonora spies—then Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell will scratch that same itch. Clarke builds a world of salons, ministries, and military campaigns with the same dense credibility and small, telling details that make Dubrava’s docks or an Osmanli audience chamber feel real the moment you step inside.

If Kay’s sumptuous sentences—moonlit canals in Seressa, a tense parley on a wind-bright terrace, Danica nocking an arrow as the sea breathes below—were a big part of the appeal, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld delivers that same spell of language. McKillip’s prose shimmers through intimate power struggles and hard-won choices, much like the moments when Leonora’s carefully chosen words sway a room or Pero’s portrait reveals more than paint should.

The way Children of Earth and Sky refracts Renaissance Adriatic politics—Seressa, Dubrava, and the looming eastern empire—into a world with faint, glimmering magic has a powerful counterpart in The Lions of Al-Rassan. You’ll find the same morally tangled loyalties and cross-cultural friendships that echo Danica’s unlikely alliances, Marin’s merchant pragmatism, and Leonora’s risky diplomacy, all set against shifting borders and the kind of choices that carry the weight of empires.