If you loved watching Emily Marshwic earn her place amid volley fire and mud, you’ll click with Winter Ihernglass. Like Emily on the swamp front lines, Winter fights through skepticism to prove herself in a brutal campaign—only here it’s a desert theater with ingenious battlefield maneuvers, sharp logistics, and tense stand‑offs under fire. The push‑and‑pull between commanders (think Emily’s clashes with cautious superiors and bold gambles in the field) echoes in Marcus d’Ivoire’s wary partnership with the brilliant, unsettling Janus bet Vhalnich. And where Emily’s duels with warlocks raise the stakes, Wexler counters with conspiracies and set‑piece battles that deliver the same adrenaline and earned respect.

Emily’s journey from reluctant conscript to seasoned officer—and those letters home where you feel her resolve steel—find a spiritual twin in Paks. You’ll get the same granular soldier’s life you enjoyed in the swamp campaign: recruit drills, blistering marches, mess‑tent camaraderie, and the way small choices snowball into defining moments. As Emily learns to command under fire, Paks rises through a mercenary company under Duke Phelan, facing tests of courage and conscience that reshape who she is. If Emily’s growth amid cannon smoke hooked you, Paks’s steady, hard‑won transformation will hit the same nerve.

In Emily’s world, binding demons to make warlocks is power with a price—tactically decisive, ethically fraught. Jemisin digs deep into that same vein. Gatherers like Ehiru wield dream‑magic only under sacred rules, and every use forces a reckoning with consent, duty, and the harm done for a "greater good." Much as Emily weighs the human cost of unleashing warlocks on the battlefield—and of parleying with enemies like Northway rather than simply breaking them—this story turns on hard choices where mercy and necessity collide. If the moral knots behind Lascanne’s war magic kept you thinking, this will, too.

If you were drawn to the political currents beneath Emily’s campaigns—court pressure from home, propaganda, and uneasy truces like her sparring‑turned‑understanding with Northway—Baru’s ascent through an imperial bureaucracy will grip you. This is intrigue fought with ledgers and secret police instead of muskets and warlocks, but the stakes are the same: how far will you go to save a country? Where Emily balances orders with conscience in the mud, Baru plays a longer, colder game, turning provinces, currencies, and alliances into weapons. It’s the knife‑edge tension of hard choices that made Lascanne vs. Denland so compelling, transmuted into pure political fire.

Watching Emily climb from raw conscript to a competent officer—learning when to obey, when to improvise, and when to stake everything—maps neatly onto McClellan’s world of field marshals, inspectors, and powder mages. Field Marshal Tamas’s coup shatters the old order, and soldiers like Taniel Two‑Shot have to navigate shifting ranks and brutal campaigns, much as Emily learns command the hard way in the swamps. The set pieces scratch the same itch as her desperate engagements against Denlander lines and warlocks, but with a fresh mix of sorcery and musketry—and that satisfying sense that advancement is paid for in sweat, powder, and nerve.