Paladin of Souls

Paladin of Souls is a fantasy novel by the American writer Lois McMaster Bujold, published in 2003. It won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, and it is the second book in the World of the Five Gods series, after The Curse of Chalion.

The setting is Chalion, a landlocked medieval kingdom that stands in for Castile and Leon in the years of the Reconquista, and it is one of five nations under the five gods of the series: the Father, the Mother, the Son, the Daughter and the Bastard, the last of whom has charge of disasters and of things that arrive out of season.

Ista is the mother of the young ruler of Chalion and a woman with a long, unhappy history, three years past the lifting of a curse on her family. When her own mother dies she is left with nothing to do and no freedom, so she takes a small party of guards, a courier girl and a priest on a pilgrimage. From the first days of the journey the Bastard's hand is visible in what happens to them, and Ista, who never wanted a god's attention, is given more of it than she can ignore.