I wanted to like Priory much more than I did. The good: romance! The witch is scary and awful but interesting! I like the take on Tudor/Elizabethean era norms. I read Loth as being vaguely Dudley and thought the twist so that queens are required to have heirs but the heir is a daughter was interesting.

However, the book is so, so, soooo long and by the end I just didn't care anymore. Trimming the details or splitting it into a duology might have helped. Some of the journeys seem pointless and there are odd little side trips that feel very irrelevant. Also, implausible given how far away places are from each other and the time it must take to get from one to the next. The villains aren't interesting, there's no real sense of their motives, and while the dragons are supposed to be awful - and are - they also don't have enough personality to make me interested in reading about them.