#yfandes

oh wow, where did these pixles come from???

traced from this image:

Mercedes Lackey, similar to but less egregiously than Jim Butcher, is an author I sometimes need to raise my eyebrows at. But we'll start with the good things (and there are many of those) about these books.

Magic's Pawn begins with simultaneously spoiled and neglected rich boy Vanyel, who fits into his family home about as well as a square peg in a round hole. He desperately wants to be a Bard, but lacks the qualifications to be accepted into the Bardic Collegium. Once his father is completely fed up with Vanyel, he is shipped off to his Aunt Savil at the Collegium, where he can take classes and figure out his life.

Figuring out his life for Vanyel entails falling head over heels for his Aunt's Herald Mage trainee, Tylendel, and finally putting a name--shay'a'chern--to his own sexuality. Vanyel is happy with Tylendel for a hot five minutes before Tylendel chooses violence and massacres the family that murdered his twin brother, and then commits suicide in the aftermath. The aftermath also involves Vanyel catching a brainful of magical backlash that basically triggers every potential magical gift Vanyel could have gotten. He also ends up seriously ill and depressed because all of this went down in a storm, he lost his lifebonded, and could hear people's thoughts and interpreted them as blaming him for Tylendel's death. Vanyel then also attempts to commit suicide, but is unsuccessful.

Literally the only good thing about this three-day period in Vanyel's life is that he bonds with Yfandes, a companion, and she can mitigate some of his new powers and reassure him that he is loved.

To save her nephew's life, Savil takes Vanyel to the Hawkbrothers. This works, and Vanyel is trained in both Hawkbrother techniques and as a Herald Mage.

Magic's Promise opens with a fully trained, adult, and notorious Herald Mage Vanyel returning from a campaign along the Karsite border. He is UNDERSTANDABLY burnt out, and heads up to his family home for what turns out to be the worst trip home ever. Half the castle is accusing him of banging everything on the estate down to the sheep, and the other half is trying to seduce him.

To make things worse, Vanyel has to take a child with an out-of-control gift that on first blush appears to have murdered an entire neighboring castle (it didn't, the poor kid was set up). The kid is also a dead ringer (pun not intended but I'm leaving it) for Tylendel, which wasn't helping Vanyel on any level.

To make things even more complicated, Vanyel has set himself out to stud; he is secretly the father of Shavri's daughter. This is complicated because Shavri is the king's lifebonded, Vanyel is getting confusing feelings about her, and the king is dying of a vaguely defined wasting disease.

This book was mostly eyebrow raising, if I'm being honest.

The final book, Magic's Price, gets even more eyebrow-raising because if the previous book was setting up a ton of heartache and really super sketchy prejudices, this one kicks it up to 11 and aims it all at Vanyel. From watching his king die slowly and painfully (eyebrow raise over the "chronically and terminally ill person is an object of abject pity) to getting stabbed in his family home to getting beated and raped (massive eyebrow raise, we don't need to keep doing the rape trauma plotline) to dying holding an army back alone.

It might possibly sound like I don't like this trilogy; that's not accurate. This is my go-to "I need a good cry" and "I need a good rage session" trilogy, and the storytelling and sheer heart in the trilogy are never not compelling and well plotted. It just has a lot of eyebrow raising, and it's a very heavy trilogy that tends to lean perhaps overly much on sexual assualt trauma in books two and three.