Magic's Pawn

Now normally I would consider a Mercedes Lackey novel to be low-hanging fruit. She knows her audience and she can tell them the same basic stories in slightly different settings as many time as she wants and know that they will be satisfied. And I know I will be amused and occasionally mildly disgusted. But hey, my husband brought this one home so I figured “Why not?” And when I realized that it was Mercedes Lackey trying to write a gay romance I knew it would be worth it.

So our special snowflake protagonist is Vanyel. He’s a lord’s son, heir to the lordship, and of course he and his dad hate each other. His dad is a muscle-bound, conservative jerkwad who likes to dress up like a peasant in his spare time. I wouldn’t be surprised that he had a ranch out somewhere where he could clear brush. Vanyel is delicate and beautiful with long black hair and silver eyes. Instead of letting the armsmaster beat the crap out of him day after day trying to teach him to Fight Like A Man, he would much rather play his lute and be admired. But only from a distance, because though his father has forced whores upon him time and time again, he is not ready for the touch of a lady.

Anyway, Vanyel does some reading about swordfighting style that is more suited to his willowy grace and practices in secret. When Dumbfuck McSwordy catches Vanyel practicing it with his brother, he breaks Vanyel’s arm. This makes his father furious with Vanyel. Also, the Only Person Who Has Ever Loved Him For Who He Is, his sister, leaves so he feels Ever So Alone while he recovers. Eventually, Vanyel’s dad sends him to go live with his aunt, who is a Herald-Mage. At first Vanyel thinks she will be even worse than his father, but it turns out Auntie Savil is TOTES AWESOME. And her student is the most beautiful boy that Vanyel has ever seen.

So it turns out that Vanyel’s dad forbade anyone from even implying that it might be possible for two dudes to do it together. And he didn’t have enough imagination to come up with the idea on his own despite having been totally gay for forever. But he finds out that this student, Tylendel, is totally gay too! Only, since this is a fantasy novel we can’t call them gay. They are (jesus, flipping though the book to try to find the damned made-up word reminds me how every other word is italicized) both shay’a'chern, which is “gay” in “stupid birdperson language.”

Also, since Tylendel is a mage, he has a telepathic horse. Dur, it’s Mercedes Lackey, can’t have that without telepathic horsies.

So Vanyel spends a chapter or two pining for beautiful, wonderful Tylendel while running around and acting like a snot to everyone to cover up the deep pain he feels over his father never loving him. He starts having dreams about a land of ice that makes it easy to cover up how he feels, but has the nasty side effect of covering him in water and making him super cold. Finally he realizes that the ice dreams are going to kill him, so he has sex with Tylendel and they are lifebound and their relationship is soooooo awesome they never fight or anything. Amusingly enough, the scenes where Vanyel and Tylendel are going to get it on fade to black way before she would fade to black on a hetero scene. I would almost credit this as Lackey acknowledging that she would not be able to write a m/m sex scene competently, but she still tries with the hetero ones so there goes that theory.

So of course there has to be a problem, and it comes up in the form of Tylendel’s twin brother. The twin is not a mage, but the heir to some other chunk of land somewhere that is in dispute. Herald-Mages are supposed to remain objective in all conflicts, but Tylendel has magical twin mojo with his brother that makes it impossible. So when the brother is assassinated, Tylendel goes crazy. Savil and the other mages decide that Vanyel will give him healing sex and everything will be ok, when Vanyel decides instead to feed into Tylendel’s obsession and help him plot his revenge.

Tylendel ends up using Vanyel’s latent but unawakened magic to open a Gate to port himself into a holiday celebration being held by his enemies, then uses his own magic to summon some baby dragons to eat everyone. This makes Tylendel’s magic horsey call him a dick, sever their connection, and then die nobly while trying to kill the dragons. The other Herald-Mages show up and are pissed at Vanyel, who is slowly being killed by the Gate, because they like Tylendel better than him and don’t want to be mad at Tylendel for what he has done. They clean up the mess, but when they go home and try to turn off the Gate, the energies backlash through Vanyel. Tylendel commits suicide, and as Vanyel is thinking of doing the same because of the agony he is in, he finds a magic horsey voice in his head!

The next like 150 pages are an enormous slog. Vanyel is sick both in body and in mind. It turns out the backlash awakened every single Mage gift in him except for Healing, but because of the way they were blasted open they are both extremely powerful and hurt a hell of a lot. He tries suicide, the pony stops him, he gets a fever, they heal it, blah blah blah. Finally Savil decides that Vanyel will die if he doesn’t get uber elite training from some gay birdmen, so she teleports them there.

There Vanyel is healed in like 2 pages, which is actually frustrating after the last couple of chapters because it makes it really stand out as padding the story to meet a page count. One of the gay birdmen used to be a normal guy and he gets along well with Vanyel and helps Vanyel get over this weird idea that he cursed Tylendel by having sex with him. Note: Vanyel had never even thought of gay sex before Tylendel so he didn’t have long to internalize the idea of it being a curse, Tylendel was gay as the day is long way before Vanyel got there, and it really feels like that plot development came out of nowhere. The other gay birdman, who is more alien and less compassionate, starts training Vanyel on how to use his powers. But Vanyel has Daddy Issues! Daddy never praised him, and now this mean birdman isn’t praising him enough!

So Vanyel runs away in the snow without any supplies because he’s an idiotic dingus. Naturally the Last 3 Chapters Crap Need Some Conflict villain appears to summon some dragons to eat some farmers. Vanyel doesn’t act until an old man gets himself killed trying to save his daughter, at which point Vanyel nukes the dragon from orbit. He thinks that the farmers are going to kill him for not saving them faster, and is so overwhelmed when they feed him and thank him that he decides to dedicate his life to saving people. The birdmen and Savil follow his magic energies and are pleased to see his very sudden character development.

So they decide they need to hunt down this new villain. They leave Vanyel with a different set of farmers and say “DON’T WORRY THERE IS NO WAY HE’LL COME HERE.” So he does, and he is beautiful and gay and makes out with Vanyel. Vanyel starts to really get into it but then he remembers his dead lover and sheds a tear because this is just physical attraction and not love. Did I mention that this is taking place in front of all the farmers while the villain is threatening to force a man to disembowel his wife? This dude has some awesome seduction skills, that or else the earlier romantic scenes faded to black before the weird stuff got under way.

Anyway, Vanyel and the other wizard have a dumb wizard fight that culminates in Vanyel using his Special Snowflake abilities to use the energy of the earth to nuke the wizard with his eyes. This is too much energy for Vanyel to endure so he starts to die and is thinking “‘Lendel, I’m coming!” when magic horsey and gay birdman are like “NOT ON MY WATCH” and pull his soul back. Vanyel is sad, but rededicated to helping people in need.

This book is just one of many Lackey has written in this setting, and I am sure that if you start at the beginning it probably makes sense to spend an entire novel preparing a single character to be at the point where he can have adventures. It still sucks for the reader who, like me, is coming in with this as the first and likely last book they will read. There’s 1/3rd of a character arc here and it doesn’t end on something that feels climatic enough to leave the reader satisfied. Her dedicated reader’s reaction to that feeling of incompleteness would be to get the next book, but mine is to whine in my blog.