Arrow’s Fall, Mercedes Lackey

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language: English
country: USA
year: 1988
form: novel
genre(s): fantasy
series: Heralds of Valdemar, #3
dates read: 21.3.26-22.3.26

(cw: rape, child abuse)

alright, I finished Arrow’s Fall and with it the first trilogy of Mercedes Lackey’s Valdemar books.

this sets her at odds with her former partner, Kris, who is Orthallen’s nephew; the fact that she and Kris were friends with benefits during her internship also complicates her relationship with the Herald Dirk (Kris’s best friend), with whom it is increasingly clear — to everyone but, apparently, either of them — that Talia is vaguely-supernaturally “lifebonded” (lol). it seems like there must be some kind of social restriction on telling people that they’re lifebonded, because despite the fact that everyone else has figured it out immediately nobody actually tells either of them until about halfway through the book, by which point circumstances have seriously strained the relationships between Talia, Kris, and Dirk. this was kind of tiresome; if soulmates are a recognized vaguely-supernatural phenomenon in your world I don’t feel like it makes sense that people wouldn’t, like, talk about this.

this love triangle occupies much of the early chapters of the novel, but the main plot is related to the political intrigue with Orthallen: Orthallen and other Council members have been pushing the queen to accept a proposal of marriage for her daughter, Elspeth, from the prince of a neighboring kingdom with which Valdemar is allied. for both backstory and Good Monarch reasons, the queen would prefer that Elspeth marry for love if possible (though she does acknowledge that she would force a political marriage if it would avert an existential threat to Valdemar, as long as the candidate were temperamentally suitable). having successfully put off the immediate proposal, Talia and Kris are sent as envoys ahead of the queen’s official state visit, to gather information about this prince and report back.

things go off the rails here because the prince is evil, it turns out. this isn’t really a spoiler because it’s clear from the blurb, but I also think it’s kind of lazy. Ancar is a caricature of a villain. he’s been groomed (a word I do not use lightly here) from childhood by his nurse, an evil wizard, to be power-hungry and sadistic, deriving explicitly sexual pleasure from torture and murder. Talia is captured and there’s a long sequence of torture and rape, mostly, fortunately, not described in detail, though the aftereffects on Talia’s body are described. unfortunately, this whole section was so overwrought that it just…didn’t land for me. the violence was both so gratuitous and so cliché that it felt a bit ridiculous, rather than having the narrative weight Lackey obviously wanted to give it. (the fact that Ancar is also a victim — he’s now apparently in a sexual relationship with his nurse — is not engaged with.)

long story short, Talia is rescued, there’s a short battle, Talia is magically cured of her trauma from the sexual violence she experienced in the dungeon, and then the final chapter is almost entirely dedicated to planning and then holding Talia and Dirk’s wedding.

now, did I like this book? it was fine. the plot was, overall, more engaging — if more cliché (Dirk and Elspeth have a very serious conversation about the nature of Evil) — than either of the first two books. structurally, though, the book is weird. apart from the chapter where Talia is in the dungeon being tortured, it switches perspectives constantly, like every few paragraphs. it feels like Lackey is afraid to let us see anything from the outside: we can’t just follow Talia and work out what’s going on in Dirk’s head from context clues; we have to be explicitly told what Dirk is thinking and feeling. often the perspectives at least partly overlap, as well, which makes parts of the novel feel repetitive, as we replay scenes wholly or in part from 2-3 different perspectives.

beyond this, the book suffers from the wild disconnect between what we are being told about Talia — that she is a Herald (and so inherently good), that everyone loves her, and that the reason everyone loves her is that she is a Good Person — and the reality of things we see Talia do in this book with her empathic powers, and some of the things she says about them. Talia

• forces her way into the mind of a grief-stricken, suicidal Herald who is resisting attempts to heal her trauma in order to Cure Her;
• forces her way into the mind of Elspeth’s boyfriend and forcibly links his mind with Elspeth’s to prove that he doesn’t really care about Elspeth but just wants to humiliate her;
• subsequently tells Elspeth, who is telepathic, that it was suspicious that the boyfriend didn’t want Elspeth to mind-link with him and read his thoughts;
• most egregiously, MIND CONTROLS TWO SERVANTS IN ANCAR’S PALACE, DISGUISING THEM AS HERSELF AND KRIS IN ORDER TO FACILITATE THEIR ESCAPE.

the middle ones are perhaps explainable — if not excusable — in that it’s the heat of the moment and Talia is furious. the first and last, though, are the ones that made me go, “oh, Talia is simply evil, actually.”

the first makes clear that Talia would be a Psychiatrist (derogatory), and she would not hesitate even a second to have her patients forcibly institutionalized “for their own good” if she thought she knew better than them (which she always would). the second makes clear that Talia thinks her own life and “mission” are important enough that she will condemn to random servants to death — and even if she did not predict the specific manner of their death I don’t think there’s any way to argue that this was anything other than a death sentence — to protect herself. an entirely indefensible action that the book expects us to think is not only defensible but a reasonable, good solution to the problem of how to escape a heavily-guarded palace where an evil prince wants to kill you. again: mind control. but apparently Talia is Good. (as an aside, this is also something that has never been mentioned before, but it’s introduced here as if it’s something the reader is expected to already know about.)

Talia’s morality aside, I was also rolling my eyes at the way this book imagines borders. it’s been clear since the first book that Lackey doesn’t understand how premodern borders worked and has back-projected a modern border regime with passports and immigration sponsorship. here we get an even more perplexing picture, with a clearly-delineated border (down to a gate marking the border, as if it were a real line) and, bizarrely, a clearly-delineated cultural as well as political border: on the Valdemar side of the border, they speak Valdemaren; on the Hardorn side of the border, they speak Hardornen, an apparently entirely different language. we’re told that some people within a few miles of the border on either side are bilingual, but not past that.

this is simply not how borders worked at any point before about 1900! particularly in the absence of mass education, it is much more likely that the border between Valdemaren and Hardornen culture — which doesn’t seem to be naturally demarcated, only politically — would be a continuum, either between two closely related languages (moving from “standard” Valdemaren to “standard” Hardornen through a set of transitional languages or dialects) or of varying degrees of bilingualism between unrelated or more distantly related languages. as it stands in the book, we have to ask: who has been both enforcing Valdemaren and Hardornen, respectively, on the border regions and discouraging Hardornen (in Valdemar) and Valdemaren (in Hardorn)? how does either state have the administrative capacity to so strictly control its borders?

the answer is that Lackey is not Anne McCaffrey (for all that there’s a reference to “fellis” here, lol) and simply has not considered the logistics of administration or border control in a(n ostensibly) premodern context.

an underwhelming conclusion, I fear.

moods: adventurous, dark, horny, tense