Characters / Heralds Of Valdemar Last Herald Mage Trilogy

Main Character Index | Deities and General Character Tropes | Mage Wars Trilogy | Last Herald Mage Trilogy | Collegium Chronicles | Brightly Burning | Vows and Honor | Exile Duology | Arrows Trilogy and Related Books | Mage Winds and Mage Storms | Darian's Tale

This subsection of the Heralds of Valdemar Character Sheet involves characters from the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy.

Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron and Companion Yfandes

• Action Mom: Yfandes had two children before Choosing Vanyel. He knows their names but they don't factor into the plot.
• The Ace: Easily the most gifted Herald of his generation, and one of the most powerful mages ever to exist. On top of that he has striking good looks, connections, musical talent, and enough diplomacy and charm to act as King Randi's official representative. But underneath the "Vanyel Demonsbane" of legend is a hurting, tired, and often very lonely man.
• Aesop Amnesia: Vanyel has a bad habit of forgetting that he needs to open up and emotionally depend on people. All three books have him re-learn the lesson after closing himself off and nearing the brink of a mental breakdown. Partially justified due to Tylendel's death and in later books PTSD. Late in the middle book after doing something particularly awe-inspiring he sees that a maid is terrified of him and finds this painful, so closes off his ability to connect to most people who aren't friends, something a friend nearby notices and points out.
• The Arch Mage: The last in Valdemar for a very long time.
• Armoured Closet Gay: In Magic's Pawn he pretends not to have undergone Character Development and also contrives a violent hatred for Tylendel to hide their Secret Relationship, wanting no rumors to get back to Withen. Tylendel thinks a dramatic argument and play fighting in the mud is great fun. Tylendel's friends, not in on the ruse, very much disagree and hate Vanyel - which backfires badly for him, because when Tylendel dies and Van is empowered and Chosen they have No Sympathy.
• Ambadassador By Magic's Price, Vanyel has had to fill in for the ailing King Randale and become much in demand as a diplomat, partially because of the massive respect engendered by his magical powers and battlefield heroics. Rethwellan's Queen insists on him being part of treaty negotiations, which calls him away for three months.
• And I Must Scream: It's not as pronounced as most examples, but there are some suggestions that haunting a forest for seven hundred years with only two other people consistently around to talk to is hard on him, Yfandes, and Tylendel. They ended up in that forest for far longer than they wanted to and were very eager to change their situation. A non canonical short story where Vanyel and various other characters get to confront Mercedes Lackey for putting them through a lot of terrible things also has him emphasize that tree diseases are very unpleasant to experience.
• All Gays are Promiscuous: Subverted; Vanyel could possibly count his number of lifetime lovers on one hand (no more than two hands) and is basically celibate by the time he reaches his thirties.
• All Gays Are Pedophiles: Explicitly averted. People (at least Withen and anyone influenced by him) seem convinced that he's after underage and barely-legal males and view the amount of time he spends with them as suspicious. His detractors are wrong: he just has a soft spot for troubled youth (possibly due to his own miserable childhood and adolescence).
• Almighty Janitor: Vanyel has no rank in the Circle. He's supposed to be just a Herald. But his personal power and reputation is so formidable that he can act with near Royal Authority without anyone objecting.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: He mentions once that he will protect Valdemar even after his death if he can. He does; he and Yfandes become the spirit guardians who 'haunt' the northern border, and Stefen later joins them. Centuries later, at the end of Storm Breaking, they all move on — Word of God is they're planning to take a very long vacation in the Havens before even considering Reincarnation.
• Asskicking Leads to Leadership: During King Randale's reign, Vanyel operates as the de facto King's Own, mostly because his power and legend have grown so much that even his fellow Heralds respect and fear him (partly because Randi's official King's Own is preoccupied just keeping him alive, and had relied on his advice even before then).
• Badass in Distress: While held captive by a group of thugs. Also in the short story Chance, where he survives a mage attack but is drained by the experience and has his clothes cut off.
• Battle Couple: Averted with both of his partners. When he was with Tylendel, Van didn't have combat-applicable powers or fighting experience outside of the salle; with Stefan it was the other way around.
• Blessed with Suck: He's not happy with his Gifts when they first activate; it's not a gentle awakening, and he hurts several people and endangers many more. After getting trained and learning control he still sometimes feels this way, but his sense of duty keeps him from too much despair. Rather, he thinks that the strength of his powers obligates him to use them to the fullest.
• Blue Blood: He's the firstborn and heir to Lord Withen Ashkevron. This drives most of the drama of the first act of Magic's Pawn, especially when underage Van enters into a relationship his father would not accept, and they have to conceal it so Withen doesn't come down and yank him out of Haven. It becomes moot once he's Chosen, since Heralds cannot own land or titles, though his background does prove useful in the rest of the trilogy.
• Brutal Honesty: In Magic's Promise, Van is a close friend of Randale and inherently inclined to sympathy for him, but he sees it as his duty to sometimes be harshly fair, as when he tells Randale that if he's not going to Abdicate the Throne (and there is no one who can take it from him at that time!) he needs to stop trying to pester Shavri into marriage, because she knows full well that Randale may need to marry someone else.
  • He tends to opt for harsh truth in general - he might be more capable of tact than his aunt, but not by much. Van enforces Mind over Manners stridently - he won't punish a first offense if the offender didn't know better, but he's not gentle explaining the concept and doesn't give third chances. When Tashir regales Jervis with Delusions of Parental Love, Vanyel believes these are malicious Blatant Lies and casts Truth Spell on him, forcing him to tell Jervis about the abuse he suffered. He tells Jisa her marriage to Trevan is selfish and a bad idea, and when Trevan gets his Herald's Whites early and asks Van if he's ready for them Vanyel tells him he isn't.
  • Yfandes too, describing Shavri as an incompetent King's Own in acid enough tones that Van, who's friends with her, is uncomfortable.
• Busman's Holiday: In Promise and Price, Vanyel goes home to Forst Reach for a rest and both times gets dragged into a magical conflict that nearly kills him.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Vanyel and Liss deliver a much-deserved tirade to Withen in Magic's Pawn.
• Camp Gay: Vanyel in Magic's Pawn (his father knew he was gay because he liked music and fancy clothes), and, to a lesser degree, in Magic's Promise and Magic's Price.
• Chain Lightning: In Magic's Promise he eradicates everyone who's in a Psychic Link by channeling raw Node power through the one he can reach, causing a Ruling Family Massacre.
• Chosen Conception Partner: He fathered four children at the adoptive parents' bequest, starting two Secret Legacies among the Tayledras and the Valdemaran royal family, as well as giving a lesbian Guard couple a baby. In the royal family of Valdemar's case, his being openly gay disguised the fact that he and Shavri were Jisa's real parents.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Tylendel tries to describe the Heraldic compulsion to help others to Vanyel and ends up settling on referring to it as a kind of hunger. Van doesn't get it until well after he's Chosen himself, but when it hits it hits hard.
• Close to Home: Van identifies easily with his nephew Medren, who like himself as a teen is set apart as a Non-Action Guy, interested in music, and not held in good standing in the household. He also gets special attention from the very same armsmaster who gave Van himself so much trouble. That, and Medren making use of Magic Music to influence him, has him readily believing that Medren's in as dire a situation as Vanyel had been at his age, and he misses that Jervis has changed.
• Color-Coded Eyes: Silver eyes, symbolizing his beauty and his remote nature: his power sets him apart.
• Covered with Scars: By the beginning of Magic's Promise, he has collected numerous "decorations" from knives, swords, mage-fire, electricity, a demon trying to eat his heart, etc., uzw., and so forth.
• Curtains Match the Window: By the end of Magic's Price his hair is more silver than black, matching his eyes.
• Dance Battler: Based on descriptions of his combat style.
• Deader than Dead: Even death doesn't stop Vanyel from sticking around protecting Valdemar's northern border. He, along with Yfandes and Stef, finally burn out as part of the team that holds off the final Storm, freeing them at last from centuries of duty (though of course they can always come back).
• Deadpan Snarker: Yfandes. She's especially snarky when dealing with Vanyel's angsting, though of course he gets her back when he can.
• Death Seeker: In Promise he's no longer actively suicidal, but while playing a song about a gentle personification of Death he wistfully thinks that if Death came to him in the course of his duties, he would welcome His kiss. This gets put to the test later in the book complete with that same kindly Death; despite himself, because his absence will cause so much more suffering Van chooses to live despite knowing his life is only going to get worse.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Thanks to Tylendel in the first book and Stefen in the third.
• Dirty Mind-Reading: Seeing that Yfandes has taken to a Companion stallion in Promise, Van wishes her well and asks that she please shield against him this time because he doesn't want to share.
• Don't Wake the Sleeper: After his powers are awakened a friend tries to heal Van while he sleeps. Unfortunately this happens while he's having a prophetic dream and he interprets it as an attack from one of these future enemies, though he just manages to realize what's going on in time to pull the blow and not kill his friend.
• Doomed by Canon: His death, like Lavan Firestorm's, was revealed in Arrows of the Queen.
• The Dreaded: Karsites of his own generation considered him the epitome of Valdemaran witchery. Later generations have elevated "Vanyel Demonrider" to the status of legend, warning their children to behave or Vanyel will get them.
• Dream-Crushing Handicap: Wanted to be a Bard and played well. When his father's armsmaster broke Van's arm he suffered nerve damage and lost some of the feeling in his playing hand. It never entirely returned. Through dilligent effort he regained his skill and was evaluated at the Bardic Collegium - but didn't have the Bardic Gift or talent for composition^note To actually become a Bard rather than a minstrel you need two out of three things; the talent for musicianship, the talent to compose music, and the Bardic Gift. Tylendel (who has sources in Bardic) later tells Vanyel that if Van weren't his father's heir, the Bardic Academy would have snapped him up for minstrel training in a heartbeat.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Vanyel dreams of his battle with Leareth years before it happens.
• Driven to Suicide: Fortunately interrupted both times.
• Easily Forgiven: In an attempt to coax a healing young Vanyel out of his shell, Moondance confesses his own tragic backstory to him, telling his story for the first time and weeping as he does. Van rebuffs him coldly, sneering that Moondance hadn't had it anywhere near as bad as he did, and after storming off in a huff realizes what a heel he was. He knows before he has a chance to apologize that the Tayledras will already have forgiven him, and he has.
• Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Vanyel has pale skin and blue-black hair, and when he comes into his power, even his allies find him a little scary.
• The Empath: One of his Gifts. After he loses Tylendel and all his Gifts are activated, he broadcasts his anguish to the point of reducing people on the Collegium grounds to helpless weeping. Much later, he finds sensing the fear of servants who know what he can do actively painful, so he closes off any connection to most people.
• Even the Guys Want Him: Attracts the (generally unwanted) romantic attentions of both men and women.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Goes from Chosen to a Herald very quickly. Savil presents him with her cloak, a stand-in for his Herald's Whites, basically immediately after he kills Krebain, which happened absurdly soon after he was Chosen and subsequently taken to the Tayledras to have his burnt channels healed. In Talia's time Herald-training is fairly organized and it takes three to five years for a Trainee to become a Herald. Savil, in her point of view sections, was specifically looking for Vanyel to come into Heraldic selflessness. In Magic's Price, Vanyel muses that there were some Heralds and Heraldic Trainees who thought he got his Whites so soon because of nepotism.
• Famed In-Story: To the point that everyone in Valdemar knows who he is, his epithets and is more than a little terrified of him. Van's all but lightheaded from relief when he meets a luthier who gasps and reels for a moment on finding out who he is, but then calms down and treats him like a normal person.
  • Yfandes apparently becomes similarly renowned among Companions. Hundreds of years later, the Companion Florian confesses to Karal that Yfandes intimidates him.
• Friend to All Children: Throughout Promise, and continued in the short story In The Forest of Sorrows, he has a big swell of compassion and worry for every minor he talks to, comparing them to himself and swearing that they won't have to suffer like he had. They tend towards liking and trusting him too. It makes what he does in Price while out of his right mind all the more tragic.
• Foil: To Herald Lavan Firestorm, another Person of Mass Destruction who was introduced through Talia considering how he died and was explored in a later book. Lan had a much shorter life, having his Super-Power Meltdown well under a year after being Chosen, and had less agency and choice than duty-driven Vanyel with his longer career, but was also less unhappy and isolated. Lan's own lifebond to a more stable partner - his own Companion - doesn't cause him any distress either, though some of the other characters are unsettled.
• Gayngst: He feels it a lot in Pawn. By Promise, he's mostly concerned with the pragmatic effects of having a reputation for homosexuality in a somewhat homophobic culture, but he also manages to find time to fret that his strange feelings for Shavri mean he's not really shaych.
• Go-to Alias: Valdir the scruffy minstrel, of the Go-to Identity variation.
• Guardian Entity: Vanyel, Yfandes and eventually Stefen become the guardians of the Forest of Sorrows, protecting Valdemar's northern border for centuries.
• Hair Memento: Hilariously many inns in Valdemar have a "lock of Yfandes hair" on display. Character wirly note that they would have to roach every Companion in Valdemar to provide enough hair for every inn that claimes to have a lock.
• Has a Type: Van likes to tease Yfandes about the kinds of Companion stallions she prefers, claiming they're all athletic and dim, while she protests that they're not stupid.
• Heel Realization: When Stefan interferes with a massive Roaring Rampage of Revenge in Magic's Price.
• Heroic BSoD: In Magic's Pawn, after Tylendel's death, and in Magic's Price after being tortured and assaulted by a gang hired by the Big Bad Leareth. The main plot of Magic's Promise is kicked off by Vanyel getting sent to Forst Reach for a holiday because almost everyone who gets a good look at him realizes he's on the verge of this from sheer exhaustion and probable PTSD.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Vanyel and Yfandes die together in a Final Strike that eliminates Leareth and his army.
  • Done again in Storm Breaking as he, Yfandes and Stef burn themselves out shielding Firesong and Sejanes from the final Storm.
• Honorary Uncle: Tries to get Stefen to consider him that early in Magic's Price, due to him being good friends with (and actually slightly younger than) his actual nephew. This is also his official status to Jisa, but it slips towards actual fatherly support due to both Randale and Shavri having other issues on their plate by the time she's six and also because, due to Randale's infertility, Vanyel is Jisa's biological father.
• Ice Queen: During a large chunk of the first part of Magic's Pawn, with the appropriate metaphors and everything.
• Incompatible Orientation: Poor(?) Melenna.
• In Touch with His Feminine Side: More evident in his youth. Right out of the nursery he looked and acted more like a girl than Withen was comfortable with, and even as his father tried to beat and bully it out of Van, his mother encouraged his interests in fine clothing and music. As a teen Vanyel was a good horseman but otherwise hated and had no talent for athleticism, though when he came to Haven and was issued lighter armor and a smaller sword he proved to be better at combat training than he'd ever been at home. As a Herald a lot of his vanity had to be put aside in service for his country and he had to learn some aggression in defense of it.
• It's All About Me: As a teenager he's pretty heavily self-absorbed. While he becomes quite a bit less so, throughout his life he does repeatedly find himself having ansty internal monologues and then realize he's whining and become annoyed.
• It's All My Fault: Prone to this, rightly or wrongly. In Promise, gentle Death allows him to speak to Jaysen, another Herald-Mage, who's just died protecting Jisa and wants Vanyel to know he should not blame himself.
• It's Not You, It's My Enemies: During Promise and Price he does his best to avoid having lovers, or even close non-Herald friends, knowing that his enemies would harm them just to get to him.
• It's Personal: A recurring motivator.
  • In his own trilogy, he goes particularly hard after mages who have killed his fellow Heralds. This nearly backfires on him when Leareth provokes him into a rage and takes advantage of his inattention to trap him.
  • In "present-day" Valdemar, after centuries as a deterrent against enemy mages, he gets personally involved in Winds of Fury. This makes sense because Mornelithe Falconsbane, the current Big Bad, was Leareth — or more correctly, both men were the ancient sorcerer Ma'ar. Later, in Storm Breaking, he and Yfandes are among the many who neutralize the Final Storm (the 'echo' of the doomsday weapon Urtho designed to use against Ma'ar, and whose effects Ma'ar had escaped the first time).
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Much of the point of Magic's Pawn is to coax the gold out of his jerk act that he constructed to protect himself from being hurt.
• Last of His Kind: The titular last Herald-Mage.
• Lie Back and Think of England: The thought of having sex with anyone he's not at least friends with repulses him, but he is in fact willing to sleep with women friends for the sake of giving them children. He describes it as 'not unpleasant' but a purely physical act, mechanical more than anything.
• Living Legend: By the second book, even Heralds are awestruck by him.
• Lonely at the Top: Vanyel as a full fledged Herald has trouble making friends partially because his legend had grown so much that even fellow Heralds are afraid of him. Few connected to him as a trainee, and later they find the scale of his power dismaying, more than what any one person should have. Most of his closest friends knew him before he became famous and very few people he met afterwards can call him friend. Even Medren, who's in that category, notes that he holds most of those few "friends" at such a remove that Medren would categorize them more as friendly acquaintances.
• Lover and Beloved: He's twice Stefen's age, and for this reason among others tries very hard to stick strictly to a mentorship role for quite a while, only Stefen isn't having it. Van himself was a Beloved to Tylendel, which meant he depended on his lover for everything. Their closest associates quickly pointed out how unhealthy it was.
• My God, What Have I Done?: He has this reaction in Pawn after seeing the results of giving Tylendel Savil's spellbook, and again in Price after killing two at least semi-innocent people along with their brutal associates.
• Magic Knight: He can fight magically, physically, or both.
• Master Swordsman: Once given a smaller, lighter sword and training that takes his slim build and agility into account, Vanyel is prodigious swordsman and rarely matched, though by Magic's Price as he's been behind the desk for a while he's not quite as sharp. It's implied in Pawn that he might have been a prodigy with a natural gift if it wasn't stifled by a close minded teacher.
• Mental Health Recovery Arc: He goes through several small ones, but being Vanyel he always has to go and feed himself into the next meat grinder, so they don't get the chance to take.
• Mindlink Mates: With Tylendel and Stefen.
• A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: When his MindSpeech first wakes up, he can't shield out anyone's thoughts, so he hears how most of the other Heralds, most of whom fell for his conceited popinjay act, would rather he had died and Tylendel, who was quite popular, had lived. Several of these Heralds are psychic themselves and not consciously thinking such things but Vanyel's powerful enough to pick that up. This leads to him almost being Driven to Suicide, but luckily Yfandes and Savil stop him.
• Mind over Manners: He enforces this, giving Medren one chance to shape up in Magic's Promise. In Magic's Price Stefan gets Vanyel a present by playing for a gem merchant's clients. Van makes absolutely certain Stef didn't unduly influence the buyers with his Magic Music before he will even think about accepting it; Stef is blindsided by his vehemence, since he had never really considered the ethics of his Gift before.
• Mystical White Hair: Like all Adepts, Vanyel's use of node magic bleaches his hair white eventually, though he reflects in Promise that it seems he's more resistant to getting Locked into Strangeness than the Tayledras he studied under, so at that point he's still mostly dark-haired with some white in it.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Vanyel's sheer effectiveness in the Karsite Border War (in particular his ability to turn the Karsite demons against their masters) is what sparks the religious upheaval in Karse, their pogrom against magic and their enmity against Valdemar. He's singlehandedly responsible for the Forever War between Karse and Valdemar, though Lavan certainly helped reinforce it with a dramatic Gift of his own.
  • In Price, Vanyel is dismayed to realize that Valdemarans now regard non-mage Heralds as "plain Heralds", not as good as Herald-Mages. Doubtless his own exploits have had something to do with that! By that point he's a towering figure who's filled in not just for the Monarch's Own but for the King himself, wielding magic and political power alike on an unprecedented level.
  • While Vanyel's Web-spell and the spell that causes everyone in Valdemar to regard true magic as if it no longer exists are undeniably effective, they do ensure that there are indeed no more Herald-Mages after him for centuries. It also means that for future generations true magic, which is pretty common everywhere else, is an Outside-Context Problem that Valdemarans can't properly prepare for, and makes the lives of people such as Paxia, manifesting Mage-Gift within the borders of the country, much harder.
• Nice to the Waiter: As a teenager he found common people mysterious and offputting, but as he healed in the Tayledras Vale and got to know some of the people they protected he found them much easier to comprehend and relate to than he'd thought and picks up the usual Heraldic care for others regardless of social standing.
• No Badass to His Valet: In Promise, Vanyel reflects as he approaches his old home that the commoners in the region regard him with more of a proprietary pride than the awe and fear that gets ever stronger everywhere else in the country. He has mixed feelings about this but is quite disheartened when such people, actually witnessing him use the powers that made him famous, take on that same distance as everyone else.
• No Bisexuals: In the second book Vanyel realizes he has strong feelings for Shavri, the King's Own Herald, and is quite dismayed, thinking about it in every spare moment. He wonders unhappily if he's really gay or if it's because Tylendel was born as a man, and whether his disinterest in women is really just because he hates to be chased. The idea that there's some middle ground doesn't occur to him.
• No Hero to His Valet: As powerful as Van is, Yfandes takes precisely none of his crap. She even teases him when he overindulges the night before a major spellcasting and wakes up with a hangover. But she is unquestionably loyal and stays by him to the end.
• No Social Skills: When sent to Haven as a teen, he was a terrible self-centered brat who managed to attract a handful of admirers mainly for his beauty and lineage. His Secret Relationship with Tylendel started softening him, but he and Savil agreed that if Withen found out there would be trouble, so they cultivated a feud which made Vanyel widely disliked among the Trainees in general.
• No Sympathy: A recurring flaw with Vanyel often leading him to cause major problems for later Valdemaran generations.
  • Van takes a moment to consider how awful it would be for a mage entering Valdemar to encounter the vrondi tasked with watching mages - they feel like they're Being Watched and either can't work out what's watching them or can tell that vrondi are air elementals, which mages often use as scouts, and get an increasing sense of hostility and malice meant to drive them mad if they don't leave the country - and decides that he could almost feel sympathy. Almost. That not every strange mage is an enemy, and that this would also happen to people born in Valdemar with the Mage-Gift (as is shown with Paxia in one of the short stories) does not concern him.
  • When Vanyel hears that his sheer effectiveness in the Karsite Border War has inadvertently sparked a Karsite civil war and pogrom against magic, he shrugs off the innocent casualties that might result and only cares that Karse might finally leave Valdemar alone.
• Not Wanting Kids Is Weird: Yfandes makes a couple wistful comments about the children Van has sired and asks if he's ever wanted to be a father. He's a little unsettled by the question, though he does end up having to be closer to Jisa than the other three. Stefan also asks about this, and Vanyel says they all have parents who really want them anyway.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: As a teen he played the vain, sneering dandy rather than show any emotional vulnerability or form genuine connections with other people. Tylendel managed to get him to open up at least in private, but to avoid Withen's wrath Van intensified the act and added in a strong feigned homophobic dislike for Tylendel. This made him very unpopular with Heraldic, Healer, and Bardic Trainees and with his instructors and ended up backfiring for him. After Tylendel died and Van was both empowered and Chosen, people who normally would have been his peers mourned their friend and hated that the small-minded popinjay he'd successfully convinced them that he was was here in his place.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Quite a few. In the twelve years between the first two books, Van has to do a lot of combat and picks up epithets like Demonsbane, Shadow-Stalker, and the Hero of Stony Tor, some of which appear in the songs Mercedes Lackey wrote, but aren't in prose or actually in the books themselves. The nine years between the second and third book have him take diplomatic roles more often but it still seems he's been very impressive; another epithet, Firelord, is added to the list.
• One-Man Army: Destroys a powerful mage (who was actually Ma'ar), four of his apprentices and an entire invading army almost single-handedly. (He needs Yfandes' help to overpower Leareth but still)
• Opposites Attract: Has this dynamic with both of his lifebonds in different ways. Tylendel was confident, headstrong, passionate, wanted to help others and very powerfully magical at a time when Vanyel was shy, closed off and lacked skills or knowledge of his place in the world. Stefen meanwhile is passionate, calculating, selfish in a good way, reliable and had no Mage Gift in a time where Vanyel was closing himself off to everything but work and duties and deeply lonely as his power and magic isolated him. It's implied that's how Vanyel's lifebonds work, his partners are needed to balance out his weaknesses, help shore up his emotional problems and provide a different perspective so he's not lost in his brooding.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Has enough power that he could potentially level Haven (Valdemar's capital).
• Phrase Catcher:
  • At the beginning of Magic's Promise, he is repeatedly met with "You look like hell". He does, having just gotten back from a year on the front lines filling in for five other Herald-Mages at once.
  • After the Karsite War, almost everyone who meets him for the first time starts listing his names. "Demonsbane, Shadow Stalker, Hero of Stony Tor"
• Power Incontinence: Due to the traumatic way his Gifts were awoken, Vanyel originally had no control over his powers. He accidentally shook the palace foundations, nearly killed a friend and drove half the Collegium to tears in the space of a night.
  • During the Karsite War, Vanyel is always on edge and can easily lose control of his powers if startled. One Herald makes a semi-serious joke about him accidentally leveling the palace, then clarifies and says he could well take out the entire city. He once destroyed a bathhouse in a Noodle Incident.
• Professional Sex Ed: His father hires him a female prostitute in an attempt to cure his homosexuality.
• Psychic Powers: He has the full slate of Heraldic Gifts along with the Mage Gift. He can even use magical energy to boost his mental abilities. On one offscreen occasion he killed a man with his mind; the experience was so traumatic that he never did it again.
• Rage Against the Author: In After Midnight, a (non-canon) story where a number of Mercedes Lackey's main characters get to confront her, Vanyel takes center stage (with Lavan Firestorm, whose book had just come out, right behind him) and complains heartily about not just having gone through so much suffering but also about having been made to brood about it so hard. Lackey's primary self-insert, Herald Myste, defends her, saying among other things that “Van, she didn’t have a life when she was writing you - you were her life!”
• Rape as Drama: After his capture by a sadistic gang in Magic's Price.
• Red Baron: Demon's Bane, Shadow Stalker, The Hero of Stony Tor... Karsites remember him as Vanyel Demonrider.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Both Van and Yfandes at a particularly vengeful moment in Magic's Price.
• Reincarnation Romance: With Tylendel/Stefen.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: He goes on a couple of these: first, after a magically-altered creature kills Savil, and second, after a group of thugs rapes and tortures him, both in Magic's Price.
• Ruling Family Massacre: Van kills all the Mavelans but Tashir when they all link with Vedris in a mage-duel, wiping out the royal family of the tiny kingdom of Baires.
• Safety in Indifference: At the start of Magic's Pawn Vanyel finally decides to cut himself off from all emotion as a way of dealing with his emotionally abusive father exiling him to a strange city. This is reflected by his ice dream, and eventually leads to him opening up to Tylendel.
  • Bounces back into this by Magic's Price as the deaths of many of his friends and lingering wounds from Tylendel's death make it too tempting for him to retreat into Duty and not let anyone get too close.
• Secret Legacy: He is the ancestor of the Valdemaran royal line and a line of mages in Clan k'Treva. While the k'Treva mages know their heritage, the Valdemarans do not.
• Secret Relationship: Hiding his relationship with Tylendel caused him a terrible lot of problems and may have contributed to him not really getting to share in the Heraldic sense of brotherhood and community later, but he was afraid that at best Withen would take him from Haven.
• Seeing Through Another's Eyes: Vanyel encourages Yfandes to use his senses and monitor his surface thoughts whenever he's not specifically asking her not to, so that she can keep abreast on whatever he's doing and he can consult her without having to stop and catch her up.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Unstated but very much there by the second book. He's on a hair trigger, shows Death Seeker tendencies, has trouble coping with the deaths of his friends and has a Guilt Complex over it. By the third book, he's retreating into himself over untreated emotional problems.
• Shock and Awe: Vanyel favors lightning when it comes to battle, either calling lightning from the sky or firing electric bolts from his hands. He picked it up from the Tayledras as that was one of the earliest spells Starwind taught him.
• Shrouded in Myth: To the later generations. The song Demonsbane (about the battle of Stony Tor) is a good example of his folk hero status. In it he takes on a nobleman backed by a wizard, demons, and thirteen armed men single-handed and wipes the floor with them just to make a point.
• So Beautiful, It's a Curse:
  • Savil thinks Van would be better off he were a little less pretty. He doesn't agree.
  • The story does show that Van suffers from being too pretty even if he never realizes it. He's constantly being chased by women throwing themselves at him and occasionally pursued by powerful evil mages trying to seduce him. His good looks, striking white hair and silver eyes gives him a fey and otherworldly look, contributing later in life to his air of power and unapproachability. And his girlish Pretty Boy looks makes him the target of rape by men.
  • In general his uniquely striking appearance makes Van stand out and makes people treat him differently which is the last thing Van wants.
• Superpower Lottery: He won it. But since the price of his lottery ticket was Tylendel, he would have rather have not entered at all.
• Time Skip: Each book takes place several years after the end of the previous one. The first time, he goes from a new Herald just climbing out of his pit of despair and wanting to do good to a veteran Living Legend, exhausted by the work he puts in and isolated by his power. In the third book his renown has only grown and he hasn't lost his edge, but he's had to pivot to focus a lot of attention on political work as the King's health fails.
• Took a Level in Badass: When the trilogy starts, he's a fop with no manifested powers of any kind. By the second book, he's probably the most effective warrior in Valdemar. By the third, he's a Person of Mass Destruction.
• Trauma Conga Line: Hoi... By the end of Magic's Pawn, Van has found purpose and identity as a Herald, but his own peace and happiness comes at a distant second to Duty, and he's only too aware of it. It only gets worse in the next two books. An aside in Promise suggests that he'd had a few years as a new Herald where he felt some level of optimism and that appears to be the time period in which Vixen and A Midnight Clear are set, the two short stories where he's fairly content with his life, but that doesn't last.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: His latent Gifts are blasted open when Tylendel uses him to make a Gate. The complications from that much psychic pain on top of everything else nearly kills him. Savil has to take him to the Tayledras because no one in Haven can help or train him and the longer he's there the more dangerous he becomes.
• Troubled, but Cute: He's got looks... but he's such a mess of open emotional wounds that a look is all you'll get. He even tries to close himself off from those who literally share his mind — Yfandes and Stefen — because he thinks they won't understand.
• True Companions: Usually there's a fellowship among the Heralds. Not all of them like each other or get along, but they still share a bond and a tight sense of community. Vanyel only ever gets to benefit from this around Heralds who don't know who he is. Before he was Chosen he put up a pretense of being viciously homophobic towards Tylendel, ensuring that all Tylendel's peers hated him; when Tylendel died and Van was empowered and Chosen, they were bitter. Then he had to be taken away from Haven to be healed and trained and returned already a Herald, so he never properly had peers among them. After that his degree of fame and renown expanded dramatically, to the point that many other Heralds regarded him with awe and a touch of fear.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: His anti-magic protections involve air spirits who watch for magic users in Valdemar and alert the nearest Herald-Mage when they see one. Unfortunately once all the Herald-Mages are gone (and the magic arts are forgotten in Valdemar), they simply swarm and watch any mage they see, with no ability to distinguish 'friendly' from 'hostile.' The results are painful, and even potential Herald-Mages eventually have to leave Valdemar because they can't stand Being Watched.
• Violently Protective Girlfriend: Well, Violently Protective Female Bond Creature, anyway. Yfandes is remarkably hands-on for a Companion, ready to come at anyone with hooves and teeth if they so much as lay a finger on her Chosen. In Magic's Promise, when she and Vanyel have to separate before the final confrontation, she swears that if the enemy kills him, she will avenge him before she herself dies.
• With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Even though the stress of the job seems to be nearly killing him (and it's only a matter of time before an enemy does him in for real), he can't quit protecting Valdemar through his work as a Herald.
  "There are too many people who need my protection; because I'm this powerful, I have an obligation to use this power. I'm the lone Guard at the Gate - I daren't give up, because there's nobody behind me to take up what I lay down."
• What Beautiful Eyes!: Silver eyes, which he gets from his mother, along with the rest of his good looks. He doesn't get the Eye Colour Change that other mages do, perhaps because his eyes are already too pale to bleach.
• What the Hell, Hero?: While he's disguised as a minstrel and enduring some miserable conditions on an information-gathering exercise in Magic's Promise, Van starts flirting with and tormenting maidservants, enjoying the little bit of power his looks give him over them. Yfandes calls him on that and says she'll kick him into next week.
• You Are Worth Hell: Yfandes knew the moment she Chose Vanyel that she would share his fate. She did it anyway.

Herald Trainee Tylendel Frelennye and Companion Gala

• Chronic Hero Syndrome: He tries to explain the Heraldic compulsion to help people to an uncomprehending Vanyel and has to resort to comparing it to a "hunger" that he can't help feeling, that he can't see himself not acting on. Unfortunately, unlike most Heralds, he also holds "helping Staven" in the exact same regard and even brings that up while explaining.
• Closet Key: For Vanyel
• Deathbed Promotion: After his suicide, the Companions ring the Death Bell for him, which they do only for deceased Heralds. Savil and company accordingly consider him promoted and bury him in Heraldic Whites.
• Did Not Think This Through: Tylendel's biggest flaw. Tylendel has a tendency to rush headlong into poor decisions without fully thinking through all the consequences and against the advice of everyone around him. Most of his actions end up coming back to bite Vanyel who suffers for Tylendel's poor decision making.
• Diabolus ex Machina: Two tragedies in close proximity destroy his mind. His twin brother Stavan is murdered, removing one of the supports holding his sanity up. His attempt at getting revenge on the family he blames for the deed is prevented by his Companion, who repudiates him and then dies before his eyes. Tylendel is Driven to Suicide moments later.
• Dirty Mind-Reading/Sex by Proxy: An ill-planned attempt unlocks all his psychic gifts too early.
  • Apparently he tried to do this with his Companion in a moment of loneliness. She never let him forget it.
• Driven to Suicide: Tylendel flings himself to his death moments after Gala dies. Gala's own death rides the line between Heroic Sacrifice and Stupid Sacrifice, and the attending Heralds pronounce it a suicide.
• Feuding Families: The Frelennye family are mortal enemies with the Leshara family, locked in a cycle of revenge. Lendel even admits that the Frelennyes started it but thinks the inciting incident was too minor for the Lesharas' reprisal.
• The First Cut Is the Deepest: Until he met Vanyel, Tylendel shied away from lovers and relationships due to a bad first time.
• Gayngst: He was already struggling with his family given his Power Incontinence situation but they doubled down on saying he was cursed and wanting to cast him out after learning that he was gay.
• Genki Girl: Gala, from what little we see of her, is a playful and energetic filly. Vanyel even sees a disorienting half-second flash of her as a human girl the same age as himself. It makes it all the sadder and more shocking when she coldly renounces Lendel.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Gala attacks the pack of wyrsa that Tylendel summons to unleash on the Leshara, knowing full well that they would kill her. This fight slows them down and keeps them from the Leshara until other Heralds can arrive.
• Hot-Blooded: A mild example. Tylendel is certainly intense about everything (loving Van, supporting his brother, learning magic) and also has a habit of rushing into things, against the advice of everyone around him. It might also be applied to Gala, who seemingly was an equivalent age to her Chosen and repudiated him in a rage rather than trying to pull him back from the edge.
• Idiot Ball: Gala doesn't realize that in the weeks after Stavan is killed, rather than getting better Tylendel is setting up and enacting an elaborate plan to get around her to take revenge. Companions elsewhere in the series are quite willing to ignore Mind over Manners and find ways to interfere when it comes to their Chosen and disastrous decisions on this scale, which might actually be a direct result of this.
• I Owe You My Life: Stavan kept him sane for two years after his gift awoke and before he was Chosen. Due to that, Tylendel feels like he owes Stavan a debt which is why he supports his brother even when he shouldn't.
  • He also feels this towards Gala for saving his sanity, but... not as strongly, perhaps because as he tells Van, he doesn't see her as an equal and a peer but as someone above him.
• Insane Troll Logic: Tylendel flies further into a rage seeing the Lesharas throwing a party after Stavan died, believing they're celebrating his murder. Vanyel, a bit more removed from the situation, knows that it's been weeks and the party is taking place on Sovvan Night, a holiday celebrated by many people, but there's no getting through to him.
• Living Emotional Crutch: Serves as this to Vanyel. Unfortunately he's oblivious to his status as such at first, and when Savil brings it to his attention he chooses to ignore it. When he dies, Vanyel is left completely adrift.
• Love Cannot Overcome: Even Tylendel's love for Vanyel isn't enough to pull him back from his revenge. Tylendel lampshades this, aplogizing to Vanyel for "not loving [him] enough"
• Manchild: Dallen, a Companion in the Collegium Chronicles, is the reincarnation of a Herald who knew Tylendel well enough to refer to him by nickname. He has quite a negative recollection of him.
  "’Lendel was many things, but thinking wasn’t his strong suit. [He was an] emotional, overwrought, impulsive manchild who made a habit of blundering about regardless of consequences and paid the price."
• Mindlink Mates: Lifebonded with Vanyel.
• Mind over Manners: Fatally, in Gala's case. She either doesn't see that her Chosen is undergoing Sanity Slippage or she does see but doesn't tell anyone else. By the time she does intervene, it's too late.
• My Greatest Failure: He was a promising if flawed Trainee who went off the rails. All his contemporary Heralds, especially Savil, are devastated by how badly they failed him.
  • His greatest regret after his death was leaving Vanyel all alone.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Second only to Vanyel. Before he was Chosen, Tylendel would drop into a trance, lose control of his Gifts, and wake up in a fifty-foot crater. One wonders how powerful he would have been had he survived to become a full Herald-Mage and how terrifying the pair would be had they ever fought together.
• Power Incontinence: He suffered this before he was Chosen. As he's not fully trained, it crops up in moments of emotional stress. Like when Stavan died.
• Pride: Tylendel suffers from arrogance, thinking he knows better than the adults around him, ignoring good advice and landing himself into dangerous situations. This is a normal youthful trait that he would eventually grow out of but due the dangerous feud he is a part of, this trait ends up killing him.
• Recruited from the Gutter: After his powers were awakened and especially after his family rejected him for his sexuality, he was miserable, only getting by with Stavan's support. Tylendel feels enduring gratitude towards Gala for saving him from that life, proving that he wasn't insane or possessed, and getting him to Haven and real help.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Against the Lesharas after Stavan is killed.
• Sanity Slippage: He still (mostly) has his right mind after Stavan dies, but as he lets himself get lost in thoughts of revenge, his conscience dies a slow death. By the end, he is openly using Vanyel, his Lifebonded, as just another thing he can expend to get what he wants.
• Superpower Lottery: Most Heralds have one or two powerful Gifts, if that. Tylendel had four (Mage-Gift, Mindspeech, Fetching, and Empathy) all at near-equal power.
• Thicker Than Water: Constantly excuses and supports his brother. It moves into Moral Myopia, to everyone's frustration.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: His twin telepathy with Stavan let him use his senses. Stavan was a bigger boy and both interested in girls and the receiver of interest from them, and a curious Tylendel offered to cover for his absence if Stavan agreed to let him see. Somehow or other it went very wrong and all Tylendel's latent Gifts were activated at once, very painfully.
• Twin Telepathy: With his brother Stavan. Tylendel also chose to conceal the extent of this from the Heralds, since Savil felt it would be better if this link faded with time and distance.
• Un-person: Zigzagged. To the Heralds he is a painful symbol of their failure, to the point where Stefen notices they won't even say his name, though after his lifetime they're slightly more willing to discuss him. The Companions, on the other hand, remember him clearly — Dallen, for example, has a completely unromanticized picture of him which reminds him not to let Mags go without support the way everyone ignored Lendel.

Herald-Mage Savil Ashkevron and Companion Kellan

• Animal Eye Spy: Her ability to connect with Tayledras bondbirds and ride their senses impresses Starwind, rather more than her saving him when he's half dead.
• Cassandra Truth: Realizes that the deaths of the other Herald-Mages are not accidents, but murders. Vanyel refuses to believe her until it's too late.
• Cool Old Lady
• Deadpan Snarker: Extremely so. It can occasionally work against her as she comes across as extremely caustic to people who don't know her.
• Deuteragonist: In the first book quite a few POV sections are hers, starting with Van's arrival in Haven. This lets her show more of a flawed-but-sympathetic side than what Vanyel sees.
• Feeling Their Age: In the first book she's not quite sixty. She's white-haired but Van doesn't think of her as being old until late in the book, when between anguish and the sheer amount of work she has to put in to get Van to her Tayledras friends it tells on her. Each book skips ahead by several years. By the second one, Savil doesn't have the endurance anymore to both be a Guardian and train a new student. By the third book she's nearly eighty, rarely leaves Haven anymore, walks with a limp, and needs an escort to visit Forst Reach. Few Heralds reach such an age and she would have retired if not for how rare Herald-Mages had become.
• Foreshadowing/Idiot Ball: we don't find out Moondance's history until the third book, but if Savil had remembered it during the final stages of Tylendel's arc, she would have been a lot more prepared for, or might even have averted some of, the worst parts of Tylendel's end/Vanyel's beginning as a Herald-Mage. Noted in that it's implied to be one of the things she calls herself out on, after she gets Vanyel to the Tayledras.
• Gender Flip: In a Series Continuity Error, Kellan is a mare in the main trilogy and a stallion in "Sword of Ice."
• Hero of Another Story: A seasoned, experienced Herald-Mage who is also a Wingsister to the Tayledras, which is quite unusual at this point in the setting. The story of her meeting Starwind as a young Herald is told in Sword of Ice.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Savil's Fatal Flaw. Savil cannot navigate complicated emotional scenarios and often has trouble reading people in general, rarely looking past a surface level analysis. As a result, she underestimates the problems of both Vanyel and Tylendel to disastrous consequences.
• Loves Secrecy: In Sword of Ice her Companion Kellan reveals rather smugly that he already knew about the Tayledras and says he knows a lot of things he's not allowed to tell Savil, which she finds tremendously annoying.
• Mentor
  • Mentor Occupational Hazard: She is murdered in the third book. It's done explicitly to drive Vanyel into a fury and set him on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• My God, What Have I Done??: After narrowly adverting Vanyel's suicide attempt in Magic's Pawn, Savil grimly realizes that all of this could've been avoided had she realized Vanyel's deeply rooted problems as opposed to treating the boy like a nuisance, and she vows to treat him much better.
• No Social Skills: Savil is blunt, lacks tact and puts her foot in her mouth. Her Deadpan Snarker tendencies don't help as she can be unintentionally hurtful with her quips. Her very first appearance in the first book is a flashback to her evaluating Van for Gifts, talking about him like he's not there, and dismissing him as useless.
• Out of Focus: In the second book Van goes to her for solace immediately on going to Haven and she shows up at Fort Reach not long after he does, specifically so he won't have to bear the brunt of interacting with their family without backup. If they spend time together there not addressing the dangers of the book it's not mentioned. Savil doesn't have POV sections in this book and is less involved in the action, which is probably because she's seventy-one by that point. She has a bit more focus in the third book, when she's almost eighty, though that is also the book in which she's killed.
• Reincarnation: A Companion named Sayvil pairs up with Kerowyn in By the Sword and is broadly hinted to be Savil reborn. (Lackey has since confirmed this).
• Resentful Guardian: Withen sent Vanyel to her in Magic's Pawn without asking for her input. Savil's already a busy woman with several apprentices to take care of and hates having to drop everything to make all the arrangements for the care and upkeep of her "spoiled little nephew". When he arrives she gives him a lecture about what an imposition he is. She starts to soften towards him but her crusty attitude has him perceiving her as 'tolerant' rather than 'loving'. Unsurprisingly, when life takes a tragic turn for Vanyel, he's very reluctant to accept Savil's help.
• Secret-Keeper: Vanyel had to tell her about his children at the end of Magic's Promise after finding out that a spell that can kill anyone in a given bloodline with mage-potential had been set as a trap in the Lineas palace.
• Tomboy: When she was young. It's said that one Ashkevron woman in a generation takes after her male relatives and is born with a harsh face and a propensity to action, and usually leaves to seek her fortunes elsewhere. In Savil's case, she was Chosen.
• Took a Level in Kindness: She's mellower in her later appearances but still on the Good Is Not Nice side. Savil chooses not to help Stefan recover from mage-shock not because she doesn't like him, but because she can tell he'll manage on his own and thinks he could do with a bit of toughening.
• Parental Substitute: All her apprentices in Pawn love her. By the second book she and Van have become much closer and patched up all their difficulties. In his narration Vanyel calls Savil his true mother, and she's become more conscious of his emotional needs, as he in turn worries about trying to take some of the burdens from her.
• Pet the Dog: When Van is brought to her at Haven, Savil bullies Withen's hirelings into leaving the boy's horse rather than bringing her back as ordered, which in her narration is because she can see how unhappy he is at the thought and thinks depriving him of this beloved animal is cruel. Taken along with her little speech about him being a burden this has him quite confused.

Starwind k'Treva

• Ambiguously Bi: He gently turns Savil down in Sword of Ice but he clearly likes her. It isn't clear in the writing whether he's exclusively interested in men or because he knows she was strongly affected by seeing his bondbird hunt and she'll feel foolish later if she acts on that rush.
• Bond Creatures: His bondbird
• Drill Sergeant Nasty: Relentless while training a teen Vanyel, whose powers can be catastrophic if not controlled.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: Parallels are drawn in both Sword of Ice and in Magic's Price between sharing his bondbird's senses as the raptor pursues prey and the 'chase' of two lovers. In the former story, Savil becomes intensely attracted to Starwind after experiencing his bird on the hunt and is gently rebuffed.
• Long-Haired Pretty Boy: A younger Savil was struck and astonished by his beauty upon meeting him.
• Magical Native American
• Mindlink Mates: With Moondance, as his lifebonded.

Moondance k'Treva

• ...And That Little Boy Was Me: Due to having a That Man Is Dead situation to the person he was before he met Starwind, he does this each time he tells someone about his younger years.
• Commonality Connection: Since the Tayledras are a Non-Heteronormative Society, they have absolutely no stigma against homosexuality. As Moondance came from outside of the Tayledras, he can relate the pain of his backstory to Vanyel in a way that someone entirely of the clans just can't.
• Gayngst: The Tayledras who took him in are entirely accepting of homosexuality, but Moondance remains hurt by his original community long after being cast out. In Magic's Price he tells his story to Withen because he wants Withen and Vanyel to reconcile in a way he never could with his parents.
• Gayngst-Induced Suicide: Accidentally killed his lover after they were both beaten and cast out from his home and then Attempted Suicide. Savil found him, saved him, and brought him to the Tayledras. He met Starwind and the rest was history.
• Bond Creatures: His bondbird.
• Every Scar Has a Story: He has a long one on his forearm from his suicide attempt, which he shows when he tells the story of Tallo.
• That Man Is Dead: Talks about "Tallo" as if he were a different person who did successfully kill himself.
• Mentor in Queerness: Earnestly explains to Vanyel that there's nothing unnatural about being gay.
• Mindlink Mates: With Starwind, as his lifebonded.
• With Great Power Comes Great Hotness: Initially a round-faced boy who looked like the farmers' child he was. Taken into k'Treva, exposed to the far higher than average levels of magic in the Vale, and training as an Adept changes him. Years later he looks of a piece with Starwind and any other Tayledras mage, being slim and feminine.

Brightstar k'Treva

• The Ace: Suggested, in the one page where he's present. Apparently he's quite talented and proud.
• Bond Creatures: Brightstar's bondbird is a white owl.
• Calling the Old Man Out: A downplayed version, but definitely present in his only on-screen appearance in Magic's Price. When Starwind and Moondance are reluctant to leave the Vale to save Vanyel from Leareth's leech-blade, Brightstar steps up to shame them both into going.
• Hereditary Homosexuality: While considering him Van reflects that being gay is not genetic as Brightstar clearly prefers young women. Though, their descendent in several centuries, Firesong, is quite gay.
• In the Blood: Apparently, like Vanyel he tries to do too much. His fathers rib him for this tendency, just as some of Vanyel's friends make fun of him.
• Mystical White Hair: As a Tayledras mage, even if he inherited Van's resistance to mage-bleaching he was suffused with magic at such a young age that he's white-haired as a teenager.
• Raised by Dudes: Averted.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Savil knows instantly from looking at Brightstar that he's related to Vanyel. Not only does he have silver eyes and a voice like Van's, but he makes similar gestures. Musing about his four children, Vanyel says that Brightstar takes after him the most clearly.
  • Winds of Change and on have Brightstar's descendent Firesong. Not having suffered much personal tragedy in his youth, Firesong like Brightstar has a pride and flashiness to him without being weighed down like Vanyel, but still has a strong sense of duty.

Lord Withen Ashkevron

• Abusive Parents: Withen has a narrow and homophobic view of what a man should be, and holds a good deal of anger and frustration towards Vanyel for not fitting the mold. He treats the teenaged Vanyel very harshly and orders Jervis to "toughen him up" by any means necessary, driving Jervis to break Vanyel's arm during a training bout. He mellows in later books, but it understandably takes years for him and Vanyel to form anything resembling a positive relationship.
• Benevolent Boss: Withen is broadly liked by the commoners he rules over. He doesn't put on airs, he fought alongside commoners in his youth, and when harvest time comes around he and his family help.
  • Not completely benevolent to Jervis, who felt he owed Withen for taking him in and was pressured continuously to make young Van more of a "man". Jervis wasn't really happy about this but felt if he pushed back or refused, he'd lose his position. Still, some time between the first two books Jervis finally confronted him about this and said he'd known plenty of perfectly brave and trustworthy gay soldiers, and he still has his job as of Magic's Promise.
• Cure Your Gays: He actually hires a (female) prostitute for his fifteen-year-old son in order to "cure" him. It doesn't work.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Child: By Magic's Promise he's no longer actually abusive to Van and they can sometimes even hold a civil conversation, but Vanyel finds him infuriatingly unable or unwilling to comprehend crucial topics like "Companions aren't horses" and "I like men but I would never sleep with a child and it makes me sick that you think I would", let alone smaller things like his interests and what he does for a living.
• Family Man: He's actually very good to most of his sons and other family members and fosters a lot of cousins who don't always get along with him but are broadly loyal. The Ashkevrons tend to have a case of Generation Xerox and most of the men in the family are quite a bit like him - but he really doesn't know what to do with the odd ones.
• Hidden Depths: Turns out to be a decent politician when he moves to Haven.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Angrily arrives at Haven to give Savil a verbal beatdown for allowing Vanyel to carry on a relationship with another boy, but he falters upon seeing that Tylendel's suicide, the forcible awakening of his Mage abilities, and Vanyel's own suicide attempt had turned Vanyel into a broken, sickly mess.
• Sacred Hospitality: He takes it pretty well in stride when he finds out Van has rescued a traumatized teenager and put him up in Withen's estate without asking. After he's satified that Tashir isn't the murderer he's accused of being, Withen is happy to support the boy and says he'd defend him with his own sword if trouble came. Jervis fetches Vanyel to overhear a roaring argument between Withen and Father Leren where he shouts down the priest's suggestions about Tashir and defends Van from him for the first time.
• Shipper on Deck: To Vanyel and Stef surprisingly. After over fifteen years of slowly becoming more open-minded, he was the one who ordered that Vanyel and Stef be roomed together.
• Targeted to Hurt the Hero: When she first became a prominent Herald-Mage and understood that she was making enemies who might go after her family, Savil worked to protect her brother Withen and other family members, protections which held in the climax of Magic's Promise. But Vanyel becomes a whole lot more Famed In-Story than she ever was, and Leareth's agents can circumvent Savil's protection. Wanting to keep his parents safe, Vanyel has them move to Haven, where they can be better protected than at Forst Reach.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Becomes more calm, easygoing and accepting of Vanyel with each book culminating in Magic's Price, where his attitude is entirely reformed. When Medren tells Withen that Stefan and Vanyel are already partnered, Withen actually wants to meet the man in his son's life and gives them a shared room with one bed when they come and visit. Withen is a bit strained towards Stefan but determined to be polite. After a talk with Moondance, he finally comes around to telling Vanyel that he loves and is proud of him.
• Wanted a Gender-Conforming Child: Withen is appalled that his firstborn son pretty much came out of the nursery looking and acting more like a girl. See all the other tropes in this folder! Most of the rest of his children quickly proved to be very masculine boys or feminine women but Vanyel was always apart. Withen didn't have nearly as much trouble with his daughter Liss, who became a soldier; they have their differences but when she becomes a Captain of the Guard and swings by the family estate he's bursting with pride. Of course, once a generation an Ashkevron woman is an Action Girl who takes after the men, so maybe he was just more used to the idea.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Vanyel spent most of his childhood alternately resenting and trying to win the approval of his father.

Lady Treesa Ashkevron

• Abusive Parents: While she's not nearly as bad to Vanyel as Withen and Vanyel is in fact her favorite child, she spoils and coddles him while using him to indulge her own desire for courtly romance. None of this helps his emotional stability much, especially since Treesa is incapable of standing up to Withen's abuses of Van. When he's older and visiting his family Vanyel doesn't actually mind the flirting, knowing that for her it's just a game and an excuse to exchange compliments, but he really wishes she'd lay off on the below trope.
• Cure Your Gays: Treesa's method of 'curing' Van is to try shoving eligible women at him.
• Hidden Depths: Suggested, but never fully explored. Her son is one of the most powerful Herald-Mages ever born, and some characters note that she has a special sensitivity of a type Yfandes shares (dismissed as motherly intuition), but she is repeatedly dismissed as a helpless, overdramatic airhead who never wanted more from life but a husband and children.
• Hysterical Woman: Actually seems to take pride in it.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Maybe. Vanyel views her as hysterical and weak willed but he's biased and the fact remains that she encouraged his interests and protected him in her own way. When Stefen meets her, she's calm, composed and polite to Yfandes. She even endures a mage attack with grace. It's up in the air whether she's Silk Hiding Steel, Obfuscating Stupidity or Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass.
• Out of Focus: She's given significantly less page time than her husband and is more often spoken about than spoken to. When Withen fully reconciles with Vanyel in the third book, she's present for that scene but goes completely unmentioned after gasping that she wants to go to Haven.
• Parental Substitute: She tends to become motherly and a bit overbearing towards troubled boys. This is fine for Medren, who becomes what Vanyel considers the "bower pet" in his place and gets his interest in musical instruments encouraged, but she accidentally panics Tashir - though she takes that in good grace once things have stopped flying around.
• Pet the Dog: She didn't dismiss Melenna for getting pregnant out of wedlock, and supported Medren. By the third book she also has been hosting salons outside when Vanyel is visiting and weather permits, so that "Lady Yfandes" can join them and listen to the music.
• Purple Prose: Literally! (She writes her letters on pink paper with violet ink). Her writing is almost unbearably florid, with random capitalization for emphasis, and her verbal speech isn't much clearer. She also Thinks Like a Romance Novel and gives events the spin that best suits her sensibilities — telling young women that Vanyel "lost his first love tragically," for example.
• Targeted to Hurt the Hero: Leareth sends an assassin with a pair of leech-blades made for Withen and Treesa to Forst Reach. Van intercepts one and after the Tayledras visit and help him recover he convinces his parents to move to Haven, which is at least further from the border.
• When She Smiles: The most positive Vanyel ever is about Treesa is the note that her pleasure in trading compliments with him makes her look younger and quite beautiful.

Mekeal Ashkevron

• Absurdly Youthful Father: He's thirteen or fourteen when he gets Melenna pregant with Medren. In addition, he had six children with his wife during the twelve-year Time Skip between the two first books, so his oldest true-born child may not be that much younger than Medren.
• Annoying Younger Sibling: To Vanyel in Magic's Pawn.
• Generation Xerox: Is the spitting image of Withen. It's a family trait apparently.
• Older and Wiser: In Magic's Promise and Magic's Price. Van finds him a bit thick-headed still but also gets on with him more easily than he does their father.

Melenna

• Earn Your Happy Ending: After years as Hopeless Suitor for Vanyel, and almost as long as a single mother to Heroic Bastard Medren: at the end of Magic's Promise, Vanyel gives her a minor noble title in order to make her Tashir's Castellan/Housekeeper; Vanyel nearly chokes in Magic's Price on getting a letter that casually mentions that she and Jervis have married.
• Hidden Depths: in Magic's Promise Melenna's the only one in Treesa's entourage who doesn't go into hysterics when Tashir goes into a flashback-induced fit that involves an invisible hurricane, and can therefore give Vanyel a good idea of what actually happened, including hints on what triggered it. Van, who was quite fed up with her by then, finds himself starting to like her. She also says outright when making her Settled for Gay offer that it's partly because he's so good to her son.
• Hopeless Suitor: For Vanyel.
• Settled for Gay: Offers that to Vanyel after admitting to her Hopeless Suitor status so his parents will get off his back. Vanyel gently refuses as he has met people who had done it and told him it was a bad idea.
• Settle for Sibling: Tried to do this. Medren showed up nine months later.
• Stalker with a Crush: The lengths to which she goes in Magic's Promise qualify as sexual harassement.

Medren

• The Ace: The only student at Bardic besides Stefen with all three requisite Gifts (Stefen, at least, thinks Medren's nearly as good as he is, if not definitely.)
• Heroic Bastard: He's the product of an affair between Mekeal and Melenna, but it hasn't warped his personality.
• Getting Sick Deliberately: Van has him catch "spots" from the little kids in the Ashkevron nursery to get him out of sword practice.
• Magic Music: Has the Bardic Gift.
• The Matchmaker: He is bound and determined to pair Stefan with Vanyel, eventually resorting to telling Withen and Treesa that they're already a couple, which would have been disastrous in either of the first two books of the trilogy.
• Mind over Manners: Using his untrained Gift Medren convinces Vanyel that the bruises Jervis has given him in sword training are the same kind of abuse Van got from him. On confronting Jervis and then actually thinking about those bruises, Van realizes what's happened and sternly tells Medren he's only permitted to use his Gift in a performance, to help someone who really needs it, or at the King's command, and that this is his one warning before he'll get his Gift blocked and be barred from the Bardic Collegium. A chastened Medren agrees to adopt this trope.
• Non-Action Guy: More lightly built and without the enthusiasm for violence that many of his relatives have, Medren sees combat training as a torment and Jervis as singling him out unfairly. Told that Bards get combat training too so they can handle the sometimes rough situations they're sent into, and that his training has been adjusted somewhat to make it less brutal, he agrees to comit and learn to fight.
• Out of Focus: He's quite important at the start of Magic's Price as an outside point of view on his uncle Vanyel and as a Shipper on Deck, but once Vanyel and Stefen get together, he all but drops out of the story. This at least means he dodges Savil's fate, but he and Stefen were quite good friends and he was one of the only people Van called a friend at all.
• The Resenter: Averted; Stefen's greater talents overshadowed him from the very start, but Medren just felt sorry for him for growing up without a family.
• Shipper on Deck: For Vanyel and Stefen. He just forgot to mention to Vanyel, who's slightly paranoid about younger fanboys making advances to him despite Incompatible Orientation, that Stefen was also openly shaych before they had the opportunity to meet (while Stefen knew about Vanyel).

Tashir Remoerdis and Companion Leshya ("Ghost")

• Abdicate the Throne: Tashir had been Chosen and normally that means giving up on all claims to titles and property, but there are some exceptions. Two Ruling Family Massacres in short succession left only him as the heir to the tiny kingdoms of Lineas and Baires. Not wanting to be king, Tashir signed off on the annexation of both kingdoms into Valdemar and accepted the title of Lord Baron instead.
• Accidental Murder: His story revolves around the question of whether he lost control of his Gifts and accidentally killed the rest of his family. At the start, Vanyel's main reason to believe otherwise is the fact that Tashir has been Chosen, since he thinks no Companion would Choose a killer.
• Affair? Blame the Bastard: Tashir's father certainly was cold to Ylsa, visiting her only often enough to get her pregnant a few more times, and keeping her restricted to a small part of the palace so he could be sure of the paternity of her successive children. He was pretty spiteful to Tashir though, culminating in disowning him.
• Barrier Warrior: The main application of his untrained Fetching is to physically push objects away from him. This turns out to be the skill that saved his life.
• Blatant Lies: Tashir spins a story for Jervis about what an ideal home life he'd had. Jervis believes him, which puts him and Van at odds again after they'd come to a tentative rapport.
• Disinherited Child: Tashir's father, always suspecting that Tashir was not his, disowned him at a dinner, which Tashir unhappily accepted, but then also added that he'd be shipped back to his mother's family, which Tashir was extremely dismayed to hear.
• Frame-Up: The attack that killed everyone else in the Palace would have killed him if not for his Gift of Fetching (telekinesis), which would have been fine by Vedric. Tashir being the lone survivor also served Vedric's purposes, since it made him look like the one responsible.
• Friendless Background: The only safe, reliable person Tashir had was the palace armsmaster. This leads him to see Jervis as a trustworthy soul, even when Van is still uncertain about him.
• Groin Attack: Jervis is convinced Tashir can't have killed anyone because while the boy was training with Medren he pulled a blow that would have hurt the other boy so frantically that he "nearly gelded himself".
• Identical Stranger: He looks enough like a younger Tylendel to give Vanyel a lot of heartache.
• Magic or Psychic?: The results of untrained Mage-Gift (or a trained mage summoning The Swarm into an enclosed space) and powerful Fetching manifesting in a Traumatic Superpower Awakening look quite similar, adding to the difficulty of discovering just what happened.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Tashir's father suspects him of actually being the product of Brother–Sister Incest, as his mother gave birth to him eight months after the marriage and Tashir took after that side of the family. Upon learning about the Heartstone under Highjorune Palace and how it's attuned to members of the ruling line, Vanyel discerns that not only is Tashir legitimate but that his father could have just discovered that at any time.
• Mind over Matter: Tashir has powerful telekinesis. When he's upset, objects around him start flying around and battering themselves against walls or, more rarely, flinging themselves at people.
• Mistaken for Murderer: The Palace in Highjorune was sealed off as something swept through and tore everyone but a hysterical Tashir into pieces no larger than a palm. The Herald on scene, discovering that Tashir had the Fetching Gift, immediately blamed him.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: His Companion was too traumatized over being attacked by another Herald to Mindspeak anyone else in Magic's Promise, so Yfandes refers to him as "the Young One" or "Ghost". An easy-to-miss line reveals that his real name is Leshya, which means 'spirit' in the Kaled'a'in languages.
• Put on a Bus: Once the danger is resolved, Tashir takes the Baron position and stays in Lineas-Baires instead of going to Haven. Since Heraldic education is still a master-apprentice system, and there is another Herald with the Fetching-Gift left to teach and advise him, this is fine. In the third book, Tashir is apparently on neighborly terms with the Ashkevrons, but he barely gets a mention.
• Repressed Memories: Truth-Spell clears up nothing about what happened the night of the Ruling Family Massacre, because Tashir represses the traumatic events immediately until he revisits the scene.
• Sole Survivor: He was able to protect himself with his Gift from a swarm of flying semi-demonic creatures. The rest of the people in the Palace in Highjorune, which disdains magic, were temporarily protected by the Heartstone, but they were torn apart once those protections failed.
• There Are No Therapists: Leshya is "something of a Mind-Healer", according to Yfandes, which would be helpful with Tashir given... everything Tashir has endured up to this point. However, there's no one to help him cope with his own trauma.
• Trauma Button: A curious and well-meaning Treesa, a middle-aged woman who responds to Tashir's clear distress by becoming concerned and motherly, sets Tashir off, as his own mother acted similarly at times.
• You Remind Me of X: Again, he looks a lot like Tylendel, and when Tashir corners a grieving Vanyel making illusions of his lost lover, Van breaks down and tells him this.

Jervis

• Earn Your Happy Ending: At the end of Magic's Promise it's implied that Jervis is promoted to a minor noble title in order to become part of Tashir's household. It's mentioned in Magic's Price that he and Melenna have married.
• Heel Realization: Jervis in Magic's Pawn was doing both what he had to to keep bread on the table and trying to instill in Van an ability to fight that would keep him alive, but he was also successfully goaded by the teenaged boy and lost his temper, breaking his arm. He regrets that later and is trying to do better in the second book.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He terrorizes Vanyel in the early parts of the first book, but proves to be a surprisingly decent guy in the subsequent novel.
• Lightning Bruiser: Big and fast.
• My Master, Right or Wrong: He doesn't actually share Withen's homophobia, but goes along with Withen's orders to 'toughen Vanyel up' in Magic's Pawn because he's deeply loyal to Withen for giving him the position of Armsmaster at Forst Reach. Justified, as for a retired mercenary like himself with no independent resources to speak of, the position is the only thing standing between him and starvation.
• Parental Substitute: Tashir takes to him immediately, and he's actually quite kind to the boy.
• Poor Communication Kills: He's changed by Magic's Promise, feeling that he'd crossed a line in breaking Vanyel's arm, but he's too brusque to easily say that, or tell Medren that he wants to train him for a future in being like him, a mercenary armsman, since otherwise his future prospects as a bastard seem pretty slim. Jervis challenges Van to spar with him to try and learn his fighting style so he can teach it. Van, expecting the worst, doesn't catch on until they have an outright argument.
• Put on a Bus: By the end of Magic's Promise Van considers him a friend and makes him one of Tashir's advisors, well out of Haven. Van explains to Jervis that his foes target his friends and this act both makes it look like Van doesn't care about him and takes him far enough away that he's harder to strike.
• Tough Love: Part of the reason he was so hard on Vanyel, and to Medren after him, was out of a desire to prepare them for combat, because the idea of letting someone just go to his death in the next war turned his stomach.

King Randale

• Abdicate the Throne: He wanted to do this, longing to marry Shavri, but there wasn't anyone capable of taking it from him. Randi was not "supposed" to be king until he was far older - but his father the Heir happened to be a Herald-Mage and therefore a target for Leareth, and so died young.
• Altar Diplomacy: He's introduced in Magic's Promise as longing to marry his Lifebonded Shavri and having proposed to her and been refused. Vanyel counsels him to let it go because he has to keep the option for an alliance marriage open; the peace his grandmother maintained fractured with her death, and Valdemar is on shaky ground. Vanyel is aware that marrying a stranger while bonded to someone else would be hell for someone with Randi's Psychic Powers — especially on the wedding night — but it is a sacrifice a Herald must be willing to make.
• Determinator: By the end, he's holding himself together through sheer willpower, trying to give the new Heir his cousin and son-in-law time to get ready.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Most men would have issues with their lover sleeping with another man. But Shavri wanted a child so badly it was affecting her sanity, and there were rumors circulating that Randi was sterile, so all parties agreed that one-off with Vanyel would solve a lot of problems. Randale is more concerned that Vanyel will want to claim Jisa as his daughter and is relieved when Van says Randi is her dad, biology be damned.
• Mindlink Mates: With Shavri.
• Parents as People: While he's still reasonably healthy he's a loving parent to Jisa, when he has time for her around his duties as King, but as his health fails he's really only capable of being an invalid or King, and less and less of the latter. Jisa therefore turns more and more to her biological father Vanyel for support.
• Reluctant Ruler: He didn't want to be King in the first place, but that's how circumstances fell out. Once on the throne, he was stuck there for lack of an Heir.
• There Is No Cure: Whatever he has, it can't be Healed. Not even Bard Stefen's extraordinary Gift can do more than block the pain without fogging his mind (though that is a great boon, especially since the Healers of his day are able to learn the technique and pass it along into Talia's time). Randi's goal eventually becomes just to stay alive and on the throne until his Heir is somewhat ready to take on the job.
• Working Through the Cold: And considerably worse than a cold! Vanyel does what he can, taking some of Randale's duties on on top of everything else, but there are some things that only a King can do, so Randi makes what use he can out of his coherent moments.
• Your Days Are Numbered: Hints of it in the second book and by the third is outright dying of a terminal incurable disease (implied to be cancer, though never stated or described in enough detail to tell).

King's Own Herald Shavri

• Authority in Name Only: She was neither a courtier nor a Herald when Taver Chose her, so she was never trained for the political duties of the King's Own Herald (nor, as Yfandes mentions, particularly well suited). Over time it becomes evident that the King's Own title is a pretext to let her be close to Randi at all times and discreetly keep him functioning, leaving it to Vanyel and later Jisa to take on her other duties.
• Babies Make Everything Better: She conceived and gave birth to Vanyel's daughter because 1. she desperately wanted a child and 2. Randale needed the appearance of being fertile to keep a marriage alliance on the table. Jisa not only improved the situation the moment she was born, she started a Secret Legacy in the Valdemar royal family which continues to 'present day' Selenay and Elspeth.
• Baby-Doll Baby: Vanyel remembers seeing her holding a broken doll to her chest, weeping uncontrollably from her desire to have a child.
• The Empath: Comes with being a Healer. Centuries later, in Arrows, Empaths are still rare among the Heralds, more common in the Monarch's Own but there's only ever one of those at a time. That Gift usually comes with the Healing Gift, and people who can Heal almost always go unchosen and become Healers; this lack of experience is one of the reasons Talia's Gift goes rogue on her in Arrow's Flight.
• Healing Hands: She is a Healer on top of being the King's Own.
  • In the second book, Vanyel muses that Shavri is the first Herald-Healer in history; between Randale's sterility and the tendency for Heralds with really odd Gifts being Chosen just before they're needed, Vanyel suspects Randale's illness before he starts showing symptoms. She confirms it, having noticed a growing weakness and dizzy spells.
• Mindlink Mates: She and Randale are Lifebonded.
• The Mistress: She refused Randale's offer of marriage and so was regarded as this in an official capacity.
• Parents as People: Shavri was a good mother to a young Jisa, but by Magic's Price the strain of loving and failing to cure Randale has worn her ragged and left her without much for her daughter. When Jisa announces that she's eloped, Randale collapses in shock and undergoes a turn for the worse. Shavri blames her and accuses her of selfishly erasing Shavri's work in keeping the crown away from her. Offscreen, Stefan manages to convince her to reconcile.
• Rejected Marriage Proposal: Turned Randale down when he proposed to her. She knew an outside Marriage Alliance was both possible and potentially needed, and on top of that Shavri was terrified of being shoved onto the throne as the ruling Queen. Vanyel considers her reticence wise, since a powerful Empath like her would be unable to be objective and constantly tempted to use that Gift to influence courtiers and officials.
• Shared Life Energy: She goes beyond a Healer's usual Energy Donation and links her life with Randale's. Vanyel finds it distressing (it's the one thing a Healer will never do), and her eventual death is implied to be horrible.
• Together in Death: Deliberately. Out of a combination of love for Randi and fear of being alone, she opens an unblockable link between them. They burn out and die at the same time.

Jisa

• Adopted into Royalty: She's not eligible to be the Heir until she's Chosen - and isn't actually suitable as the Monarch temperament-wise - but is functionally this. She's generally regarded and treated like an official Royal Bastard who's much loved even if her parents weren't married.
• Daddy's Girl: By far the one of Vanyel's children who has the closest relationship with him. In Promise she merely adores and has absolute trust in her "Uncle Van". Between this book and the next she susses out that he's actually her father.
• Calling the Old Man Out: When her mother accuses her of undoing all her work to keep her from the stress and horror of being on the throne, Jisa retorts that she is not her mother and doesn't want or need the same things; she is a leader, and for her the prospect of becoming either the Royal Consort or the Queen is one of partnership with Treven rather than assuming the crown alone after suffering great loss.
• Elopement: She and Treven decide it's better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission and marry in secret, and then have the news broadcast widely so the matter can't be hushed up. The Companions help them find a priest and then spread the word.
• The Empath: Like her mother her Gifts are strong Empathy and Mindspeech, good Gifts for a Monarch's Own Herald. After Shavri dies, Taver Chooses Jisa as King's Own in her place.
• Happily Adopted: As a child she was quite happy, but as Randale's illness advanced she was made increasingly unhappy by his suffering, by not being able to look to either him or her mother for support even if she understood why, and by the fear that she'd inherited his illness. Finding out that she is in fact Vanyel's daughter at least eased her mind on the last point.
• Heroic Bastard: Her parents weren't married, so she's not legally Randale's daughter. She's also deliberately not-Chosen at the usual age, meaning Randi has to name someone else as Heir.
• I Am Not My Father: Elopes with her Lifebonded and reveals this to the world, determined that unlike Randale and Shavri - and unlike Vanyel with Tylendel - she's not going to allow them to be kept apart for Altar Diplomacy or maintain a Secret Relationship.
• In the Blood: Plays two ways — she is remarkably similar to her real father in temperament and is the link to pass his Superpowerful Genetics along to further generations. She is also, to her relief, not the true daughter of Randi, meaning she doesn't have to worry about inheriting his mysterious illness.
• Kissing Cousins: Her Lifebonded is nominally her uncle, a younger brother of Randale. She knows they aren't actually related, but almost no one else does.
• Nephewism: In her teens, as her parents lose the capacity to care for her, she turns to Vanyel for advice and support, whom she officially regards as her Uncle Van.
• Oblivious Adoption: As a child. She was concieved in part to dispel rumors of Randale being infertile, so it was kept secret. Jisa figures out the truth by herself.
• Royal Bastard: She has no royal blood but, as she resembles her mother, everyone believes she's King Randale's bastard daughter.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Fortunately Jisa looks a lot like Shavri, though she does pass Vanyel's silver eyes on to a few descendents in the Collegium era.

Stefen

• The Ace: Of the Bardic trainees. Medren, who was formerly the prize student, has no trouble accepting that Stef's better than him at everything on top of having a very useful, one-of-a-kind Gift.
• …But He Sounds Handsome: Stefen doesn't know about his past life at the time, but he's indignant on Tylendel's behalf when considering how Heralds treat his memory, saying in the narration that Tylendel hadn't been in his right mind when he was repudiated and that the Companions had rung the Death Bell for him, meaning that some of them, at least, thought of him as still a Herald.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Develops a version of this despite his pragmatism. His painblocking ability is so rare and necessary that he's constantly using it. Even when he's made aware that his power is draining him, he still runs himself ragged playing for Randal and taking care of and supporting people through various crisis.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Spent his life as a beggar on the streets. Subverted in that besides making him slightly more pragmatic and selfish, Stefen has mostly overcome his childhood and has very few emotional problems from it. Many other characters (cough Vanyel) can only dream of such resilience.
• Deader than Dead: Stef along with Vanyel and Yfandes is finally released from his centuries-long duty after his ghost burns out in Storm Breaking.
• Driven to Suicide: Nearly, until he is stopped by Vanyel's ghost.
• Establishing Character Moment: His first scene is him agreeing to play for Randal in front of the court, playing his fingers to bits doing so and then his Meet Cute with Vanyel. It establishes Stefen as a pragmatic and ambitious individual that is nevertheless capable of great empathy and wisdom. His Meet Cute with Vanyel characterizes their relationship - despite Stefen being in constant awe and completely in over his head, he does his best to keep up with and call out Vanyel.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: Literally - in order to earn a place with Vanyel after death, he must spend his life working to overcome the perception of "plain Heralds" as inferior to Herald-Mages. He doesn't actually manage, but it turns out that the effort is enough.
• Everything but the Girl: Stef gains prestige, renown and the backing of very powerful patrons and friends (everything he wanted at the beginning of Magic's Price) but loses Van.
• Extremely Short Timespan: He's a Journeyman for only three months before getting promoted to Master Bard, entirely because of his pain-soothing Gift. As a Journeyman he'd be obligated to travel so he could become more worldly and prove himself, but that would take him away from the King's side. To try and curb jealousy from other Bards, his is a special position that gives him no additional pay or luxury, which he's not thrilled about but accepts.
• Foil: To Tylendel. Tylendel is intense with a habit of acting before thinking; Stefen is very methodical and calculating. Tylendel had multiple Gifts at great power, Stefen has only the Bardic Gift. Tylendel as a Herald wants to help people; Stefen is primarily concerned with himself. Tylendel grew up privileged with a close family and prioritizes his twin above all else; Stefen was a street urchin who didn't know his parents. Tylendel struggles with his childhood trauma; Stefan recovered and divorced himself from it. Stefen comes across as a version of Tylendel who has learned from his mistakes... which of course he is.
• Guardian Entity: Guards the Sorrows along with Vanyel after his death.
• The Gift: Has one of the most powerful and unique Bardic Gifts in the verse. Even outside of his pain-blocking ability, Stefen can spellbind and enchant a crowd of people.
• The Hedonist: At first.
• Hourglass Plot: He's Tylendel reincarnated. In addition to now being the "weak but mentally stable" half of the lifebond, the end of Magic's Price has him follow Vanyel on a revenge quest, lose him soon after, attempt suicide, and have to live most of his life without him by his side.
• I Just Want to Be Badass: Thanks mainly to sheer determination, he manages to keep up with Vanyel on a mission and actually winds up saving it from disaster.
• Ladykiller in Love: A gay version: he happily played the field until falling for Van.
• Legendary in the Sequel: Later books show that Stef is to the Bards what Vanyel is to Heralds — a legendary figure of great power who became the standard for all later generations.
• Lover and Beloved: With Vanyel. In regard to sex, though, this is flipped, as he has more experience than Vanyel, who's sometimes celibate for years at a time. It's how Vanyel and Stef avoid the power imbalance that Tylendel and Vanyel had. Stef brought greater mental stability and sexual experience; Vanyel greater life experience.
• Magic Music: In addition to the Bardic Gift, he has the power to soothe pain through music, which is useful for the dying King who hates being hazy from painkilling drugs but can't be without them for long.
• May–December Romance: Mildly... he's in his late teens when Van is in his early thirties. This helps keep Van from depending on him like he did with Tylendel.
• Meet Cute: Runs into Vanyel after playing his fingers to bits and snaps at him in irritation.
• Mindlink Mates: With Vanyel.
• Morality Chain: He plays a major role in keeping Vanyel sane.
• Non-Action Guy: Bards are usually not in the front lines. Normally they do get some combat training, but Stef was promoted to Master Bard after only three months as a Journeyman in order to keep him at the King's side. Even if he had been trained to fight, regardless he is out of his depth when dealing with the magical enemies that threaten Vanyel. He serves a support role instead.
• Only in It for the Money: Pre-Character Development, Stef constantly calculated the cost and gains to himself and would only help someone if it brought him money, goods or connections.
• Only Sane Man: Often the most sane and stable of the Dysfunction Junction.
• Past-Life Memories: Stef has some hints of Tylendel's past life — he calls Vanyel "ashke" and knows things about Savil and Vanyel that he shouldn't. It's mostly subconscious and serves as foreshadowing.
• Pet the Dog: Early in Magic's Price he's really into Enlightened Self-Interest, being someone who'll do good pretty much only because he'll get something back. Seeing Randale so gravely ill, and seeing the relief Stefan's playing brings him, stirs him into doing his best for the dying King, completely setting aside cost and benefit to help someone for what he notes is the first time in his life.
• Really Gets Around: Before meeting Vanyel he had quite the reputation.
• The Reliable One: Stefan quietly supports Vanyel through various crises and mental breakdowns. Whenever Vanyel needs help, advice or just someone to talk to, Stef will be there no matter how out of depth and terrified he is.
• Reincarnation Romance: He comes back to restore not only Van's lost love but his lifebond. While appearing as a spirit in the Mage Winds and Mage Storms books, he sometimes resembles Tylendel and sometimes Stefen.
• Sanity Has Advantages: Stef is reliable, self-possessed and stable with rare hints of trauma. It's implied that this stability allowed Stef to survive an entire lifetime alone after losing his lifebonded - a feat that Vanyel could barely manage.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: With Vanyel. They only get a short time together before Vanyel dies and Stef lives for 60 more years without him.
• Street Urchin: His backstory.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Mainly due to his childhood and uncertain place in life, Stefen starts out coolly pragmatic and selfish. Spending time with Vanyel teaches him to be more caring and ethical in using his power.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: It's really easy to forget that Stefen is only 18 when he and Vanyel meet. In contrast to a lot of the people around him (Vanyel and Tylendel (and a lot of other Heralds) were emotional messes at that age) and in spite of his childhood, Stefen is stable, self-possessed and confident with hints of wisdom and empathy. He has growing up to do but is still miles ahead of many other characters.