Heralds Of Valdemar / Tropes A to E

The Heralds of Valdemar series provides examples of:

The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy has its own page.

• Tropes F to O
• Tropes P to Z

Tropes starting with A

• Abdicate the Throne: Elspeth, from the position of Heir, to take on the mantle of the first Herald-Mage since Vanyel's time.
• Accidental Proposal: Tremane tries to preempt this trope early in Storm Rising. When he puts out a call for volunteers among his troops to help with the harvest (which means his soldiers working side by side with farm women), he realizes he will need to have the volunteers briefed on local courting customs. Otherwise, it's too likely one person might think they're in a casual relationship when the other thinks they're engaged.
  • On the accidental proposition side, among the Tayledras offering someone a feather or a flower is the same thing as asking "Do you want to sleep with me?" and this gesture can be accepted or rejected entirely casually. At one point Elspeth picks up a tailfeather dropped by Darkwind's bird and holds it out to him. Darkwind, understanding that she has no idea, takes it as intended but has to keep himself from laughing. He explains later without reminding her of this moment, and the next time she offers him a feather it's in full awareness of what it means.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Valdemaran mages pull off a lot of this in and following the Mage Winds trilogy, simply because they're too new at magic to know what ought to be impossible. This also leads somewhat paradoxically to the use of Sufficiently Analyzed Magic, when the artificers start getting involved. It turns out that one of the things they don't know about magic is that there are some things they can't proceed to learn about magic! Mages of more intuitive traditions, Firesong especially, are not amused.
• Achilles' Heel: The bond between Companions and Heralds has a fatal weakness - killing a Companion will often incapacitate a Herald, and Companions are big, hard-to-protect targets. The Karsites, especially, have targeted Companions for this reason.
• Action Bomb: A mage using the Final Strike technique effectively becomes one of these.
• Action Girl: Most female Heralds. Jeri, Elspeth, Tarma, and Kerowyn are excellent examples. Myste is the only confirmed non-example. Valdemar also accepts women into the Guard or regular army. Outside of Valdemar, female mercenaries are reasonably common, though noble families look down on their daughters taking up such a life, and the descendents of the Kaled'a'in don't seem to gender Action, so Action Girls are completely unremarkable.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: Both magic and science were much more advanced back in Urtho and Ma'ar's era. They had literally rerouted the ley lines to help power things like permanent Gates. Urtho appeared to understand biology and genetic engineering to a great degree - mages had been uplifting animals for some time before him, but he was the one to create gryphons entirely out of whole cloth. Also, amongst the all the Lost Technology in the vault under his ruined tower there were a number of weapons of mass destruction that were explicitly stated to be non-magical. At least one was implied to be an atomic bomb!
  • Before the Mage Wars the technique existed to transfer a mage's soul into an inanimate object, allowing them to use the senses and bodies of living people while also still able to work magic and "live" for an indefinite period of time. Need mentions having seen it done once before doing it to herself, though it's not something her apprentice had ever heard of. Several thousands of years later, various well educated mages are taken aback by the very idea of enchantments that last beyond the death of the mage who cast them and have no idea how Need did what she did.
• After-Action Patch-Up: Kero and Eldan have one in By The Sword after their first meeting, since said meeting involved her rescuing him from a Karsite priestess who was about to torture him. It leads to Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex in fairly short order. On top of Need.
• After the End: An event in the distant past called the Cataclysm violently reshaped large sections of the planet, and is generally responsible for most of history since it occurred. The Cataclysm and its immediate after-effects are depicted in the Mage Wars trilogy.
• Age-Gap Romance: Vanyel (early thirties) and Stefan (17); Talia (18) and Dirk (mid-30s); Elspeth (28) and Darkwind (20) ^note  There's some dispute on this. When Talia first comes to the Collegiem, she's told Kris' Never Live It Down story and he's mentioned as having recently got his Whites. During Talia's internship with Kris as her mentor, he mentions that he and Dirk met shortly after being Chosen, when Kris was thirteen and Dirk was eleven. Usually Herald training takes about five years. By that reckoning, Dirk is only three years older than Talia.
• Agonizing Stomach Wound: Averted at the end of Intrigues, when Mags survives multiple gut-stabs with no noted after-effects. On the other hand, the stabs are specifically noted to have missed anything vital, and he was in the hands of the Healers literally within minutes of getting the wounds.
  • During Storm Breaking, Melles deals with an attempted assassination by gut-stabbing the assassin, noting that a gut-wound is painful enough to immediately disable the man while leaving him in good enough condition for Melles to question about who hired the assassin. The gut-stab doesn't have time to kill the assassin, Melles finishes him off once he gets his answers.
• Alien Non-Interference Clause: Kal'enel and whatever god(dess) is behind the Companions hold to a rule that humans are to solve their own problems wherever possible, and divine intervention is to be restricted to situations where they can't succeed on their own; for this reason, the Companions aren't allowed to get their hooves into humans' relationship problems unless they're asked for help. The gods are not above breaking this rule if they think it necessary, however.
  • Valdemaran priests are actually not supposed to pray for their country's victory in war in order to keep from bothering the gods about such a subjective and self-serving thing as taking sides. Quick ends to a conflict and for their people not to suffer greatly, yes.
  • Even Vkandis Sunlord, the least subtle example amongst the gods, allowed and endured rampant corruption within his priesthood for centuries. He only interfered directly in time to give his people a chance to survive the cataclysm.
  • One place where this expressly does not apply is Iftel. No invading army ever crosses their border without either being turned around or turned into a smoking crater, and foreign mages are distinctly unwelcome, because the nation is protected by the direct intervention of a god who has declared the little hermit kingdom off limits. That intervention extends outside of its borders too; while there was apparently some difficulty between it and Valdemar in Vanyel's time which was largely sorted by a bit of Altar Diplomacy, seven hundred years later Valdemarans can barely say the name "Iftel" and don't believe they've ever had any trouble with it, because something turns their minds away from even thinking about it. It's Vkandis Sunlord, as it turns out, and the border defenses that he set up play a major part in Mage Storms.
• The Alliance: Between Valdemar and several neighboring kingdoms.
• All Animals Are Dogs: Deliberately invoked by the Shin'a'in in regards to their warsteeds. They've been bred over thousands of years (with magic incorporated into the beginning of the process) to change their social structure from herds (like normal horses) to packs (like dogs or wolves). While the battlesteeds are highly trainable and not as inclined to spook as regular horses, they do still come across as clever animals, keeping them distinct from Companions.
• Alliterative List: Some of the music's titles:
  • Heralds, Harpers and Havoc
  • Magic, Moondust, and Melancholy
  • Lovers, Lore, and Loss
• Alliterative Title:
  • Closer to the Chest
  • Take a Thief
  • Heralds, Harpers and Havoc
  • Magic, Moondust, and Melancholy
  • Lovers, Lore, and Loss
  • Shadow Stalker
  • Sun and Shadow
  • The Collegium Chronicles
  • Brightly Burning
• Altar Diplomacy:
  • Comes up repeatedly in the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy. Queen Elspeth the Peacemaker secured peace with Iftel by marrying one of its nobles, and after his death did not marry the man she loved but remained in widowhood, playing potential suitors against each other to Valdemar's advantage. The peace she fostered broke with her death and the next king, Randale, was reluctantly dissuaded from marrying his beloved by the knowledge that marriage with another foreign noble might secure another shaky border situation. His own successor defied this and told a disapproving Vanyel that there weren't any eligible prospects at this point anyway.
  • Queen Selenay's first marriage is to Prince Karathanelan of Rethwellen, cementing Valdemar's longstanding alliance with its southern neighbor. Unfortunately, Thanel turns out to be The Evil Prince who shortly attempts to usurp the throne for himself and is killed by Selenay's bodyguards. Their daughter Elspeth grows up with her father's crimes hanging over her head. Just a few years later, however, Selenay falls in Love at First Sight with Prince Darenthallis—of Rethwellen, Thanel's brother, so that works out.
  • Princess Elspeth herself is resigned to a political marriage as part of her duties as Heir—until she reckons up the neighboring kingdoms and realizes that all are either in stable alliances or are Valdemar's enemies. She can't marry a Rethwellen prince since those are her first cousins. Her eventual love-match with Darkwind does help establish a new alliance with the Hawkbrothers, but only informally, as she abdicates as Heir to focus on combat magic, and the Hawkbrothers don't have a hereditary authority anyway.
  • Near the end of Closer to Home, two Feuding Families are ordered by the Crown to resolve their differences with a marriage of their heirs, only son to oldest daughter. When the son seduces the youngest daughter and dies in an attempt to murder everyone else, the survivors put aside their fighting and pledge to attempt to find other, better matches for marriage.
• Always Lawful Good: Companions, which makes sense as they are functionally angels. Most are reincarnations of specifically good humans who know why they've come back, and there are a few who were never human and are extra special. Heralds also fit, being Chosen by the Companions through some combination of psychic evaluation and destiny; it's said that if they start to go bad their Companion will chastise them and try to get them back on track, and if they fully turn then they will be repudiated.
• Ambiguously Brown: The legendary Baron Valdemar himself. While it isn't mentioned in the text (because how many people actually talk about the precise shade of their skin tone in everyday conversation?) the original cover of Beyond portrays Kordas Valdemar as having the coloring of a middle-eastern man.
• Amplified Animal Aptitude: Shin'a'in warsteeds and most bondbirds are not quite Intellectual Animals, but are notably smarter than normal horses and birds thanks to extensive magically-augmented breeding programs. Some of the warsteeds' behavior, particularly as it regards their ability to learn and follow commands, is described as being more like that of a dog than a horse (see above). Bondbirds can speak mind-to-mind, with brighter ones able to form complete, grammatical sentences and have high emotional intelligence.
• Angel Unaware: It's very possible that Need is an angel in this setting - the distinction between 'angel' and 'helpful spirit' isn't very clear, but she associates closely with the Star-Eyed Goddess and the Avatars, Companions range from tolerating to liking her, she answers 'prayers' from desperate women, being picked by her feels like being Chosen only less intense, and she's found freely on the Moonpaths. An essay written by the author's husband describes the people most likely to undergo an Angelic Transformation as driven to improve the world and "a strong, stable mix of heroic, loving, resourceful, and wise." The only real evidence that she isn't is that all the more confirmedly angelic beings were selected by benevolent deities to be preserved in death and to reappear in various forms when they'll be needed - Need made herself a Soul Jar and has persisted attached to it since then.
• Angst Coma: Vanyel in Magic's Pawn and later in Magic's Price. Talia gets her coma in Arrow's Fall the old-fashioned way (torture followed by a lethal dose of poison), but stays in it due to angst, requiring Dirk and Rolan to join forces and coax her out via their psychic bonds with her.
• Animal Eyes: Nyara and An'desha have these, as the last physical remnants of their transformations at the hands of Mornelithe Falconsbane.
• Animal-Themed Fighting Style: The Black Gryphon gives us Zhaneel, a female gryphon who manages to take down three makaar solo by using her greater speed and ability to gain altitude to perform strike and run kills on them. Skandrannon, another gryphon known for unusual fighting styles, likens this to a falcon diving after much larger, stronger prey. This serves as subtle foreshadowing that Zhaneel's body type is deliberately based more off a falcon than the eagle traditionally associated with gryphons, both in the series and in real life.
• Answer to Prayers: there are many gods, and at least some of them do respond directly to prayers and appeals for aid. In one book, the Star-Eyed Goddess of the Shin'a'in makes a direct appearance in response to a prayer by one of Her followers. In other stories, Vkandis Sunlord, God of Karse, sometimes acts directly in response to prayers by His followers.
• Anti-Villain: Grand Duke Tremane, as decent a man as could survive in the Imperial court.
• The Archmage: The word is never used, but several of the characters fit:
  • Urtho, the ancient Mage of Silence, was possibly the most powerful mage in the entire series. He could do just about anything with magic, including create new life-forms such as gryphons, hertasi, and tervardi. No other mage save Ma'ar could even come close to that, and many of Ma'ar's creations, like the makaar, were just imitations of Urtho's.
  • Urtho's arch-enemy Ma'ar was almost as powerful and much more aggressive and malicious in his approach to his goals. All of his incarnations through the centuries qualify as archmages.
  • Vanyel Ashkevron fits in many ways, after he achieves his full power. He's immensely powerful, highly skilled, and well-educated in the ways of magic.
  • The ancient mage who goes by the name of Need may be trapped in a sword, but she's also thousands of years old and experienced in both magic and warfare to a degree that few can match. Whatever the problem, Need is likely to have an idea for how to solve it.
  • Emperor Charliss of the Eastern Empire is an extremely powerful mage — it's a requirement of the job, since the Empire runs on Magitek and weak emperors are always targets for assassination. A lot of his power goes into the spells that keep him alive, but he has a lot of lesser mages to draw on, so he still has a lot of power available for doing other things.
• Arranged Marriage: Forced marriage is illegal in Valdemar, but political marriages among the nobility often get a pass unless one or both parties work up the nerve to object openly. The practice is also common in other countries.
  • Talia gets told on her thirteenth birthday by her father's wives that she is old enough for marriage and that one will be arranged for her from the offers her father received. The closest she gets to a choice in the matter is being asked if she'd like to be the secondary wife of someone old enough to be her father, the primary wife of someone closer to her own age (with her father deciding which offer out of these subsets to accept without any further input from Talia herself - she doesn't even get told the names of any of the people who had made an offer), or spend the rest of her life as a cloistered nun. This prompts her to declare that she doesn't want to be married and would rather be a Herald, and then she runs out of the house, to be Chosen shortly after.
  • In the first book of the Collegium Chronicles, Healer Trainee Bear goes home for the winter holidays only to be told that marriage has been arranged for him with a neighbor girl. He wants nothing to do with this, and three books later gets out of it by eloping with the actual girl he loves, Bardic Trainee Lena.
  • The political maneuvering behind arranged marriages is a theme of Closer to Home. Many of the young ladies (and, more to the point, their parents) are hoping to land wealthy merchants who will parade them at social functions, instead of older nobles merely looking for someone to provide an heir and a spare. The Double Standard between ladies, who are expected to be faithful at least until the aforementioned heirs are produced, and young men, for whom mistresses and visits to brothels are winked at, is explored. The more sexually liberated Heralds decide that something ought to be done about a culture that raises girls to aspire to no more than a good match.
  • Bear's situation happens roughly a decade or so before Closer to Home, which happens at least a century before Talia's. Talia's situation is actually quite unusual in 'current-day' Valdemar ^note  When Talia mentions her upcoming marriage to Gaytha the housekeeper, she's shocked and calls it 'barbaric', outside the nobility and especially royalty, for obvious reasons. Once Talia becomes a Herald, the only actual arranged marriage we see is the proposed one between Elspeth and Ancar.
  • Kethry's own brother had her married by proxy to a pederast when she was eleven. This was illegal in her nation, too, but it took a decade or so before she had the means and courage to call her brother and 'husband' out on this.
• Artifact Title: "Herald" is an in-universe example. They were named because the first three Chosen were the King of Valdemar, his son and heir, and his court herald; King Valdemar reasoned that a kingdom could only have one King and one Heir, but could have many Heralds. Very rarely does a Herald actually act as herald, and when they do it is duly Lampshaded.
• Acceptable Breaks from Canon: In the mainline novels, it's very unusual for either member of a Herald-Companion pair to survive the death of the other for long. Pretty much the only exception is the Monarch's Own and the Monarch's Own Companion - Talamir survives Taver's death and is Chosen by Rolan but is never back to his old self; Rolan goes on after Talamir's death and Chooses Talia. In short stories in the anthology novels, written by guest authors, it's relatively common.
• Ascended Demon: Attempted in The Oathbound, at the end of which Thalhkarsh is Brought Down to Normal and captured by priests who hope to redeem her. There is no indication of whether or not the project succeeded, as she isn't mentioned again in any other book.
• Asleep for Days: It's very, very common for protagonists and major characters to wake up and be told this, after making some usually climactic effort.
• Author Appeal: Mercedes Lackey has a number of interests that work their way into her novels.
  • Falconry. She's actually worked in raptor rehabilitation, which is largely the reason why we get things ike the Hawkbrothers and their bondbirds, the gryphons, and the avian humanoid tervardi.
  • Equestrianism. Companions are the most obvious result, but Shin'a'in warsteeds are a slightly less wish-fulfillment version of it too, and regular Shin'a'in horses are almost like very well-trained normal ones.
  • Music. Many characters are musical in some fashion, most notably the bards, who use Magic Music. Many others are not, however — Dreadful Musicians are fair game for humor, as in other Lackey works.
  • More philosophically, it's not a Valdemar novel until someone extols the virtue of practicality. None of the good characters desire upper-class luxuries (except Firesong, who very nearly turns evil and is mocked for his delicacy by everyone else), and the narrative goes on detailed tangents about plumbing and logistics. Whenever a heroic aristocrat appears, it's with reassurances that they're not like the other rich people and they just want to be treated the same as everybody else. Pretty weird for a staunchly medieval culture. Also, despite their lack of interest in pursuing luxury, Tayledras Vales are climate controlled and always utterly comfortable and lush.
  • May–December Romance is another one that recurs throughout her work. (Lackey herself is 16 years older than her husband, which may or may not have something to do with it.)
  • Bathing. Those plumbing tangents are frequently used to justify giving the characters tubs of hot water to soak in, and if there isn't extensive plumbing then there are hot springs. Taken to extremes with the Tayledras, whose Vales are absolutely dotted with hot springs sculpted to be comfortable to relax in and who bathe constantly when not out in the field.
  • Winter! Hardly a book goes by without time lovingly spent on some aspect of winter life, positive or negative. The north of Valdemar in particular gets some heavy snowfall. Special mention goes to Talia and Kris, getting snowed into a tiny cabin for a month and then having to shovel their way to the road, and to Duke Tremane, who has to fortify a town that keeps getting assailed with storms.
• Author Avatar: the character Myste is an obvious (and admitted) author self-insert; to make it clear how obvious, "Misty" is the author's nickname. And to make it even more obvious, Myste's position in the court is Herald-Chronicler, aka 'court historian', aka 'she writes down everything that's happening'. (She is also plump, Blind Without 'Em, and totally useless at any sort of fighting whatsoever, which dials down the potential Sue quotient considerably, though her relationship with Alberich dials it back up a few notches. Guess who else is plump and Blind Without 'Em?)
  • Leslac the Bard, created to explain Series Continuity Errors with regard to the songs about Tarma and Kethry, has a name taken from Leslie Fisher and Mercedes Lackey. Unlike Myste he's hated by the other characters.
• Author Catchphrase:
  • Lackey re-uses several proverbs across different trilogies and cultures, attributing them to various in-universe sources. The most common one is probably "it is easier to apologize than to ask permission."
  • She also uses the phrase "hit in the back of the head with a board" frequently. It seems that is the only way to describe shock in her world.
  • Every character in the Valdemar universe licks their lips before speaking, no matter what they're feeling.
  • In the most recent books, Lackey has been overusing the term al fresco, an Italian phrase meaning "in the open air", with no explanation of how the Valdemarians know Italian.
• Authority in Name Only: Karse is technically a kingdom, but everyone both in and outside the country knows that the king has no real power outside his palace and actual control of the country lies with the priesthood. The Mage Storms trilogy hammers this in by having Karse's ambassador to Valdemar be appointed by the Son of the Son rather than the court, and when Solaris makes a state visit to Haven, she is treated as a visiting head of state rather than merely the head of a church visiting a country where most people practice totally unrelated religions.
• Automaton Horses: Mainly averted (see Shown Their Work), but justified with the Companions, who use node magic to augment their endurance and can therefore run much faster and for much longer than any ordinary horse. They do still need to rest and eat eventually, although they are also much more capable of taking care of their own needs than ordinary horses.

Tropes starting with B

• Baby-Doll Baby: In Arrow's Flight, Talia encounters a Weather Witch whose child drowned when she wasn't attentive enough. She has gone mad from grief and guilt and is convinced that a rag doll wrapped in a blanket is her son. Giving her someone else's unwanted child, who is apparently the reincarnation of her baby, restores her to sanity and given a second chance she is a model single parent.
  • What convinced Vanyel to sire a child for the King's Own Herald is finding her weeping over a broken baby doll as she tells him she can't stand it anymore, she needs a baby.
• Background Magic Field: Composed of Life Energy, which flows like water into Ley Lines and nodes, and is used to power virtually all Functional Magic.
• Badass Boast: There are a few examples, particularly in the songs written to go along with the novels
  • Need, from the album Oathbreakers, is about (and from the perspective of) the titular sword, Need, and serves both as a backstory for the blade and one of these, particularly the closing lines:
    A thousand woman-slayers by my edge and point have died, I am Need! I am Need! I am Need!
  • Send in the Silver Gryphons, from the album Owlflight, serves as one of these for the mixed Gendarmerie/Paramilitary of the city of White Gryphon, the Silver Gryphons.
• Based on a Dream: In the foreword to some editions of Arrows of the Queen Mercedes Lackey says this is where her initial idea for the book came from, and expresses irritation for this as a cliché.
• Battle Couple: It's easier to list who is not.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Not a hard rule for humans, though a majority of the heroes are noted to be good looking, particularly the Tayledras. It's hard to find a book with a Companion or a gryphon that doesn't go into raptures about their beauty. Gryphons were specifically designed by a mage with an artistic bend to be gorgeous; notably, his enemy's warped copy and counter, the makaar, are all ugly brutes.
• Beauty Is Bad: Not a general rule in the series, but Talia is notably mistrustful of handsome men thanks to childhood abuse at the hands of her older brother Justus, whose looks are described as "angelic." She's more comfortable with "attractively homely" Dirk than with his gorgeous friend Kris, and admits to Kris that she'd rather he were cross-eyed or had a few warts or something.
• Because Destiny Says So: Between advanced psychic powers, powerful wizards, and activist gods, these people have turned Because Destiny Says So into a science.
  • The usual explanation for why Companions Choose who they do, when they do it and why people with the Gifts that will be needed always seem to turn up in time to get them trained before they have to be put to use.
  • Lampshaded in Arrow's Fall, among other instances. To paraphrase: "The Firestarter we desperately needed to win this battle just happened to spend the night with a ForeSeer, who had a prophetic dream and kicked him out of bed just in time to get here? How does that happen?" To directly quote: "Pure, dumb Heralds' luck."
  • It's justified in The Last Herald-Mage as a magical web binding Heralds and their Companions that operates below the conscious level. Vanyel deliberately enhanced this web and tied it to the Heartstone he created beneath Haven. In Mage Storms, the workings of the web and its spells are explained completely.
  • The Mage Winds trilogy might as well have "Wow, we were lucky!" as its catchphrase, as characters continuously manage to get through difficult circumstances by just happening to do this or that, or by Falconsbane grabbing the Idiot Ball. All according to the gods' plans, apparently.
• Being Watched: Weaponized when Vanyel arranges for any non-Herald mages entering into Valdemar to be monitored by minor air spirits called vrondi, causing the mages to feel that they are being watched all the time. Unsurprisingly, this makes people extremely anxious to leave — even driving those who can't (or won't) leave insane — and Valdemar is not bothered by magic for several hundred years.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Herald Talia is one of the nicest, kindest, and (literally!) most empathetic people in the world. But she has a point beyond which you just don't push it, and if you do... see the Mind Rape entry below.
• Big Bad: Ma'ar, in the background or foreground of just about all of the novels through Mage Winds. After he's finally disposed of, the series lacks a clear major villain, substituting The Empire and The End of the World as We Know It.
  • And the Cataclysm came at the end of the war with Ma'ar, bringing him back around to be the indirect villain for Mage Storms.
• Big Good:
  • Urtho, in The Black Gryphon. An interesting example because he didn't want to be a leader, but was forced into it because he was the only one with power who would stand up to Ma'ar. In Mage Storms, we learn that the historical view of Urtho varies among the Shin'a'in, the gryphons, and others.
  • Solaris, in Mage Storms. As the first genuine High Priest of Vkandis in centuries, she has some pretty awesome powers but is only shown to exercise them once.
• Binding Ancient Treaty: Established between Valdemar and Rethwellen at the end of Oathbreakers, then somehow forgotten by Valdemar by the time of By the Sword, when Valdemar needs Rethwellen's help fighting Hardorn. Kero, whose grandmother Kethry was vital in the events that forged the agreement, provides a gentle reminder of its existence.
• Bioweapon Beast: A few characters with some awareness of ancient history know or speculate that creatures like colddrakes, basilisks, firebirds etc were created as weapons millenia ago. In the "modern day", colddrakes and several others are just monsters, basilisks are dangerous but predictable and their ability to consume the remains of other monsters is very useful, and firebirds can be coexisted with given great care. Certainly there was a Magitek era in which archmages uplifted and heavily altered animals and created entirely new species. The Black Gryphon, which takes place at the end of that era, doesn't mention monsters other than makaar, which are Ma'ar's counter to Urtho's gryphons.
• Birthday Hater: Since Holderkin birthday celebrations consist of the birthday child receiving a lecture from the adults of the household about the greater responsibilities that come with age, Talia doesn't celebrate or even spend much time thinking about her birthday once she becomes a Herald.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: the only-mentioned Lady Naril in the Arrows trilogy. Midway through book 1, Talia is being badly affected by pretty much everyone in the immediate vicinity burning up with rage, and Jadus tells her why: a young Herald named Dirk has been horribly played by a young Court beauty. Naril made Dirk fall wildly in love with her, all for the purpose of getting her claws into his best friend Kris, who had previously rejected her. A flashback by Kris in Arrow's Flight spells it out as "Come to her bed until she tired of (Kris) or she would make Dirk's life hell". But when Dirk finds her out, she unleashes a vicious verbal attack that flays his ego to shreds - Kris tells Talia later that he truly thinks it was only Dirk's Companion that stopped him throwing himself in the river that same night. But the worst that can be done is to banish her from Court in disgrace. This also becomes a subtle Chekhov's Gun: the tragic and near-disastrous cycle of miscommunication between Talia, Dirk and Kris mid-way through Arrow's Fall is due, among other things, to Dirk being utterly incapable of believing any woman would want him when Kris is around.
• Bittersweet Ending
  • The Last Herald-Mage trilogy ends with Vanyel dead and True Magic no longer known in Valdemar, but he leaves the country so well guarded against magic that it doesn't suffer a serious major incursion for centuries. Also, Vanyel and his lover Stefan get a personal happy ending, serving as a spirit guardians of the northern border together along with the spirit of Vanyel's faithful Companion Yfandes. In Storm Breaking it comes up that they were bound to that border, almost always with no other company, for seven hundred years, much longer than they expected, but the resolution of the book releases them from this duty and lets them pass on together, at which point Lackey has stated they've gone "to Bermuda."
  • Brightly Burning ends with the Karsite army burned to ash and Valdemar saved, but Lavan Firestorm and Kalira dead. It wasn't even a heroic death — with his Companion gone, Lan had lost the last thing keeping his already-collapsing sanity together. Cue the inferno.
• Black Magic: Blood Magic and demon summoning. However, Blood Magic is not considered evil when it's only the caster's own blood (or Life Energy) involved, and/or the sacrifice is voluntary.
• Blood Magic: The Life Energy released by pain and the shedding of blood is a rich source of power. It's also a lot easier (and more addictive) to use than node magic, to the point where even people without mage gifts can use primitive forms of it. Of course, taking it from unwilling victims is evil and effectively treated as cannibalism — once you've practiced blood magic, it forever stains your soul.
  • On the other hand, shedding blood as a voluntary sacrifice is benign. The Earth-binding rituals that unite a ruler to their country involve mixing their own blood with the soil and consuming it, and under the right circumstances it's possible for a ruler to give their life to heal the land. Something like this was required at the Goddess's decree to restore the Dorisha Plains — four shamans were basically told they had been volunteered, and all of them selflessly went.
  • Final Strikes can be seen as using Blood Magic as a mage spends themselves all at once to make an Action Bomb, though blood is less emphasized than life force.
• Bluffing the Murderer:
  • A variant is employed by Talia and Elspeth in Arrow's Fall to catch the traitor in Selenay's court, by attempting to lure him into an Engineered Public Confession. It works better than expected, leading to a full Villainous Breakdown.
  • Another one is used by Karal in Storm Warning to catch the mole responsible for Ulrich's death, by presenting himself as an easy target for assassination.
  • A pre-pubescent Skif, in Take A Thief, manages to convince Alberich that the best way to catch a ring of child-slavers is for Skif to pretend to be a particularly sad Street Urchin and get abducted, with Alberich following the snatchers to their boss.
• Boarding School of Horrors: Lavan attends a day school of this in Brightly Burning.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: Vkandis does this to reestablish his true priesthood in a truly unmistakable way - see Smite Me, O Mighty Smiter.
• Bond Creatures: The Companions, most prominently; also the bondbirds of the Tayledras. The Firecats of Karse may answer to this trope too. They're more independent-minded than their cousins the Companions, but still ultimately attached to one person. Kyree also seem to end up in this category at times.
• Bondage Is Bad: Zigzagged. There are multiple villains who use bondage and sexual torture to gain magic, obtain control over others, or just get their sadistic kicks. Notables include Hadenalith in The White Gryphon, Mornelithe Falconsbane in the Mage Winds, and King Ancar in Arrow's Fall and Winds of Fury. However, The White Gryphon implies that Amberdrake was trained in BDSM when he snarks that he's forgotten more about knots and ties than Hadenalith would ever dream. In Winds of Change, Starblade's therapy includes BDSM sessions to undo the mental and physical corruption that Falconsbane wrought on his body. While there are no on-screen depictions of good characters practicing BDSM, Lackey doesn't wholly condemn BDSM, instead indicating that lack of consent and violation of autonomy are what make the villains truly villainous.
• Break-In Threat: In one book, a minor noble sends an assassin after the Empire's heir (who is also an assassin). The heir kills the man and leaves his body in the nursery of the noble's son.
  • Played for Laughs with Skif in his early years, especially in the Arrows trilogy. During his traineeship, one of his secret hobbies is breaking into the houses of certain highly placed nobles; he doesn't take anything, instead he leaves notes with sarcastic remarks on their lack of security (after you read Take A Thief, you get the impression these nobles were often selected by Alberich in his job as Spymaster). Elspeth also mentions in Arrow's Fall that Skif makes a habit of leaving funny notes - and sweets - in the 'secret' compartments of her desk.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: an unusual and hilarious version. For the DAW 30th anniversary anthology, Lackey wrote a short story where all the main characters of the Valdemar books to that point manifest in her bedroom and call her out on the Trauma Conga Line she's inflicted on them. Lackey apologizes specifically to Talia, saying she hadn't yet learned at that point in her writing career when to throttle back on the urge to show off what she'd researched specifically, Talia getting her feet crushed during her torture in Arrow's Fall. She even gets called out by ''Myste''! Lackey offers her Alberich as a love interest to buy her off.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Talia, quite comprehensively, in both Arrow's Flight and Arrow's Fall, albeit for separate reasons.
  • Vanyel throughout the Last Herald-Mage series. Each book puts him through a separate Trauma Conga Line.
• Brick Joke: In Magic's Promise, due to his father still thinking that All Gays Are Pedophiles, Vanyel ends up making a pledge that all children in Forst Reach are safe from his advances so he can spend time with a newly befriended nephew without him getting any ideas. In frustration of having to make the pledge in the first place, he ends up including "every damn thing down to the sheep". At the very end of the book, he's drinking with one of the few members of his household without any wrong ideas about homosexuality and he indirectly gets asked about his sex life. Celibate for three years at that point, Vanyel replies in irritation that it's been so long that both his (male, but much older) drinking buddy and the sheep are starting to look like options to him.
  "Stick to the sheep, they don't snore."
  • In Magic's Price Vanyel gets very drunk the night before a major spellcasting, and is very hung over the next day. Yfandes completely enjoys this, and Vanyel swears he will find a way to get a companion drunk in revenge. In the Mage Winds series, when the power of a Vale Heartstone is moved to Valdemar's Heartstone, the Companions all have a magical hangover from the aftereffects. Lampshaded by Gwena to Elspeth that she would no longer mock her when she was 'wine sick'.
• Broken Bird: Winterhart of The Black Gryphon was a nascent Empath as a teen, but nobody noticed it. When the court of the High King was murdered by agents of Ma'ar with the aid of a fear-inducing artifact, she was particularly vulnerable and fled in terror, with psychic wounds that persist until Amberdrake breaks through her shell and helps her deal with them. Amberdrake himself also qualifies to a certain extent as he was a recognized Empath and Healer from a very young age until sent to a renowned, cutting-edge medical school that refused to recognize magical/occult abilities. Being around the sick, dying, and injured with inadequate emotional shields or training very nearly killed Amberdrake. Then he fled the school before it was overrun by Ma'ar's forces and returned home... only to find his childhood home razed to the ground and his entire family gone.
• Bureaucratically Arranged Marriage: In Closer to Home, Prince Sedric tries to force two Feuding Families to reconcile via Altar Diplomacy, by ordering Brand of House Raeylen to marry the oldest daughter of House Chendlar—which backfires badly when Violetta, youngest daughter of Chendlar, falls hard for him. Brand manipulates the situation and nearly manages to kill off both families and inherit their lands.
• Burn the Witch!: Until Solaris' reforms, this was the fate of any magically or psychically gifted Karsite not chosen for the priesthood. Specifically this is why Alberich is now a Valdemaran Herald rather than a Karsite Captain; his Companion had to rescue him from a burning barn after he too obviously used precognition to save a village from a bandit raid.
• Bury Your Gays: One of the more notable inversions of this trope occurs in The Last Herald-Mage. The tragic suicide of Tylendel, Vanyel's first love, sets him on the path to become the titular last Herald-Mage, and the gods even return Tylendel to him as Bard Stefen, and then reunite them after death in apology for his suffering.

Tropes starting with C

• Call-Back / Call-Forward: (depending on reading order).
  • In the later parts of By the Sword, Valdemar has to hire Kerowyn's Skybolts to bolster their war with Hardorn. Talia and Dirk are complimenting Kerowyn on the excellent behaviour of the Skybolts - no rape, pillaging or even scaring the populace! - and Kerowyn, annoyed by what she sees as condescension, starts a Calling the Old Man Out speech along the lines of "We're professionals, FFS! What did you expect?". She then remembers that Valdemar hasn't needed anything but it's own standing Army for at least a couple of centuries, and the only experience anyone in Valdemar has had with mercenary troops in living memory was with the Tedrels (an entire nation of Jerkass mercs, blacklisted by the Mercenary Guild for being assholes decades ago, who tried to invade Valdemar with conquest in mind, and killed the current monarch's father and predecessor in the subsequent bloody war). Realising that the remarks come from genuine ignorance, she restricts herself to those few lines. In later-published books (namely Exile's Honor) we actually see the Tedrel War, and you understand exactly why people in Valdemar are astonished to witness mercenaries behaving like actual professionals who understand the value of good PR.
  • In Into the West, which is set before Companions even existed, a cat meows in a way that almost sounds like a proper answer to something it was just told. Kordas, who has spent the book up to that point getting introduced to the Eldritch Location that is the Pelagir forest the hard way, internally quips that he wouldn't be surprised if the cat had actually spoken at that point. Then he extends the joke to include the idea of talking horses.
• Calling the Old Man Out:
  • Vanyel to his father in Magic's Pawn, regarding his atrocious mistreatment of Vanyel in an attempt to prevent him from "turning gay".
    • Vanyel's deeply protective older sister gets in a few hits too.
  • Skandranon to Urtho in The Black Gryphon, regarding the latter's functional enslavement of the Gryphon race. He relents when he learns Urtho's true motives.
  • Bear gets to do this twice during the Collegium Chronicles. The first time is by proxy; he rakes his father's spy over the coals knowing a full report will be on its way to Dad before the day's out. The second time, direct to his father, it's this trope combined with You're Not My Father.
• Call to Adventure:
  • Delivered without fail by Companions; their Chosen may jump at the Call or try to refuse the Call, depending on their situation at the time. All accept eventually, though on one notable occasion the Call rejected one of the Called.
  • Subverted in one of the short stories. The First-Person Smartass narrator, Don, lampshades at one point that that's the point when some meddling Companion is supposed to Choose him. Instead, he meets a MindHealer who reveals that he has a less-adventurous - but still important - job to do as another MindHealer.
  • Also done a bit more quietly by Need. The people she chooses as her bearers start to feel antsy about staying in one place for too long, as she wants them roaming the world and trying to right wrongs. It's not a big deal for Kethry, who's a wandering mage and has many goals herself that would be met by traveling and resolving difficult situations, but her granddaughter Kerowyn is plagued by Need's dreams and yearning during her whole period of training as a fighter.
• Cannot Tell a Lie: Inflicted on Duke Tremane by High Priest Solaris in retribution for his murder of her friend. The basic Heraldic Truth Spell will make any lie obvious; the advanced version forces someone to tell the truth. Deception is also impossible in mind-to-mind communication — if you lie, the other person will know it. However, Gwena the Companion is able to lie and does so when her Chosen asks "Are you a mage?"
• Canon Discontinuity: In the first two Arrows novels, it is mentioned that a Companion repudiates his Herald about once every couple of centuries. Starting with the third, the only repudiation to have occurred is with Tylendel in Magic's Pawn. Granted, there may be a difference between severing a new Companion bond (as with a trainee who decides Heraldry isn't for them) and breaking a fully-formed, mature bond. Breaking a new bond hurts, but breaking a mature bond is devastating.
• Canon Welding: The Tarma and Kethry stories pre-date the original Arrows trilogy — Oathbreakers established that they had all taken place in Rethwellan and other kingdoms south of Valdemar, thus linking the two series.
• Captain Ersatz: Herald Jakyr's family's religion is a direct copy of the Quiverfull movement, and he actually namedrops the idea of "a quiverful of children."
• The Cassandra:
  • This trope is also why Alberiech doesn't speak up in regards to why he doesn't like Orthallen. The fact he's originally from Karse wouldn't help his case.
• Cast from Calories: There's a similar effect in the Mage Winds trilogy. At least once when Darkwind is training Elspeth, he has to remind her to eat because use of mage energy 1) uses up the mage's personal energy reserves (a.k.a. previous meal) and 2) suppresses the appetite of new mages. Elspeth knows she's getting more experienced with magic when she finds herself ravenous after a working.
• Cast from Hit Points: Mages who are low on Mana can do this. The ultimate version is known as a Final Strike and is invariably suicidal for the mage attempting it. It's also possible for mind-mages to overstress their Psychic Powers into at best a nasty headache, often unconsciousness, and at worst a coma.
• Cataclysm Backstory: The aptly named Cataclysm; see After the End and World-Wrecking Wave.
• Cat Girl: Nyara, also a Mad Wizard's Beautiful Daughter, is this because her father magically experimented on her with the changes he intended to work on himself.
• Celestial Paragons and Archangels: The Grove-Born Companions are essentially archangels in horse form. The Firecats of Karse and the Avatars of Kal'enel also qualify, though those are all virtuous former humans.
• The Chains of Commanding: Urtho suffers from this more noticeably than any other major ruler. The war with Ma'ar forces him to some rather extreme (and for him, amoral) acts that he profoundly regrets. Kerowyn also wrestles with the obligations of leadership in the third act of By the Sword after becoming leader of the Skybolts mercenary company, and one of the songs Lackey wrote to accompany the Vows and Honor books describes "The Price of Command" from the perspective of a leader in a similar position.
• Changeling Fantasy: Of a sort. Heraldic Trainees plucked away by their Companions from massively abusive childhoods usually find their "real" home and family in the Heraldic Circle. Arrows of the Queen gets close to lampshading it since before Talia gets Chosen, she has a fantasy of such a thing happening to her.
• Changing of the Guard: As noted above, the focus character changes between trilogies. (Did you expect the same characters for all 3000 years?) Certain villains (most especially Ma'ar) put in appearances throughout the series, and a number of protagonists have persisted as well, largely by Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence.
• Character’s Most Hated Song: Kerowyn absolutely hates the song "Kerowyn's Ride", about her rescue of her brother's fiancee. Though in this case, part of her problem is that she has perfect pitch and many of the people who sing it to flatter her ...don't.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Oathbreaking ceremony is mentioned in passing early in the first part of Oathbreakers, and unsurprisingly is a key part of the novel's resolution. Any piece of lore that Jadrek mentions also inevitably pays off at some point over the course of the story, most notably the legend of the Sword that Sings.
  • Urtho's personal portal into the High King's palace in The Black Gryphon. In a similar vein, the Antimagic box he has Skandranon "bomb" Ma'ar's forces with. The latter also serves to establish the explosive potency of magic nullification.
  • Karal's power is to be a "Channel", a very rare ability that can't even be trained. It's established right away in Storm Warning, which is good because he ends up using this ability at the climax of each and every novel in that series.
  • Talia is taught the Heralds' arrow-code in Arrow's Flight, and the fact that the exposition is depicted in full is a pretty clear forewarning that she will have need of the code's direst signals. Sure enough, she has need of the signal for "catastrophe, situation helpless, do not attempt rescue" in the next book.
  • A very subtle one, depending on whether you read the books in publishing or chronological order: in Arrows of the Queen, Talia hears the Death Bell for the first time, and Keren explains that "there used to be a little chapel in Companion's Field" attached to the bell tower that holds the Death Bell, though "it's no longer there". In Magic's Price you find out why: Tylendel dies by jumping from the bell tower. A few days later, while Tylendel's lying in state in the chapel, Vanyel cuts his wrists and the rescue party does considerable damage to the chapel in order to get to him in time. It could also be that after the chapel became the scene of one of the greatest ever tragedies of the Heraldic circle, and nearly another tragedy as a direct consequence, they decided the chapel was best removed regardless of damage.
• Chekhov's Gunman: Several characters Talia meets in Arrow's Flight, particularly the trader Evan, play a part in advancing the plot in later books.
• The Chessmaster: The gods, collectively, are the setting's ultimate chessmasters, manipulating the entire history of Velgarth from the Cataclysm onward to ensure that humanity can prevent a repeat performance when the Mage Storms hit.
• Chessmaster Sidekick: Court-Baron Melles' valet, who is a gifted assassin in semi-retirement.
• Child by Rape: An'desha's mother, and for that matter his daughter Nyara.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: Deconstructed with Need, which forces Chronic Hero Syndrome upon its bearers with no regard for any sense of proportion or self-preservation, before she wakes up in the Mage Winds trilogy. Played straight by Heralds, for whom it's more or less contractually obligated. It shows up among the Healers, too, especially during plague situations.
• Circuit Judge: One of the primary everyday functions of the Heralds.
• Circus of Magic: In Winds of Fury, the protagonists, who have a variety of magic, Psychic Powers, and Bond Creatures in the shape of large white horses, sneak into an enemy nation using a Needle in a Stack of Needles approach—they use their illusions and showy magic to disguise themselves as carnival performers, hucksters, and charlatans, and travel towards the capital as part of an actual carnival troupe. Performing in carnivals seems to be a common occupation for low-power mages, making it an excellent disguise.
• Clingy MacGuffin:
  • Need. Even Kerowyn, who refuses to allow Need to have the kind of hold over her that it did over her grandmother, isn't entirely sure she could get rid of it if she really needed to, and — considering the pain she went through the one time she almost lost it — generally isn't willing to find out.
  • Friendly Fire, a short story in Oathblood, has Tarma and Kethry getting a cursed coin that requires serious action to get rid of. It can't be thrown away, it has to be taken freely, though whoever takes it doesn't have to know that it's an ill-luck talisman.
• Closet Key: Tylendel, for Vanyel. Firesong seems to be this for An'desha, but it is ultimately subverted as If It's You, It's Okay.
• Clothespin Nose Plug: At one point in Changes (book 3 of the Collegium Chronicles), while Mags is searching for a team of assassins sent to Haven, he discovers the assassins eliminated the previous team for failure. The bodies had been left in a sealed building during summer and had begun to rot by the time they were found. Several Guardsmen throw up from the stench before one of them starts handing out scarves soaked in mint for everyone to wrap around their faces.
• The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes: Heralds can often fix anyone's troubles but their own. Comes up particularly in Arrow's Fall, where — irony of ironies — the Herald with Empathy as her Gift and "most trusted adviser" as her job title cannot resolve any of her interpersonal problems until the end of the book. Only there, when her Love Interest is literally in the room and tries to leave in a snit, can she mindwhammy him into listening to her.
• Color-Coded Characters: Valdemaran Heralds (white), Bards (red), and Healers (green) wear distinct, Highly Conspicuous Uniforms because being highly visible is part of their jobs. It's also observed that the colors in question are difficult to counterfeit: red and green dye are expensive and white cloth is hard to keep white. Each group's trainees also wear distinctively-colored (but less conspicuous) uniforms: Heraldic trainees in grey instead of white, Bardic trainees in rust-red instead of scarlet, and Healers in pale green instead of forest green. In addition, the Collegium's Armsmaster wears Herald's "Whites" done in grey darker than the trainee uniforms. This started as a personal habit of Alberich, but his successor Kerowyn did the same thing, cementing it into a tradition that seems likely to last.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: Different forms of magic are sometimes associated with or seen in different colors. The most commonly seen ones get spelled out in the Last Herald Mage trilogy - blue is associated with "true" magic, green with healing magic, red with psychic powers or "mind" magic, and gold with connections to the divine.
• Color Me Black: In Oathbound, Tarma and Kethry foil a bandit party that's been preying on caravans, killing the men outright and slaying the women after the bandits rape them. They kill the bandits, but save their leader. Said bandit leader gets transformed by illusion magic into a buxom blond woman, stripped naked, and sent back to his fellows. This comes back to bite the duo later, when the leader, having survived the experience, joins forces with the demon Thalkarsh.
• Combat Pragmatist: The main philosophy of Herald-Weaponmasters Alberich and Kerowyn — forget grace, dignity, or any illusions about a "fair fight"; just attack for maximum damage with whatever you've got on hand. It's probably not a coincidence that they were both successful professional warriors ^note  Alberich was the youngest ever Captain in the Karsite Army, despite having no connections or wealth to fuel his rise, and Kerowyn was the Captain of a successful mercenary company before they were Chosen.
• Comes Great Responsibility: All Heralds are devoted to Duty above all else, even if their innate psychic Gifts are not that strong. For those whose Gifts are strong, they'll work themselves to death trying to take care of all the things that only they can do.
  • This comes up particularly in the story of Vanyel, who wasn't thrilled at the idea of becoming a Herald after the Herald-related Trauma Conga Line he'd just been through. He finally signs on when he realizes that good people are being menaced by forces that only he has the power to fight.
• Coming of Age Story: Many of the series' heroes are teenagers at their first appearance, and the stories follow their growth into adulthood as much as their progress on The Quest.
• Common Hollywood Sex Traits: Over and over, the stories seem to have no clue how female sexuality actually works. Having sex for the first time is always painful and bloody, no matter how skilled the partner or how turned on the woman is. Talia, Amily, and Violetta all fall prey to this, with the text of first-time intercourse all describing the "stab of pain", despite their partners taking time and care.
  • Violetta's case is particularly aggravating, as it combines the pain with a huge dose of "Hymens Don't Work Like That". Dia rants that if Violetta had sex with Brand, everyone would somehow "know" she'd been "deflowered". In actuality, they wouldn't. Hymens can not only be easily torn by everyday exertion — not to mention masturbation — but often form as a ring of tissue that doesn't block anything. Not even a doctor can tell if a woman is a virgin.
  • Kerowyn has a more realistic first time as a teenager with an also-teenaged partner barely more experienced than her. It hurts a little without being as pronounced as above and her lover finishes quickly and falling asleep. She feels frustrated and disappointed afterward because one, he didn't bring her to orgasm and two, she subconsciously desires to connect with him in mind as well as body; a desire he can't fulfill (and isn't even aware of). As the relationship continues, he becomes more skilled and she lowers her expectations until they're both satisfied. But she never gets what she truly wants out of sex until she meets Herald Eldan.
• Competence Porn: The Heralds are essentially ideal coworkers. If you've ever wondered what a group could do without pesky real-life problems- bureaucracy, laziness, traitors, lack of funding- getting in the way, the series is for you. Also, they are adored by all and get to ride cool white horses. Notably, Talia fantasized about being saved from her crappy life by Heralds long before she started dreaming of becoming one.
• Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like:
  • Alberich is sentenced to be burned to death for saving a village from bandits. Why? Because he learned that the village would need to be saved through ForeSight, which marked him as a witch in the eyes of the Karsite priesthood.
  • Alberich himself does this afterwards because he's been "rescued" by his sworn enemy, which earns him the undying(ish) hatred of his countrymen. ^note Particularly when he reasons out, and Kantor admits, that Kantor triggered his ForeSight to occur especially strongly in public to bring matters to a head - Alberich also comes to agree with Kantor's statement that he couldn't have hidden his Gift much longer anyway He gets over it later.
• The Confidant: The position of Monarch's Own Herald, less formally known as the "King's Own" or the "Queen's Own", exists so that the Monarch always has one trustworthy, loyal, and completely honest friend, alleviating the loneliness that is part of the job.
• Conflict Ball: Elspeth ends up with it early in the Mage Winds trilogy. Sent out to find mages to recruit to Valdemar's cause, with Skif along as a bodyguard, she ends up fighting with him over his greater caution than hers, to the point of treating him as entirely in the wrong even after acknowledging that he has some valid points. She also decides, based on some rather spurious logic (mostly her opinion that things have been too easy so far) that she's being manipulated into following a path that someone else has chosen for her. She turns out to be right; the Companions threw their support en masse behind the plan to find mages, and bullied the Heralds who didn't agree with the idea into going along with it. Upon hearing this, Elspeth promptly ignores the very sound reasons for the plan (which she agreed with wholeheartedly when she thought it was her plan) and deliberately goes off in a completely unexpected direction in order to do things her way. Despite the fact that the plan laid out for her was exactly what she wanted and the fact that the fate of Valdemar was at stake. She abandons her best chance of success because she doesn't like the fact that it wasn't her doing.
• Confound Them with Kindness: Given as advice from Mags to Lena in the Foundation trilogy. The latter has recently discovered her oblivious father has sponsored a brilliant new student from the middle of nowhere who's now ostentatiously getting everything she's dedicated her studies and practice to earning. Mags suggests she should go out of her way to make friends with him, giving his reasoning: If the boy really is a malicious attention-seeker trying to use her father, he's still too inexperienced to deal with the girl he's bullying insistently being nice to him. If he's innocent and her nerves are just strung too high, then in his position he badly needs a friend, and making friends will shut down anybody else using the situation to get under her skin. And Lena is the kind of person who'll feel a lot better about herself once she gets past agonizing over what he's really like and whether she's treating him fairly or not, and she'll be happier trying to be a friend than trying to play Alpha Bitch.
• Conjunction Interruption: When a character begins to say something, and he opens with "But," that is almost invariably a cue for someone to interrupt him. One exception occurs when the character starts with "But," and pauses himself, unable to think of anything further to say.
• Conlang: Shin'a'in/Tayledras/Kaled'a'in. Other languages are handled entirely by Translation Convention.
• Continuity Nod: Main characters in one trilogy will frequently appear as minor characters in others. Multiple Heralds in Vanyel's day also reappear as Companions later.
• Continuity Snarl: Happens occasionally despite having the same author for the entire series; the perils of working in the same setting for several decades. Mercedes Lackey is also just not good at remembering already-established details across any of her books.
  • In particular, the early part of Queen Selenay's reign is extremely confused. According to Exile's Honor and Exile's Valor (which actually depict all these events, written in 2002 and 2003, respectively), there's almost exactly a year between the end of the Tedrel Wars and Selenay's marriage, she becomes pregnant not long after that, the King of Rethwellen (the Prince's father) dies after the marriage but before Elspeth is born, and the Prince dies soon after Elspeth's birth. However, according to Arrows of the Queen (written in 1987, the first book written in the series), the Tedrel Wars were about 15 years ago, but Elspeth is only seven years old. Meanwhile, Take a Thief (written in 2001, and set between Exile's Valor and Arrows of the Queen) says the Tedrel Wars were 20 or 30 years ago. And finally, in By the Sword (which was written in 1991, and takes place at the same time as Exile's Honor and Exile's Valor, but in a different place), the king of Rethwellen dies about a year after his son's marriage to Selenay — because he has a heart attack upon hearing of his son's death.
  • Skif's backstory is also given multiple, contradictory versions. In Take a Thief (where he's the main character), he was an orphan (his father unknown, his mother dying soon after he was born) who worked for his cruel, authoritarian cousin in a tavern owned by his greedy, neglectful uncle; Skif got out from under their thumb by learning thievery from Bazie, a kindly adult who lost his legs with fighting as a mercenary, so he now leads a band of child thieves. Eventually (in separate incidents both unrelated to thievery) both Bazie and Skif's cousin are killed, but his uncle gets off scott free. According to Winds of Fate, however, Skif learned thieving from his uncle, who was eventually caught and hanged for his crimes. Elsewhere in the Mage Winds trilogy, Skif claims to have learned to pick pockets from his mother, who was later killed by a rival thief.
  • Need in the Mage Storms books establishes that she survived the Cataclysm "in a shielded casket in a shielded shrine in the heart of a triply-shielded Temple to Bestet, the Battle-Goddess" but was drained to the dregs and unconscious for years afterwards. In Mage Winds she didn't know what gryphons were or have any recognition of the descendents of the Kaled'a'in, both of whom were extremely prominent in the Mage Wars preceding said Cataclysm. But in the short story Women's Need Calls Me her bearer was a minor mage in Urtho's armies and the Cataclysm didn't affect Need at all. Also, this Need's personality and powerset are very different and limited. Notably, if she'd even had her unconscious powers from By The Sword, the ability to protect Captain Kerowyn's whole company from magic, she would have been an invaluable asset in the war. A waking Need as of Mage Winds and Mage Storms is dramatically stronger and can counter and wield powerful magic. Urtho was intelligent and female-friendly; Melysatra and Need wouldn't be nonentities among his forces.
  • Lampshaded back in the eighties. After writing a Filk Song about Tarma and Kethry defeating some bandits Lackey decided to write a full short story about the encounter, but didn't have the lyrics on hand and didn't remember quite how the song went. In universe the song exists and was written by "Bard Leslac", a musician who Tarma and Kethry despise for portraying them inaccurately and mooning after Tarma.
• Cool Chair: The Iron Throne^note Introduced two years before George RR Martin's of the Eastern Emperor, constructed of the personal weapons of the rulers of the countries the Empire has conquered.
• Cool Gate: Gates, especially the rare permanent Gates.
• Cool Horse: Shin'a'in horses are consistently praised and coveted by anyone who knows horses, who find them remarkably beautiful, intelligent, and capable. A travelogue in The Valdemar Companion has the writer muse that Shin'a'in horses are between Companions and normal horses in ability. Shin'a'in battlesteeds are set apart even more. Bred with magical assistance for intelligence first and ability second, battlesteeds are repeatedly stated to be very large, very ugly beasts with huge heads. They're noted to act more like dogs than horses at times. Intact males of any Shin'a'in breed are almost never allowed to leave the Plains. Companions would count too, but they are NOT horses.
• Cool Old Lady:
  • Savil Ashkevron, in the Last Herald-Mage trilogy. She's an elderly Herald-Mage who acts as Vanyel's instructor and mentor. It's her death that finally pushes him over the edge and turns him into a revenge seeker.
  • Need is (or was) a mage-smith in her original mortal life. Faced with the destruction of all she held dear, and being too old to fight effectively, she sacrificed her body to bind her soul to a sword so that her favorite student could take it up and wield it to seek justice.
• Cool Sword: Need, in spite of her unique drawbacks.
  • Played with by the Sword that Sings in Oathbreakers, stated to light up and start singing when in proximity to the rightful heir to Rethwellan's throne. Tarma and Kethry find a body frozen in a mountain path and clinging to a sword, which intrigues them until they take a look and find out it's some kind of decorative status symbol of a blade, which had had gems and precious metals on it that have since been stripped, leaving it the kind of non-weapon that can't keep an edge or, apparently, cut butter, which disgusts Tarma. Kethry takes it anyway and good thing, because when they meet the prince they set out looking for it starts glowing and singing and making it suddenly more feasible to install him as king.
    • The coolness of the Sword That Sings is played straight, if made rather sinister, in the short story Trust Your Instincts, where it starts off with decorations intact and empathically instills an intense, inescapable desire for a minor local mage-noble who presented it to the true Queen a year ago to come pick it up again and carry it off into the mountains. The man dies there with the knowledge that the sword never meant him to survive, leaving it to be found by Tarma and Kethry many years later.
• Corrupt Church: Played straight with the official sun-god worship of Karse... until the deity in question got sick of it and made his displeasure known.
• The Corrupter: A trait of evil mages in these books. Some simply want all rivals dead, but others want them permanently trapped in the position of underling, both for the ego boost and the handy backup supply of power. This is in contrast to good mages, who can function cooperatively and share power willingly.
• Cosmic Deadline: Lackey likes a Prolonged Prologue and loves to write hundreds of pages of worldbuilding and character-heavy prose, exploring the setting, the characters' place in it, their relationships, their emotions, and having them address and resolve minor problems. Most of a given book is, after its introduction, almost Becky Chambers-esque, sometimes barely hinting at a greater plot or threat. Then in the last quarter (or less!) of the book, the main threat - and often the main villain, for the first time! rears its ugly head and things happen much faster and without anything like the loving detail of the rest of the book, resolving in a rush with often only a page or two of denouement afterwards.
  • Villains in the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy are definitely Orcus on His Throne, far away from Vanyel and his perspective and only ever seen or spoken to at the very end of the book, so that they seem to have very little presence until that last quarter where suddenly they've been behind everything and are important, and get killed only a few pages after appearing for the first time. The third book, Magic's Price, does slow things a little.
  • Most of Winds of Change is basically Slice of Life and worldbuilding, with several small crises and various gestures at the existence of the Big Bad without him actually doing anything. Then in the last quarter of the book Firesong arrives and Nyara rejoins the heroes, Falconsbane decides to act, Tre'valen is killed, Darkwind and Elspeth are jealous of Firesong, the heroes shatter the Heartstone, and Nyara takes Need on an assassination attempt.
  • Each of the three books of Mage Storms goes this way, compressing the climax into the very end. The tail end of the finale has several major characters from elsewhere in the series - the spirit sword Need and the ghosts of Vanyel, Tylendel/Stefan, and Yfandes - get brought in and have one scene each. They're never seen talking to each other or incorporating into the daily life cycle shown in the rest of the book, nor is there even any discussion involving them before the climax.
  • Brightly Burning spends half of its page count on Lavan's difficult school life before his Traumatic Superpower Awakening and subsequently being Chosen. That leaves some space to explore his life as a Herald-Trainee and his moral discomfort with his powers before he's hurriedly promoted to full Herald and shoved out into the war, where he rapidly is corrupted by said powers until having a Superpower Meltdown.
  • The last part of Exile's Valor, prequel to the first Heralds of Valdemar trilogy, rushes to cover many of the background events mentioned in those books.
• Costume Porn: Usually at least once a novel.
• Covers Always Lie: Played straight with some books and averted with others. The most notable aversions, in that once you've read the book, you can recognize the exact scene on the cover, are The Silver Gryphon, Magic's Promise, Brightly Burning, Exile's Valor, Arrow's Fall, and Storm Rising. Closer to Home is one where the cover image does not lie, but the dust-jacket description of the book does: Most of it talks about Mags' backstory as was revealed in the previous five books, but then it goes on to say that he's going to need all that experience to handle a conspiracy that doesn't actually exist, as the book actually centres around Mags' efforts to keep two Feuding Families that independently decided to spend the Season in the capital on the same year away from each other's throats.
  • The cover for the first batch of the first print run of The Hills Have Spies uses the synopsis for one of the very first drafts of the book, rather than the proper synopsis. The error was caught and corrected very early in the print run, making the copies with the incorrect synopsis collectors’ items.
  • Take a look at the page image - it's the cover of By the Sword. Then read the book, and come across the lessons/rants on appropriate fighting attire. The outfit Kero wears on the Bt S cover is so blatantly something Kero wouldn't be caught dead wearing ^note the torso armour, with the multiple curved shoulder pieces just begging to be caught on something, could be justified because she's trapped behind enemy lines and has to take whatever armour she can get. The pink pants? Could be salvaged, but Kero would absolutely stain them with mud or even blood to darken them. The bright blue scarf with a long, fluttering end???? Could be an improvised belt, but the only way Kero would wear it with a long fluttering end, that just begs to be used to reel her in or catch a lookout's eye would be if she was playing bait, or joking about hanging herself with it - because it's likely to get her killed - that it's hilarious!
  • The sword Need is consistently described as very plain. In a flashback to her human life she muses that it's absurd that her unbreakable magic swords sell for much higher when other people fit them with fancy begemmed hilts. Every cover - she's on the same page image as Kero - gives her a gemstone pommel, hilt rings, and crescent-shaped decorative quillions. It's not just covers either, the books that have chapter illustrations featuring her, drawn by the author's husband Larry Dixon, use the same design.
• Cringe Comedy: Early in Storm Warning, Firesong jokingly flirts with Darkwind right in front of other guests and An'desha, who's his lover at the time. An'desha, already tired, feeling excluded from the conversation and not realising the whole thing is a private joke between two good friends, gets really mad at them, culminating in almost killing Darkwind with his magic without anyone noticing. In the meantime, the fake flirting between Firesong and Darkwind is so hilarious that the reader can easily be torn between laughing and wanting them to stop before An'desha gets pushed over the edge.
• Crossover: The short story A Dragon In Distress, penned by Mercedes Lackey and Elisabeth Waters and published in Sword and Sorceress XII, has Tarma and Kethry compelled by Need to enter a portal into the main setting of Waters' own work to help, well, a distressed female dragon whose adopted princess has been kidnapped by a prince. As this story mostly doesn't take place in Velgarth it's not included in any of the official anthologies, but has appeared elsewhere including as an ebook.
• Crushing Handshake: Alluded to in Take a Thief—when Skif and Deek agree to work together, Skif is impressed that Deek doesn't try this.
• Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Karsite church and its god Vkandis have a distinctly Medieval Christian flavor to them. This comes complete with monotheistic worship, a hierarchical church complete with a pontiff and an emphasis on scripture.
• Cue the Flying Pigs: Early in By The Sword, Kerowyn reflects that finding a man who could accept her and her chosen lifestyle for what they are would be as likely as her horse talking to her. When she ends up in Valdemar in the last third of the book, it's not hard to see where this is going.
• Culture Clash: Subtly woven throughout the series, particularly in Closer to Home, between Valdemaran subcultures. The Crown and its employees (Palace staff and Heralds, along with most Collegium-trained Healers and Bards, and most of the Guard) believe in equality of the sexes and tolerance for all, but the Valdemaran nobility as a whole (and the guilds to a lesser extent) are patriarchal and classist. Furthermore, Valdemar has plenty of foreign cultures that have moved in or been absorbed, all with their own values; the Lake Evendim people are monotheistic and friendly to the point of cuddly, while the Holderkin are suspicious of outsiders and adhere to a polygamous forced version of Arranged Marriage until Selenay learns just what's going on down there. A motto of Valdemar is "The Is No One True Way", meaning just because some other subculture does things differently doesn't mean it's wrong for them, even Holderkin.

Tropes starting with D

• Daddy Had a Good Reason for Abandoning You: Both Daddy and Mommy, in a highly Justified example. In Beyond, Kordas and Ilsa have three sons, but less than a handful of people know that, not even the boys themselves, who are told they are the children of Kordas' illegitimate cousin/right hand man Hakkon. By Imperial decree, all heirs to a title must be sent to court at age 13 to be 'properly educated' - in reality held hostage to keep their parents in line. The Court is horrifically abusive and neglectful of it's young hostages; Ilsa's twin brother died of illness, along with his personal attendant, and no one even noticed until Kordas managed a visit to come check on him. Kordas and Ilsa both vowed their children would never be put through that, which means never announcing their existence. Once everyone's safely out of the Empire's reach at the end of the book, Ilsa and Kordas tell their sons who they really are. Turns out their eldest (who will later become one of the first three Heralds) has already figured it out and told his next-youngest brother.
• The Dark Side: Blood Magic is dangerously addictive to those who practice it thanks to Evil Feels Good, and it stains your soul, marking you indelibly with its taint. It's also a good way to get Drunk on the Dark Side.
• Decadent Court: The court of the Eastern Emperor, to the point where "master assassin" is considered a respectable entry on a prospective Emperor's resume, and one of the main characters reflects that being cursed to be unable to lie is the single most horrific fate that could ever possibly befall an Imperial nobleman.
  • The Court of the Eastern Empire in Valdemar I's day was even worse, to the point that one wonders how it didn't break down into civil war. Fostering the children of nobles to make use of them as hostages is a cruel but potentially effective way of deterring rebellion, unless one does such a poor job of fostering them that the children die due to sheer negligence on the part of the caretakers - a dead hostage is a worthless hostage. And arbitrarily stripping nobles of their rank on zero notice for no reason seems more likely to inspire rebellion than deter it, as the idea that one can be perfectly loyal and lose everything anyway means that there is no real incentive for faithful service.
• Deadly Prank: Some unaffiliated students pull one on Talia — as attempted murder. "Give our love to Talamir" indeed.
• Death World/Eldritch Location: The Pelagirs are not a nice place to wander without native protection. Leftover magebuilt living weapons and other critters from a magical war two thousand years back, check. Flora/Fauna/People mutated by either the wave of magical power unleashed by the Cataclysm that ended said war or the abnormally high level of background mana even since, check. People both crazy/misanthropic enough to live there and badass enough to survive, check. The most consistently benevolent people there (the Hawkbrothers, pledged to their goddess to decontaminate the place) set a ward that turns casual wanderers away but will give purposeful intruders exactly one chance to properly justify their presence or flee before using lethal force. One of the Hawkbrother clans was decimated when they took in a blood-path mage who was disguised as a child, which doubtless intensified their wariness.
• Defector from Decadence: Admittedly Herald Alberich did not defect so much as get shanghaied but the end result remained thus. He protests it, too, once he recovers from his mad dash for freedom journey. He even considers - for a few moments anyways - having his bond between himself and his Companion severed. He doesn't go through with it, mostly because of the mention that it would leave both of them badly damaged but it seems a close thing, even so.
  • Duke Tremane defects from the Eastern Empire.
  • Baron Valdemar in the prehistory of the kingdom, implied to be from the Eastern Empire as well. Later confirmed in Beyond.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Kerowyn, who is not so much cold as very narrowly focused. Played arrow-straight in The Black Gryphon, with Winterhart. Played for Laughs in Oathbreakers with the bard Leslac, who thinks he can pull this on Tarma. He's badly wrong.
• Derailing Love Interests: Skif in the Mage Winds trilogy. Largely justified and even when he's being an idiot he still acts as an ally.
• Deus Angst Machina: Winterhart's backstory in The Black Gryphon, thoroughly justified by being in the path of the Big Bad. Amberdrake, too, although he deals with it differently. Vanyel's upbringing is equally angst-ridden but is mainly told in the story.
• Dirty Mind-Reading: Heralds and others with strong "Communication" gifts often wind up an unwitting third party to someone else's fun. Herald Talia gets a double whammy — through her Empathy and her unblockable bond with Rolan, she can 'overhear' Companion encounters as well as human ones.
• Disease by Any Other Name: "Summer Fever" sounds just like polio, right down to being (what a modern doctor would call) a viral disease.
• Disowned Parent: After Lena and Bear elope, Bear's father Healer Tyrall tries to kidnap Bear to force an end to the marriage. After he gets arrested for charging up to the Royal Palace (and home of the Healer's Collegium) with armed mercenaries, Bear publicly declares that he is no relation to Healer Tyrall. It's implied that this will have actual legal force.
• Damsel in Distress: Happens on occasion - Dierna in By the Sword and Lady Myria in The Oathbound play it particularly straight - but in most cases the damsel in question does more than just sit around waiting for rescue. In one notable incident from the Oathblood anthology, the kidnapped girls manage to leave a scent trail for their rescuers to track them by, and then poison their kidnappers to slow them down for the rescue team to catch up, without being suspected until it was much too late.
• Divided We Fall: The Kaled'a'in clans converging on the glassy crater that was all that remained of their ancestral homelands after the Cataclysm had diametrically opposite ideologies regarding the use of magic, and split into the magic-loving Tayledras and magic-shunning Shin'a'in. They maintain semifriendly relations for two thousand years mostly thanks to living apart from each other and because there are plenty of individuals willing to bridge the divide. Shin'a'in are expected to send mage-talented children who don't agree to become shamans or have their magic removed to the Tayledras, but broadly regard them as uncanny and distant people, and there's plenty of social pressure for their children to stay. It takes a direct order of their Goddess to get more of them to start working together.
  • In Mage Storms, Valdemar's nascent alliance is on extremely shaky political grounds and frequently suffers from this problem.
• Doctor's Orders: Healers call the shots.
• Don't Ask, Just Run: In Brightly Burning, foreseers see Lavan’s final firestorm just in time and all the Heralds start frantically calling the retreat to get their army out of the way before all hell breaks loose.
• Don't Fear the Reaper: In Valdemar tradition, Death is personified as an attractive member of the person's preferred gender — the male Shadow Lover or the female Lady Death. Vanyel, who is some degree of Death Seeker for most of his career, actually sings a love song to the Shadow Lover at a low point in his life.
• Doomed by Canon: Vanyel Ashkevron and Lavan Firestorm, both of whom have the conclusions of their stories told in Arrows of the Queen, the very first novel of the series.
• Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: Inverted somewhat with Stefen, who does not resemble Tylendel all that much but is his reincarnation, making his lifebond with Vanyel not so much a replacement lifebond as a re-lifebond. The middle book does have Vanyel meeting a boy who closely resembles Tylendel, but they don't hook up.
• Downer Ending: The Foregone Conclusion of The Black Gryphon, with Urtho dead, Ma'ar Not Quite Dead, and the survivors of the Cataclysm forced to rebuild in exile, with their homeland all but annihilated.
• Dramatic Irony: A lot of the books are prequels to the main series which is set in Selenay's reign which means that the reader already knows the outcome. Mercedes Lackey milks this for all it's worth.
  • Lord Orthallen is revealed to be an Evil Chancellor in Arrow's Fall. Alberich's and Skif's series has them trying and failing to find out the person being the various evil plots, something that the reader already knows is due to him.
  • Vanyel has a dream of his death that he thinks he overcomes by the end of the first book. This is the death that is mentioned in the first page of the series
• Dreadful Musician: Used for comedy in the supplementary filk song "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night". Both Tarma/Kethry and Kerowyn are also pursued throughout their careers by bards trying to sing (frequently awful) songs about their "heroic exploits". In Tarma's case, it's particularly hilarious because the bard in question, Leslac, believes himself the one to Defrost the Ice Queen, proving that he did no research about the Swordsworn.
  • Kerowyn probably wouldn't mind "Kerowyn's Ride" so much if it wasn't played every time she showed up to a new town, if the people performing it were skilled and practiced, and if she wasn't obligated to be appreciative. She has perfect pitch and a keen awareness of missed notes.
• Dream-Crushing Handicap: One of the stories in Sun and Glory details a half-witted boy who's under the delusion that he's a Herald. He is not Chosen, because he doesn't have the mental capacity to serve as a Herald, but the Companions like him and generally treat him as a Herald in every other way. The narration says that he "wears his Whites on the inside."
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Some Foreseers have prophetic dreams. Vanyel has a recurring one which he deals with throughout his trilogy, predicting his ultimate confrontation with Leareth. He originally thought he'd resolved the prophecy in Magic's Pawn, but the dreams come back in Magic's Price.
• Dripping Disturbance: In Exile's Valor, Selenay is already having trouble sleeping due to grief over her father's death, and the drip in the royal suite's bathing room isn't helping matters.
• Driven to Suicide: Tylendel. Vanyel and Talia both make good tries at it, too. Bard Stefen is interrupted before he gets his chance.
• Drowning My Sorrows: Dirk, in Arrow's Fall, due to being wracked with guilt for having procrastinated on teaching one of his Fetching students a Dangerous Forbidden Technique which might have saved her life. She died trying to save infants from a fire while on her intern circuit. And of course, the one person who could help him resolve it, Talia, is in a Love Triangle with him and Kris (or so Dirk thinks). He doesn't snap out of it until he collapses completely.
• Dual Wielding: Mastered by Alberich.

Tropes starting with E

• Early-Bird Cameo: Vanyel, Stefen, and Lavan Firestorm are all mentioned, and Herald Eldan makes an appearance (by description only) in the very first trilogy published.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: The Arrows trilogy was the first set of Valdemar books, and some of the elements it introduces run counter to later books.
  • Heralds having multiple secret ways to communicate outside of Mindspeech, particularly a code using marked arrows. Heraldic Arrow Code is discussed at length in Arrow's Flight, pays off plotwise in Arrow's Fall, and has never been mentioned again.
  • Some Heralds cannot Mindspeak with their Companions, most notably Talia and Sherril. It's also stated that even Trainees with the Mindspeaking Gift have to practice before they can consistently talk to their Companions. But in Take A Thief Skif, a character whose Mindspeech is so weak he can't telepathically speak or be spoken to by any other human characters, can hear Cymry without trouble from the moment she Chooses him, and all the other Heralds and Trainees are likewise. It's established in later books that Companions can speak to pretty much anyone, even those without the innate ability to hear thoughts. A possible explanation is that these Heralds are 'blocking' their Companions (which has come up elsewhere in the series) — Sherril has an unconscious mental barrier — meaning Companions can't speak to people who are actively keeping them out. The fan suggestion that Talia's powerful Empathy blocked Mindspeech was Jossed in the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy, when Monarch's Own Heralds with powerful Empathy are stated to be common but have no difficulty with Mindspeech.
  • A type of mushroom which neutralizes Mind Magic appears in Arrow's Fall. This is never mentioned or used again. It caused some real grief for the Heralds, who would've been motivated to avoid it even if it survived the rough conditions Hardorn went through after that, but it also doesn't come up at all in books set earlier and it's not even clear whether the mushrooms were fed to Talia as a deliberate ploy or not. If she'd eaten them while at Court or after being imprisoned things would have gone very badly for her, but it happened on the road and early enough that the effects wore off before reaching the capital, so it caused her some distress but didn't actually keep her from discovering or doing anything. Considering that Ancar dedicated a mage to neutralizing Talia while she was tortured, you'd think he'd have been interested in knowing that feeding her these mushrooms could do the same job.
  • In Arrows of the Queen it's repeatedly stated that the Monarch's Own Companion usually Chooses a new Monarch's Own from the ranks of the Heralds (i.e. someone who already has a Companion). In Vanyel's second book, a Companion consulted over a child with strong Gifts says she'll likely be Chosen soon but it will be an "unbonded" choosing since the Monarch's Own Companion will Choose her once the current Monarch's Own dies. In Van's third book, and in Mags', the presumptive Monarch's Own is conspicuously not-Chosen but is given a Herald-level education in anticipation. It may be related to how the Herald-Companion bond seems more tenuous in the first novel: newly-Chosen persons can elect to break the bond if Heraldry isn't for them, and Rolan isn't nearly as present in Talia's mind as later Companions are in their Heralds', so presumably exchanging one Companion for another is more feasible.
  • In Arrows of the Queen, Vanyel's homosexuality goes without comment, but Keren and Ylsa are concerned about how Talia will react when she finds out that they are a same-sex couple, as even many Heralds keep a distance from them; they're relieved to find out that she doesn't mind. Heralds, and the setting in general, are broadly made out to be quite open-minded later, but then again this first book was written in 1987.
  • The Arrows trilogy also takes pains to state that Heralds can only have casual flings or rare, intense lifebonds because between their bonds with their Companions and the requirements of their duty they don't have space in their hearts for normal love. Unless a Herald gets love at first sight with someone, they're never going to fall in love with them at all, and in fact Herald Teren's wife and children left him after he was Chosen. Later books completely ignore this and many Heralds court and marry and may even be considered Good Parents, restricted only by the need to find partners who can understand that Duty comes first.
  • Arrows also suggests that magic has been absent in the whole setting rather than just in Valdemar, with Ancar's mages talked about as hushed, astonishing rumors in Hardorn, by people native to that country, complete with some of the same phrasing about "old magic". However, this gets changed in later books that in Valdemar, there's something actively preventing magic from not only being used, but even talked about, and that something is actively hostile towards mages: after his death, Vanyel and Stefen/Tylendel work with the vrondi and Companions to keep magic as a forgotten resource, until Valdemarans were able to accept all Heralds as equally able, whether they had magic or not..
  • The whole "old magic was forgotten and is coming back" thing in Arrows was immediately ignored in the Vows duology (published the same year), as Kethry is a White Winds mage and magic is shown as fairly common throughout those stories, with armies having their own teams of mages. Kethry is also shown casting magic within Valdemar's borders without any consequences, and magic is openly discussed and shown to the Valdemarans present, one of whom is a Herald. Then in the very next book, By The Sword, Kethry's granddaughter Kerowyn can't even say the word "magic" to a single Herald outside of Valdemar, Kethry herself talks about how awful Valdemar's anti-magic protection was for her as a mage, and other non-Valdemaran mages are shown being driven to the point of insanity just by being inside Valdemar. More tellingly, in the Arrows books, neither Hulda nor Ancar's army mages seem to have any issue casting magic inside Valdemar, though they are shown to be enraged and constantly frustrated by the same protections during the Mage Winds trilogy.
  • The Arrows series has Talia state that her people, the Holderkin, had only been in Valdemar for two generations. However, in subsequent series, it turns out they'd been in Valdemar at least since Vanyel's time, since Vanyel talks about fighting Karse down on the southern border and dealing with the Holderkin's homophobia.
  • Arrows also states that if someone Chosen doesn't want to be a Herald, they can simply send the Companion out again to choose someone else, with apparently no ill effects. One of the teachers says this to a class of newly-Chosen, and the Queen even states this directly to Talia shortly after Talia arrives at the Collegium. However, in Alberich's book, we find out it's not so simple: breaking that new bond would leave both the Companion and newly-Chosen "damaged", with the heavy implication that it would be extremely traumatic to both.
  • It's also stated during Arrows and the Vanyel books that Empathy is the one Mindgift that's necessary in the Monarch's Own Herald, as they're not only responsible for the mental health of the Monarch, but all the Heralds. Then we get to Mags's books, where both Nicolas and his daughter Amily don't have any Empathic Gift, yet function just fine as Owns, without any mention of them overseeing the mental health of any of the other Heralds.
• Earned Stripes: Getting your Whites, Greens, or Scarlets. The change in uniform marks the end of someone's period as a trainee Herald, Healer, or Bard, respectively.
• Earn Your Happy Ending:
  • Particularly in the Mage Storms trilogy when it seems as if The End of the World as We Know It is going to happen no matter what anyone does to stop it, and the eventual victory comes at a heavy cost for the heroes.
  • Bard Stefen gets a personal version — he can join Vanyel in the Forest of Sorrows, but only if he works the rest of his life trying to dispel the stigma against "ordinary" Heralds.
• Elemental Nation: As of Mage Storms, the major countries in the setting correspond to one of these elements (although a Water country has not shown up yet).
  • Valdemar is Air. Its sigil is a winged horse, its ideology emphasizes freedom above all else, and its people specialize in 'mind-magic', which is invisible to the naked eye. Valdemaran spirit guardians are white horses that can run as fast as the wind. Also, vrondi (a kind of Air Elemental) are used for the casting of the Truth Spell and were bound to the task of invisibly staring at all mages that cast magic within Valdemar's borders (thereby slowly driving mages mad as long as they remain in the country).
  • Karse is Fire. Its tutelary deity is a sun god, and its spirit guardians are great cats with thick red fur. Most Karsites with magic are pyromancers, typically passionate about their religion and duty to the state.
  • Hardorn (and the Eastern Empire its laws are based off of) is Earth. It unifies many races and religions under a ideology that emphasizes humility and practicality. With the magical Gates that Hardonen mages specialize in, they can link almost anyone on earth together. Additionally, their king has strong earth-sense.
• The Empath: Empathy is a standard, if uncommon Psychic Power, generally found among Healers. Exceptional individuals who can project this ability are called MindHealers — the most notable examples being Talia and Amberdrake. There are also a rare few evil empaths, said to leave a trail of twisted minds behind them.
• Empathic Weapon: Need until she wakes up in Winds of Fate.
• Emperor Scientist: Urtho and Ma'ar serve as good and evil varieties, doubling as Sorcerous Overlord.
• The Empire: The Eastern Empire. An easy to miss reference in one book names it the Aurinalean Empire, but it's never mentioned again.
• Elsewhere Fic: A majority of the characters found in the anthology novels, especially those written by guest authors, are about original characters. Many of them recur or have an overarching story that continues across several books, making miniseries. Some end up referenced by Mercedes Lackey's main-series novels, making them Canon Immigrants.
• Enemy Mine: Valdemar and Karse, which have been enemies time out of mind, unite against the threat of Ancar. Subverted in that once they unite, they are no longer enemies.
• Ethical Slut: Many Heralds lean toward this. As few are willing impose themselves on a spouse that would end up taking third place behind Duty and a Companion, friendly encounters with their colleagues are often seen as preferable. Also, it's mentioned that, since Heralds can pretty much expect to die in the line of duty, many prefer to become hedonistic and "anything but chaste" in their off-duty hours rather than try to form a strong bond with a single person when either of them may never come home again.
  • Tayledras crank this trait up to the point where a visiting Herald Elspeth has to fight down her own scandalized embarassment. The Shin'a'in refer to the Tayledras as being as shameless and randy as kestrels.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Generally refused as a possibility. Given the Black-and-White Morality of the setting, any antagonistic figure who has people they actually, sincerely care about turns out to be misguided and perhaps rough or cranky but every bit a good person. Any evil character feels, at most, a possessive pride over others and is completely willing and happy to harm them. During the Storms books it's earnestly explained to An'desha that he can't be evil, because he's jealous. Jealousy means caring about someone else and therefore no evil people can be jealous.
  • This refusal gets odd in Brightly Burning. A terrible bully died provoking a Traumatic Superpower Awakening, and when Herald Pol passes by his family's home he has No Sympathy and sneers internally to find that it's done up in black, thinking it's poor taste for them to mourn a bad child.
• Evil Chancellor:
  • Hulda infiltrates the courts of both Valdemar and Hardorn by posing as a nursemaid and seeking to corrupt their rulers' respective heirs.
  • Lord Orthallen straddles this and The Evil Prince. Despite being a senior member of the privy council and a close personal friend of three generations of the Valdemar Royal Family, he either instigated or was heavily involved in at least four plots against the crown over the course of 20 years while avoiding suspicion almost completely until the day of his death.
• Eviler than Thou: Ancar and Hulda, meet Mornelithe Falconsbane. Among several other examples, he takes their We Have Reserves strategy, which already extended to murdering the countryside's women and children in Blood Magic rituals in order to make the men into mind-controlled soldiers, to an unsettlingly large scale.
• The Evil Prince: Ancar of Hardorn. To a lesser (or at least less competent) extent Thanel of Rethwellan, Prince-Consort of Valdemar.
• Excalibur in the Rust: In Oathbreakers, the long-lost Singing Sword of Rethwellan that is used to identify the country's rightful king is discovered to be none other than a rusty, dirty old sword that Kethry picked up along the wayside. It was decorated with gems once, but as an actual sword it's basically a decorative prop that Tarma claims wouldn't cut butter.
• Exposition Beam: For most characters, learning what being a Herald means and adjusting to Collegium norms form a big chunk of their arc (and helpfully explains those things to the reader, as well), but in Foundation, Mags' Companion telepathically injects all that information into him instantly. He somehow has no problem absorbing it, despite being a traumatized child slave with no knowledge of the outside world. Makes you wonder why future Companions never thought to do that.
• Expy: Closer to Home has clear expy of Romeo and Juliet. It's mostly a Deconstruction, showing, among other things a) what shitty parents the Montagues and Capulets were and b) just how silly and possibly dangerous the lovers' attitudes towards romance were (and in Juliet's case, what a bad idea it was to keep the Nurse around, because she was a major enabler of this). It's really driven home when this version of Romeo turns out to be a psychopath, who's perfectly happy to seduce (and ruin) Violetta, marry her under false pretences, and murder both their families (and a whole bunch of innocent servants) horribly in order to inherit all the wealth of both Houses.
• Eye Colour Change: Mages who work with node magic see their eyes gradually lighten to blue because of the magic's bleaching effect. They also gain Mystical White Hair.