Heralds Of Valdemar / Tropes F to O

The Heralds of Valdemar series provides examples of:

The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy has its own page.

• Tropes A to E
• Tropes P to Z

Examples starting with F

• The Fagin: A Loveable Rogue type. Skif falls in with a group of young thieves led by an adult man (Bazie), who is unfortunately crippled; he gives them food, shelter and lessons (both educational and in how to be a good thief) in exchange for helping him out with his daily life and stealing for him.
  • In Closer to Home, a man named Gripper is running his own gang of boys that steal for him. Unlike Bazie, however, he's abusive and mean to them, so when Mags rescues them and recruits them to be messenger boys (and keep an ear out for any useful information), they're quite happy to do so. By Closer to the Chest, it's established that there are other cruel men running gang boys to act as thieves, with the subsequent result of Mags stepping in and recruiting the boys for his messenger group.
• Famed In-Story: The story of Kerowyn's first heroic exploits follows her throughout the rest of By the Sword, rather to her chagrin. She follows in the footsteps of her mentors, Tarma and Kethry, whose mercenary careers are plagued by tales of their "heroic unselfish deeds". As they put it, it's tough to get paying jobs when people expect you to help them out of the goodness of your heart. Their kyree companion Warrl evidently became this as well; another kyree is introduced later whose favorite phrase is "my famous cousin Warrl!" Vanyel also gets quite a bit of this in Magic's Promise and especially in Magic's Price.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: Both out in the "wild" and in the edited, officially sanctioned anthologies, Elsewhere Fics featuring Gifted individuals being Chosen by Companions are pretty common.
• Fantastic Honorifics: "Siara" is the default honorific in the Eastern Empire, when its not clear what the right one would be.
• Fantastic Fallout: The Mage Wars ended with the Great Mages Urtho and Ma'ar causing The Cataclysm - an event that shook the world so hard that it left two giant craters in the landscape over a hundred miles wide, and strange magic mutations even farther out.
• Fantastic Nuke: The most powerful mages explicitly embody this concept, the most obvious example of which is the Cataclysm at the conclusion of the Mage Wars.
• Fantastic Racism: The descendents of the Kaled'a'in, Magical Native Americans that derived into the plains-dwelling Shin'a'in and the forest-dwelling Tayledras, are more flexible than neighboring cultures with regards to gender and sexuality, but they tend towards major xenophobia. Outsiders are not welcome on the Plains and barely tolerated in passing in Tayledras territory. In Sword of Ice, a short story featuring Savil in her youth, Savil helps a Tayledras in dire straits, after which he decides to take her home and faces strong resistance from his clan - he wants to make her a Wingsister, a trusted position that gives her many of the benefits of joining the clain without being expected to stay, but in all their history they've never granted that honor to anyone but Shin'a'in. Savil's not blood related at all and they have to give her a Secret Test of Character before agreeing. In addition, there's how the two cultures consider magic.
  • The Shin'a'in have been tasked with guarding ancient magic superweapons from anyone who might be able to use them and consequently have a Ban on Magic. Whenever a Shin'a'in is born with magic, they have a choice: have that gift deactivated, become a shaman, or leave the Plains (most being sent to the Tayledras). In The Oathbreakers, Tarma brings her out-clan mage oathsister Kethry home to visit. Many Shin'a'in are horrified that Tarma's paired off with a mage outsider and accuse Kethry of tricking her and coming to the Plains for nefarious reasons. It takes divine intervention to make them accept her, but that does mean that when she has children they are considered also Tarma's and fully accepted despite clearly being of a different ethnicity. This is not the case for half-Outlander kids like young An'desha, who despite being raised on the Plains never had a place there.
  • The Tayledras were tasked with using magic to cleanse wastelands twisted and warped by the same magical apocalypse that their cousins are trying to prevent a repeat of. Magic is an Oddly Common Rarity for them and they tend to regard mages as better and more important than others - Starblade essentially abandoned his first son Wintermoon for being a Muggle Born of Mages, and a resigned Wintermoon tells Skif that no woman of the clans will take a man without magic as a long-term partner. Non-magical Tayledras certainly still have important roles in the clan and there was a particular rift in this one, but they just aren't regarded with the same esteem overall.
    • Tayledras xenophobia depends on the clan and the Tayledras in question. The clan featured in the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy, having softened on outsiders since accepting Savil, allows outsider villages to be founded on the outskirts of their territory and tries to protect them from mages and magic, even offering to take a victim of an attack back to their Vale to try to heal her. K'Sheyna in the Mage Winds trilogy allows a pair of Herald guests to become Wingsibs, accepts gryphons as allies (because they had access to ancient records listing gryphons as among their ancestral friends), and is unusually accepting towards people who were warped by magic and given inhuman features - meaning that they control their knee-jerk hostility towards such people enough to not kill them on sight and may allow them to cross Tayledras territory, but won't offer sanctuary.
• Fantasy Contraception: Female Heralds (and presumably, other women who venture afield) employ an herbal concoction that reduces or eliminates "moon days" and also has contraceptive properties.
• Fantastic Firearms: The prequel novel Beyond mentions the Imperial weapon known as a "Spitter", which is basically a magitek compressed-air pistol. They're officially dueling weapons, limited to the nobility, though there's a reference to a larger version used on the front lines of the current war.
• Fantasy Gun Control: Velgarth never developed firearms, though the tech level in other respects ranges from the Renaissance to the Steam Age.
• Fantasy World Map: The name of the world is Velgarth and it's enormous, containing countries that are mentioned only by name in publications and more beyond that. Vadlemar and it's neighbors encompass a tiny part of the West.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Ancar turned Hardorn into a giant machine to create and supply an army to conquer his neighbors. Because none of the five wars of conquest he launched actually succeeded in taking any territory, by the time he died, he had stripped so much manpower and resources from his country to fuel an unproductive war machine that the people who managed to survive his reign were barely capable of supporting themselves... if they were lucky.
• Fashion-Based Relationship Cue: Hawkbrothers indicate they're in a serious relationship by wearing a feather from their partner's bondbird as a hair ornament.
• Fate Worse than Death: Inflicted by Kethry on Idra's brother in Oathbreakers, as punishment for the betrayal of his kingdom and the brutal rape and murder of his sister.
• Faux Affably Evil: Lord Orthallen straddles this as well, most vividly seen (or not, rather) when he was acting as Selenay's confidant.
• Feuding Families: The plot of Closer to Home. The noble houses Chendlar and Raeylen have been fighting for a couple of generations, but the King has managed to keep tensions low by simply manipulating Court so the two families are never there at the same time. In this book, they both show up before he can stop them, and Mags and Amily spend most of the winter trying to keep them from going at each other's throats—until the son of Lord Raeylen tries to kill them both, except for one of the Chendlar daughters, so he can marry her and inherit both Houses. They reconcile after that debacle.
• Fictional Geneva Conventions: The Mercenaries' Code binds all Guild mercenary companies, and any nation that ever wants to be able to hire Guild mercenaries - that's everyone except Karse, the Empire, and Iftel. (Valdemar doesn't generally use mercenaries, but they treat them fairly when they do, or when they fight against them.) The exact details aren't shown but clearly it involves "abide by the contract," "don't send mercenaries into a suicide mission," and "mercenaries don't loot without permission or commit atrocities against the population."
• Fighting for a Homeland: A common theme across the series is that, while some mercenaries are scum, most hired fighters just want to get enough money together to buy some land, marry, and settle down. Tarma is an inversion (a homeland fighting for people) — she already has the land for her Clan, but unless she personally establishes its fame and fortune, she won't attract quality people to repopulate it.
  • A less sympathetic example is the Tedrels, who are so desperate for a country that there are no depths to which they will not sink to get one.
• Fighting from the Inside: An'desha in Winds of Fury, from within the body that Mornelithe Falconsbane stole from him.
• Filk Song: From the 80s to the mid 2000s, Lackey wrote filk of her characters and the things they got up to, helping clarify characterization and events to herself. Some were in-universe songs, some weren't. Unfortunately due to the dissolution of Firebird Arts and the radio silence of its owners, there's no longer a legal way to obtain this music and Lackey can't have it re-recorded and released again.
• The First Cut Is the Deepest: Vanyel after losing Tylendel. His deeply romantic (and deeply in denial) mother likes to tell young women "he lost his first love tragically" — fortunately by the time Stef comes along she seems to have accepted things.
• Fisher King: Inverted and invoked in Mage Storms. After years of misrule by Ancar, who ruined the land with magic, the people of Hardorn insist their new king go through a ceremony to magically bind him to the land so that he will personally feel the effects of any abuses inflicted upon it. Later in the series, all of the allied lands get a monarch Earth-bound to help set the last wave of defenses against the Final Storm.
• Fish out of Water: Newly-Chosen Heralds almost always have to go through an adjustment phase when they arrive at the Palace for training.
• For Doom the Bell Tolls: The Death Bell, which the Companions ring when a Herald dies.
• Forever War: The Karsite/Valdemar war started in Vanyel's day if not before and lasts until Selenay's reign, meaning the two countries were some degree of hostile to each other for over five hundred years.
• Forged Letter: In Brightly Burning, a forged letter is used to lure Lavan out where the assassins can get a shot at him.
• Foregone Conclusion: The deaths of Vanyel and Lavan Firestorm, not to mention Urtho and the Cataclysm.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: In By the Sword, Kero has only a moment of grief when her Shin'a'in warsteed Hellsbane — the latest of a long line of mares by that name, three of which were her personal combat mounts — is killed underneath her by Ancar's forces. Between the stress of battle and being Chosen immediately afterward (to say nothing of a hard Tap on the Head), she doesn't give the mare a second thought.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Mage’s Pawn, when Tylendal and Savil are talking about how to get through to Vanyel after his dreams of being a Bard are dashed, Savil asks if him attempting suicide is likely to be a problem. Tylendel replies that Vanyel is unlikely to go that far, however, if it was himself...
  • In Arrows of the Queen, when first describing Companions, Talia remarks that they transcend horses in the way that "panthers transcend cats, or "angels transcend men". Yeah, about that...
  • Spy, Spy Again has a couple of good ones; Prince Kyril, or 'Kree', is lovingly teased by his mother for being a Hawkbrother Changeling, because he's the only one of her six children that don't look like her or her husband; instead, Kree has black hair and silver-grey eyes. When you realise he strongly resembles the royal family's hidden ancestor Vanyel Ashkevron, it's no surprise that Kree has the Mage Gift, so strongly he can never return to Valdemar. Early in the story, Kree and his Heterosexual Life-Partner, Mags' youngest son Tory, are allowed to ride a pair of volunteer unbonded Companions. Tory gets along very well with Companion Ellissa; in one of the last scenes of the story, when Tory is mourning losing his brother in all but name to the twin pressures of his Mage Gift and his intense love for Tory's cousin Sia, Ellissa Chooses him specifically saying the only reason she didn't sooner was because he had lots of unfinished business and didn't need her yet.
  • Beyond:
    • Kordas discovers that one of the major changes in the Imperial Palace since last time he was there is that all low-level jobs are now taken care of by human-sized magical "Dolls" that are kept moving by some sort of intelligent non-corporeal being. He rules out demons due to how docile they are. He quickly gains the symptahy of the three at his service by being the only person treating them as the intelligent beings they are. In return, they let him know that they are all part of a Hive Mind and Cannot Tell a Lie. Soon enough, they turn out to be vrondi who are very interested in joining the Valdemar duchy's plan to escape the Empire, thus giving their present-day Valdemar kin an origin story.
    • Early on, Kordas's narration points out that the Valdemar Duchy is so small that some Baronies are bigger. There is also a recurring mention of the fact that the Emperor has a thing for giving titles out as rewards, frequently resulting in whoever previously held it losing it without any sort of warning. One of the book's last-minute hurdles is that the Emperor turns out to have demoted Kordas to Baron to give the Duke Valdemar title to Merrin, the Count who has been spying on Kordas for him.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: Specifically invoked in Winds of Fury when a bunch of mages and a Cat Girl have to sneak into Hardorn. "Where do you hide a red fish?" "In a pond full of red fish."
• Fostering for Profit: Dialogue from Foundation hints that Cole Pieters may have been doing this with Mags and the other orphan children he had working in his mine. Since families with working children get a yearly stipend from the Crown if they have a child Chosen (until he or she becomes a full Herald), Cole Pieters could have continued it if he had been smart about things. However, he tried to obstruct Dallen from Chosing Mags, which resulted in him being found out.
  • Actually, Pieters couldn't. He didn't have any trouble fooling the local priesthood on their short annual visit, but knew that as soon as Mags was firmly in the custody of someone with the authority to protect him from reprisals, Mags would start talking about the horrific (and illegal!) conditions of the mine workers. Which is exactly what Mags did - and Dallen did even sooner, as soon as he got a good look at Mags' memories.
• Founder of the Kingdom: Baron Valdemar, fleeing the corruption of the Eastern Empire with his followers, founded both his namesake kingdom and the Heralds. According to what is told in The Mage Storms the crown was half forced on him because his people didn't want a mere Baron as their ruler while everyone else around them was declaring themselves kings, no matter how small a place they had.
  • Urtho's were split up after the Cataclysm and groups and companies went on to found k'Leshya, the Shin'a'in, the Tayledras, Iftel and possibly Karse. As of Spy, Spy Again, this also the Sleepgiver Nation, descended from a group made up of a couple of Urtho's allied mages, their guards, and their families.
• Freak Lab Accident: Vanyel has strong mage-potential but it takes a freak accident involving the backlash from a collapsing Gate to unlock his powers, transforming him into the third most powerful mage in history and granting him almost every other Gift in the book as well.
• Friend to All Children: Tarma. Kids know it too, running to her for protection even though she's usually the scariest-looking one in the room.
• Full-Frontal Assault: In The White Gryphon, Hadanelith, a Serial Killer and mind-rapist, conducts a series of assassinations against prominent members of Haighlei society... by climbing into their windows nude. This has several purposes: it shocks the victims, who are mainly high-class females, into being unable to resist; it avoids leaving evidence in the form of scraps of clothing or shoe-prints; it helps frame the White Gryphon delegation since no Haighlei would ever consider such an act; and it amuses him.
• Functional Magic: Has elements of almost all types.

Tropes starting with G

• Geas: The magic sword Need (before she awakens), compels her bearers to go to the aid of women in trouble. Many of Tarma and Kethry's adventures are due to this effect, but Kerowyn uses her Mindspeech to get Need to back off a bit so she can make her own choices in life.
• Genki Girl: Natoli, almost to the point of being a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for Karal.
• Genius Loci: The Forest of Sorrows. Leave it Vanyel to turn himself into this in death.
• Genre Shift: Over time the franchise shifts from epic fantasy to slice-of-life. Most of the Mage Storms trilogy is about political debates and Tremane's reconstruction of Shonar, and the Spy series rarely involve any crisis worse than sexual harassment.
• Giant Flyer: Gryphons.
• Glad-to-Be-Alive Sex: Kerowyn and Eldan in By the Sword.
• Glory Seeker: Tarma, quite unhappily. A wiser Shin'a'in cautions her that if she wants to attract quality persons to repopulate her clan, she'll have to rebuild its reputation personally.
  • Elspeth gets a brief version of this — when she returns to Valdemar after her long visit to the Tayledras lands, she has to make a grand entrance through the streets of Haven because 1) rumors are circulating that she's been murdered by her stepfather and 2) there's no way to hide her new allies (especially the gryphons).
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: In The Oathbound, the heroes fear the demon Thalhkarsh is threatening to become a god by drawing power from the worship and sacrifices by his followers; when they see his true form and run he loses that power. Averted in that there's no indication that the real gods (or the One, depending on how you look at it) need worship. Many gods are spoken of differently in these early books and theology is never given much detail.
  • In Darian's Tale, it's noted that the tribal totems of the Northerners probably play this straight; the character in question wonders if there's a level of spiritual warfare when tribes clash as well.
• Good Feels Good: Heralds in general and especially Skif, who does a Heel–Face Turn because of it- not that he was all that bad to start with.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion: Averted near the end of Arrow's Flight in which Talia allows a midwife to abort a young woman's pregnancy if she wishes it (which was due to her stepfather raping her and she'd found that it was non-viable anyway since the girl was underage).
• Good Is Not Nice:
  • Weaponmaster Alberich, who believes that he cannot afford to be kind or merciful to his students lest their training fail at a critical moment.
  • Alberich's successor, Kerowyn adopts the same rule, having come from a mercenary background and also having seen firsthand what happens to trainees whose weapons instructors are too easy on them.
  • Talia is a very reasonable person and good at sorting out people's problems, but her psychic ethics are largely restricted to people on her side. Enemies beware!
  • Need, while awake, can be very kind and will go to great lengths to help people. She's also irascible and has high standards and a cutting sense of humor, and can test people cruelly to help them internalize that they're skilled and don't totally depend on her.
• Grand Theft Me: Big Bad Ma'ar has been possessing his descendants for thousands of years.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Eastern Empire is responsible for Hardon's war with Valdemar having manipulated Ancar. However, they're never actually fought or even seen (except for a small outpost). The problem becomes moot after the Mage Storms wreck havoc on magic and thus the Magitek society
• Grim Up North: For Valdemar, the Northern Wastes; Valdemar itself is this for Rethwellan and Karse.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Talia, explaining the Mind Rape she puts a particularly horrible person through, says she's forcing him to relive the worst things he did to his daughter from her point of view on loop, and that he'll come out of it if and when he learns that what he did was wrong and stops thinking of her as his property to abuse as he sees fit. In the meantime, physically he's vacant-eyed and drooling and considered mad.
• Groupie Brigade: Herald Alberich takes advantage of one of these in Exile's Valor. When he realizes that the actor Norris is trailing him, he goes into a large inn and "happens" to mention the fact that Norris is outside to a roomful of young ladies ... then dives for cover as they charge outside and mob Norris.

Tropes starting with H

• Healing Hands: The Healers generally have this as an ability, though it costs energy that comes from the Healer's personal magical reserves, so it's better to use medicine and care whenever possible.
• Healing Shiv: Need includes magical healing among her many properties, though it's not (usually) achieved via stabbing since Need also functions very serviceably in the capacity of a normal sword. Contact or close proximity with her is all that's required for her healing ability to take effect, although in Winds of Fury extreme circumstances lead to Need having to very carefully heal someone who's just been impaled on her blade, as the blade is being pulled out of his body.
• Heir Club for Men:
  • Notably averted by the Valdemaran royal family; with Companions Choosing girls as well as boys, the Heralds know better than to think a Queen would be less effective a ruler than a King. Queen Selenay rules both before and during her marriages (and her husbands remain Princes, even though Daren legally could have been crowned King if he wanted), and her daughter Elspeth remains Heir even after her younger half-brother is born. Valdemar's nobility, however, is not so enlightened, preferring male heirs strongly.
  • A side plot in the Last Herald-Mage Trilogy is that King Randale is sterile — an obstacle to any possible alliance marriage. To hide this fact, his consort Shavri conceives a child with Herald Vanyel, with Randale's full knowledge and consent.
• Heir-In-Law: Selenay's first husband initially assumed he'd become King as part of the wedding. Once convinced that wasn't happening, he decided to have Selenay killed and go for the "regent for the Heir" variant of this trope.
• Hell Hound: Wyrsa, pretty much. They're described as an unholy fusion of sighthound and venomous snake approximately the size of a horse; they're incredibly fast-moving, vicious, and absolutely tenacious in pursuing their prey. Anyone who manages to hurt or kill a wyrsa will have the entire pack after them until they either die or manage to kill off the entire pack. To make matters worse, wyrsa affected by the mage storms caused by the Cataclysm developed the ability to eat magic.
• "Hell, Yes!" Moment: In OwlKnight, Darian and his companions are up against a snow-drake when heading northwest to find his parents. Things seem impossible, until Healer Keisha fires an arrow hitting it at the right spot. To Darian's amazement, Keisha runs right up to face the snow-drake, followed by younger sister Herald Shandi who shouts the Trope expression.
• The Hero Doesn't Kill the Villainess: The magical sword Need will protect a warrior from all hostile magic, endow a sorceress with absolute expertise with the sword, and heal anything short of a death-wound. She also places a geas on the woman who bears her to protect other women (sometimes even if said women don't WANT protecting) and will not permit herself to be used against a woman, no matter how wicked.
• Heroic BSoD: Just about every major hero in the stories has at least one.
  • Vanyel, after the Gate backfire gives him Adept-level magic and nearly kills him (grief and self-pity).
  • Vanyel again, after being raped by bandits and subsequently Paying Evil Unto Evil (self-loathing).
  • Talia, when her Gift goes wild and nearly kills herself and Kris (self-loathing).
  • Talia again, after being imprisoned in Ancar's dungeons, subjected to rape and torture, and attempting suicide (despair).
  • Kerowyn when she resigns her commission with the Skybolts and refuses to notice that most of them are completely sympathetic with her, so she flees them and tries to lie low.
  • Amberdrake, after Skandranon apparently fails to return from a mission (grief).
  • Karal, after Ulrich's death (grief), and Altra the Firecat (grief and guilt that he couldn't save both Karal and Ulrich).
• Heroic Dolphin: Out of the Deep, a story in the Masters of Fantasy anthology, reveals that there are psychic dolphins in (landlocked!) Lake Evendim. They call themselves Bright Leapers and rescue a Herald from pirates.
• Heroic Fatigue: It is not uncommon for Heralds to experience this, however Vanyel suffers worse than most. Throughout the second two books he is in almost constant state of overwork, starting with returning after an entire year of filling in for five other Herald-Mages simultaneously on the battlelines.
• Heroic RRoD: Pushing one's magic (or Psychic Powers) too far can result in backlash; see also Cast from Hit Points.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Several. The Final Strike technique (used most notably by Vanyel) is basically a prepackaged Heroic Sacrifice in the form of a suicide-weapon-of-last-resort for mages, using all their energy at once in a huge explosion.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Tarma of course is not just celibate but asexual by divine oath, and Kethry is more than het enough for both of them, as she demonstrates by getting Happily Married at the end of Oathbreakers and having Babies Ever After. They still care deeply and passionately about each other, wearing matching rings, holding hands, and sharing a bed more often than not, and willingly foster some Homerotic Subtext in universe.
• Hidden Elf Village: The Hawkbrothers' Vales are these, until the events in the Mage Winds bring them out. Even their Shin'a'in cousins, whose common ancestry means they're some of the very few people who can be assured of a friendly meeting, find them bizarre and extremely closemouthed.
  • Iftel was a Hidden Elf Nation State. For hundreds of years it showed up on maps, but few ever went in or out. It was well known that trying to invade or sneak over the border would lead to instant death, but sometimes people were permitted in and came back out reporting that it was otherwise a very boring place which there was no real reason to visit, ever... In reality it contained a people (true Kaled'a'in) and even an entire sentient species (the Gryphons) that virtually everyone in the setting would have been floored to learn still existed in the world. Why visitors reported otherwise isn't quite explained, but it's implied to be because the same magic that guarded the borders also imposed a Weirdness Censor.
  • Valdemar itself is a downplayed example after Vanyel's era up until the Mage Winds trilogy. While they trade with their neighbors and maintain good relations with everyone except Karse, they generally don't have much to do with the world outside their borders unless things have gone totally pear-shaped, in part because Vanyel's web and the gods are working to keep Valdemar secluded (being in a corner of the map, with nigh-impassible barriers on two borders, helps). Outsiders see Valdemar as a strange but harmless hermit kingdom, and a saying in Rethwellan is that "when the wind blows folk from Valdemar, prepare for heavy weather." Even friendly neighbors like pre-Ancar Hardorn aren't sure that Companions aren't just pretty horses.
• Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: Valdemaran Heralds (white), Bards (red), and Healers (green) all wear these in their normal duties. In each case it's because it's their job to be highly visible, even when being visible is sometimes a liability, like on the battlefield.
  • Two Heralds of note refuse to wear Whites, and both are Weaponmasters who come from a different country: Alberich and Kerowyn. Kerowyn calls it her "just shoot me" uniform and only a royal decree can get her into one. For his part, Alberich also prefers "grays" but will occasionally don Whites in order to disguise himself, as his reputation for disliking them is so well established.
  • In the Mage Winds series, the Hawkbrothers (specifically, their hertasi helpers) take such a dislike to Elspeth's Whites that they literally steal them until they can come up with something better. She insists on them remaining white, but they at least manage to make her the most stylish Herald in the history of Valdemar.
• High Fantasy: The Black Gryphon is definitely on the High side, with its armies of good and evil and ending in the Cataclysm. While a lot depends on individual trilogies or books, most of the rest of the series trends more Low Fantasy or Heroic Fantasy, with the Vows and Honor books also having a degree of Sword and Sorcery. Notably there are no traditional 'fantasy races'. Nonhuman peoples seem to be either created by long-gone mages as Uplifted Animals, straight up created from whole cloth, or are Companions, who are mostly reincarnated humans and very specific to Valdemar.
• Hired Guns: Tarma, Kethry and Kerowyn are all mercenaries, and the Mercenaries' Guild is a very important organization in most of the non-Valdemar stories (particularly Oathbreakers and By the Sword). Guild mercenaries are consistently portrayed as clean-cut good guys even if they're Only in It for the Money; non-guild types vary widely in their ethics and competence.
• Honest Advisor: The position of Monarch's Own Herald exists so that the ruler always has at least one completely honest, absolutely trustworthy friend.
• Horse Archer: The specialty of the Skybolts, who are an entirely mounted force. Heralds may also qualify, since they are always trained in archery.
• Horsing Around: There are several instances, including the famous gray stud of Forst Reach and a beautiful but brainless horse in Oathbreakers.
• Horseback Heroism: Heralds, obviously, but most characters across the series have their turn at it.
• Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Don, from one of the short stories, is a male example. He's a whore, and he does specialize in older married women (he considers this ethical, as his clients' husbands nearly always have their own bits on the side), but he spends half a page explaining to an Herald that ultimately, he leaves his partners better than he found them, while he leaves with heavier pockets. What cements this trope, however, is that he turns out to have been an unconscious and untrained MindHealer, using his empathic talents to soothe his lovers' cares.
  • In the Herald Spy books, they work at the ethical brothels (ones where the ladies are decently-treated and the taxes are paid like at other businesses) in Haven. Some of the brothels, or at least the madams running them, are part of Nikolas's network of spies.
• Hope Sprouts Eternal: At the end of Brightly Burning, the entire pass where Lavan Firestorm made his last stand is reduced to ash, but several months later tiny seedlings can be seen, pines that need fire to sprout. Lavan's friends are cheered to find one in the place where he and his Companion died and consider bringing it back to Haven with them, but know these pines need adversity to survive.
• Hot Drink Cure: In the first book of the Collegium Chronicles, a severe blizzard hits Haven. Some people barely make it to the shelter in time and are treated for hypothermia, with some of the treatments being heated alcoholic drinks.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Dirk and Talia.
• Hunting "Accident": Prince Thanel's attempt to assassinate his wife Selenay, and also the official explanation for Thanel's death when the attempt failed.
  Talia: I suppose that's marginally true. They were hunting Selenay.
• Hurricane of Aphorisms: There are a lot of old Shin'a'in proverbs, and everyone loves to quote them.
• Hypocrite:
  • The Karsite Priesthood hates magic, burns magic-users and hates Valdemar ostensibly because they're a witch-nation full of demons. Many Karsite Priests are mages who summon demons. For extra irony, Valdemar has not had any mages since around the time Karse declared magic anathema.
  • Valdemar's Heralds in Closer to Home oppose the system where women are seen as tools of political alliance rather than as people in their own right, and yet the King commands an Arranged Marriage between two Feuding Families to settle the feud. Even centuries later, it's accepted that Valdemar's Monarch and Heir may need to make a marriage of alliance, whatever Valdemar's national values on the subject say.

Tropes starting with I

• I Call It "Vera": Generally averted — most fighters in the Valdemar 'verse are too much of a Combat Pragmatist to become sentimentally attached to any one weapon. Played straight with "Need," an Empathic Weapon, and various musical instruments. Lampshaded by Alberich in the Exile duology: his own mentor banned such weapons from the training salle, and he intends to do the same if any Trainee is so foolish as to name a weapon and start using it to the exclusion of others.
  These things were just pieces of steel, not something sentient. And when you focused too much on "my famous blade, Gazornenplatz," you were apt to forget that it was a tool, to be used and as readily left behind if need be.
• Identical Grandson: "The Ashkevron family look tends to breed true, and when it doesn't the poor thing usually runs off to Haven."
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Most of the series use it:
  • The Mage Wars: The X Gryphon:
    • The Black Gryphon (1994)
    • The White Gryphon (1995)
    • The Silver Gryphon (1996)
  • The Last Herald-Mage: Magic's X:
    • Magic's Pawn (1989)
    • Magic's Promise (1990)
    • Magic's Price (1990)
  • The Collegium Chronicles: All One Word Titles. The last two are a type of building.
    • Foundation (2008)
    • Intrigues (2010)
    • Changes (2011)
    • Redoubt (2012)
    • Bastion (October 2013)
  • The Herald Spy, a sequel to the Collegium Chronicles with an adult Herald Mags.
    • Closer to Home (October 2014)
    • Closer to the Heart (October 2015)
    • Closer to the Chest (October 2016)
  • Family of Spies: sequel to The Herald Spy, focusing on Mags and Amily's teenage children. All punny titles featuring the word 'spy' (obviously)
    • The Hills have Spies (2018)
    • Eye Spy (2019)
    • Spy, Spy again (2020)
  • Vows and Honor: Oath-X:
    • The Oathbound (1988)
    • Oathbreakers (1989)
    • Oathblood (1998)
  • Exile's Duology: Exile's X:
    • Exile's Honor (2002)
    • Exile's Valor (2003)
  • The Arrows Trilogy: Arrow's / Arrow's X:
    • Arrows of the Queen (1987)
    • Arrow's Flight (1987)
    • Arrow's Fall (1988)
  • Mage Winds: Winds of X:
    • Winds of Fate (1991)
    • Winds of Change (1992)
    • Winds of Fury (1993)
  • Mage Storms: Storm X:
    • Storm Warning (1994)
    • Storm Rising (1995)
    • Storm Breaking (1996)
  • The Owl Trilogy (Darian's Tale): Owl-X Portmantitles:
    • Owlflight (1997)
    • Owlsight (1998)
    • Owlknight (1999)
• Idiosyncratic Cultural Gesture: Subverted by a Genre Savvy Tremane. Early in Storm Rising, the town council of Shonar asks Tremane if some of his troops could possibly help with the harvest. Tremane agrees, then realizes he'll need to have his volunteers briefed on local courting customs since they'll be working side by side with farm women ? he doesn't want any issues with one person thinking they're in a casual relationship and the other thinking they're engaged.
• Idiot Ball: Near the end of the Mage Winds trilogy, Elspeth, princess of Valdemar, goes undercover in enemy territory. Among the weapons she brings? A knife emblazoned with the Valdemaran crest. A throwing knife. Which she uses for its intended purpose, on an envoy of the Eastern Empire — just as he's Gating back home. As one of her companions notes, "very subtle, Elspeth."
  Skif: So the envoy arrives falling out of a gate with a knife that has the royal symbol of Valdemar carved on its pommel embedded in his throat. Why not just send the Eastern Emperor a note? 'Your father won the Horse Faire. Your mother tracks rabbits by scent. Love and kisses, Elspeth of Valdemar!'
• If It Tastes Bad, It Must Be Good for You: Valdemaran Healers bounce back and forth between averting this trope and playing it straight:
  • The standard herbal medicine for overstraining one's psychic abilities tastes absolutely horrid. Most Healers will provide a "chaser" with no medical properties but which will clear the taste out of a patient's mouth.
  • At one point in the Collegium Chronicles, Mags has a huge fight with Healer-Trainee Bear, then a few chapters later needs medical treatment. Bear tells him that while Mags had some good points, he's getting medicines made with the worst-tasting alternatives Bear could find as payback.
  • In an aversion, when Karal collapses from stress and overwork, he's assured that potions for stomach ulcers are deliberately made to be tasty (it's the only way to get people who need them to take them).
• Ignore the Fanservice: Vanyel, to a tavern wench. He doesn't understand why at first, because he doesn't yet realize that he's gay.
• Imaginary Love Triangle:
  • Gets almost ridiculous in Winds of Change. Darkwind likes Elspeth, Elspeth seems interested in return. Then Firesong shows up and Elspeth seems slightly more interested in him than in Darkwind. Firesong notices and has a talk with both of them "Sorry, I'm Gay and happen to like Darkwind. But I know Darkwind likes Elspeth, so I won't try anything". But Elspeth is in the middle of learning about Tayledras customs, so her thoughts after the talk are "Could Darkwind be bi and interested in Firesong?" (he's not). Luckily that gets cleared up immediately after.
  • Dirk, Kris and Talia: Talia falls in Love at First Sight with Dirk but has her first sexual relationship with his best friend Kris during her internship. When Dirk learns about it, he loses all hope that Talia will want him and starts avoiding her. The result is a tangle of misery that doesn't resolve until things have become truly terrible. Made more absurd by the fact that Dirk and Kris are best friends, with Kris shipping Dirk and Talia - you'd think they could talk about it.
• Implausible Deniability: Master Silversmith Jelnack after his wife's failed assassination attempt against Lan in Brightly Burning. While he's not formally charged alongside her, Herald Pol doesn't believe for an instant that Jisette's husband wasn't aware of the plan. On top of supervising her (as per the de facto restraining order forced after her first attack on Lan), hired assassins aren't cheap. The money had to have come from the Jelnack family coffers. Did a businessman like Jelnack really not notice that his wife was withdrawing such large sums from their accounts — or believe that such an amount was being used for 'household expenses'?
• Impoverished Patrician: Kethry's backstory.
• Inappropriately Close Comrades: Comes up in a few places
  • Among the Herald ranks, no-strings-attached trysts are common, especially among working Heralds who aren't on permanent assignment. It doesn't affect discipline, since everyone knows that Heralds are incorruptible and all-business when on duty.
  • Among mercenary companies like the Skybolts, dalliances within the ranks are not uncommon, but officers are obliged to avoid intimate fraternization with those they lead or risk undermining their position. Kerowyn spends her years as Captain largely chaste, because she doesn't have access to many men who aren't 1. under her command or 2. completely intimidated by her.
• Incompletely Trained: Talia's Gift training in Arrows of the Queen amounted to the other Heralds realizing that she had full Empathy. They didn't have any other Heralds with the Gift and she worked often with the Healers, who did have Empathy. Since she seemed to have it under control, the Heralds assumed the Healers taught her and the Healers assumed the Heralds taught her, plus her primary Gift teacher died and took any further plans with her, so they assumed she was fully trained - a mistake that nearly had dire repercussions later and went into the Chronicles "for sheer wrongheadedness."
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: One of the Heralds' defining traits. It's worth noting that the potential for this has to exist in order for the Companions to Choose them in the first place, and many a Herald with a troubled past has had to reconcile it before fully embracing his/her destiny. Also, Heralds are not completely incorruptible, but it is observed that evildoers couldn't possibly understand what it would take to do so and couldn't offer it even if they did. In the entire history of the kingdom, only one Herald has ever been repudiated: Tylendel, who wasn't corrupted but instead went mad and attempted a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • Canon Discontinuity: In Arrows of the Queen, it is mentioned that a repudiation occurs about once every couple of centuries. By Arrow's Fall, it had changed to only one ever.
• The Infiltration: Tarma's role in Oathbreakers is to get inside the court in Rethwellan to uncover the truth of what happened to the King's sister. She does, and it is not pretty.
• Insane Troll Logic: Jisette Jelnack during Brightly Burning. She insists Lan be tried and interrogated under Truth Spelll to 'prove' his guilt in murdering Tyron. Lan's testimony instead confirms Tyron was a sadistic bully and that his death was a result of involuntary self-defense. Jisette's response? Lies! All lies! The prosecution then cites testimony from 40 other students, from other victims to Tyron's surviving friends. All inteviews were all likewise conducted under Truth Spell and corroborate Tyron's sadism. Jisette's response? More lies and slander!
• Instant Expert: One of Need's powers is to make its bearer a master swordfighter if they are not already experienced in martial combat, turning a Squishy Wizard like Kethry into a Magic Knight. In the hands of a completely unskilled bearer, the effect goes even further.
• Instant Messenger Pigeon: Mercenaries in Oathbreakers and By The Sword sometimes have scouting parties sent out with a couple of birds in a carrier to fly back to the main group. They do not appear to know to return.
  • In the Mage Wars Urtho's camp has "messenger birds", which appear to be small parrots given a lesser degree of the Amplified Animal Aptitude bestowed on warsteeds and bondbirds. They don't fly quickly or quietly enough (being prone to screaming) to be useful at long range, but in camp they're the main casual way for two people to communicate during the day. They can be sent to specific people, whose faces they recognize given enough light. It's also common for someone to send a messenger bird to spy on camp goings on. They're everywhere, so no one really notices one of the birds is remembering everything it hears to repeat back later.
• Insurance Fraud: A variant is performed in Take A Thief. Actual insurance doesn't factor in, but landlords who own tenements in Haven's slums are sometimes subject to inspections, and subsequently large fines if their buildings aren't to code. Rather than pay the fines or do the work to renovate and repair them, both of which represent formidable cost, they sometimes just burn the buildings down and sell off the land they stood on. Usually without bothering to evict or warn their tenants first; afer all, that would suggest it was intentional!
• Intellectual Animal: Companions, most notably; also gryphons, Firecats, kyree, and hertasi, all of which were either divinely or magically created. Some of the smarter bondbirds also qualify—for example, Hyllar the hawkeagle, who demonstrates a capable grasp of abstract concepts such as "acting" and "sarcasm."
• Intentional Heartbreaker: Lady Naril in Arrows of the Queen pretended to love Dirk so she could get closer to his handsome best friend Kris. When Kris rejected her, she tore into Dirk for believing a beautiful woman like her would want a homely man like him. Dirk's self-esteem was so shattered that he didn't believe any woman would want him, complicating his relationship with Talia.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Talia's close bond with her equestrian instructor Keren in the Arrows trilogy. Perhaps even moreso, her equally close friendship with the elderly and mostly retired Herald Jadus in Arrows of the Queen.
• Internal Deconstruction: Closer to Home shows that, while Valdemar really does try to be The Good Kingdom, it's still an oppressive system in many ways. Both commoner and noble women are trapped in systems of social control that trap them the role of wife or victim, even in a Kingdom where there are ostensibly other options, and the villain of the book benefits from these systems of abuse. When other books in the series are set in Valdemar, they're about something gone wrong; this book shows Valdemar's system as oppressive even when working as intended.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • Skif and Nyara are only sort of an example, since Nyara was originally human before her father altered her. Later her Cat Girl features are reverted until she's almost completely human in appearance.
  • Lavan Firestorm and his Companion have a Lifebond as well as a Companion bond; this is necessary to anchor his sanity.
  • There's something of a deconstruction or justified aversion of this issue in the Mage Storms trilogy, where the true nature of most Companions (reincarnated Heralds) is revealed. The Companions go to great lengths to conceal this secret to avoid exactly the situation where a Herald is forced to confront a former loved one in a ... slightly different body.
• Intimate Healing: Sexual therapy is just one of a Kaled'a'in kestra'chern's arts, though they don't use it in every case, and calling it prostitution is not only ignorant but an enormous insult.
• It's All My Fault: A stock exclamation from just about any heroic character when misfortune befalls someone, whether that's a leader suffering from The Chains of Commanding on down to a casual friend.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Dirk tries this in Arrow's Fall. Talia, the 'beloved' in question, is not amused.

Tropes starting with J and K

• Just Between You and Me: Hadanelith in The White Gryphon does this after having Amberdrake and Skandranon captive. Skan lampshades this in the beginning by asking, "Good gods, does every half-baked villain have to boast about what he’s going to do before he does it? Can’t you just kill us so we don’t have to endure your boring speech?” Hadanelith retorts that he wants them to know everything so that they can suffer in not being able to thwart his plan. Skan and Amberdrake then proceed to feign boredom instead of interest to keep Hadanelith talking.
• Karma Houdini: Baron Melles. At least, we don't see him getting his comeuppance, greatly though he deserves it.
• Karmic Transformation / Karmic Rape: Tarma and Kethry, tasked with clearing out bandits who've been abducting and raping women, kill a number of them and capture their leader. Kethry renders him unconscious, puts a spell on him to make him seem to be a woman "to all senses" and will never wear off, then ties him to a horse and sends it after the remaining bandits. Tarma and Kethry are both delighted by this and all but high five, and when gleefully recounting the story later shrug off someone who's disturbed by saying "Turnabout is fair play". The bandit doesn't actually die, though, and goes on to cause them far more trouble by summoning Thalkarsh.
• Keystone Army: Several, mainly out of Hardorn. The "keystone" in most cases is the mage whose spells are keeping the massive conscript force controlled — take him out and the men turn on their officers en masse.
• Kids Are Cruel: Talia, Vanyel, and Lavan Firestorm suffer considerably at the hands of attackers who themselves are minors. Vanyel is merely ostracized; Lavan is bullied until his Gift involuntarily retaliates; and Talia is almost drowned.
• Knight of Cerebus: Ancar in the first trilogy, arguably. While the first two books of the trilogy deal with some weighty subjects, the focus is on Talia and her experiences as she comes of age and grows into her power and her role as Queen's Own. When Ancar takes center stage in Arrow's Fall he shifts the threat level from local to national - kicked off by murdering one major recurring character and subjecting Talia to the most horrific tortures he can come up with - and he remains the major looming threat of the series until the end of the Winds trilogy.

Tropes starting with L

• Lady of War: Queen Selenay; also something of a Winter Royal Lady, since she (like all Heralds) wears white on duty.
• Lady-In-Waiting: Amily, with the help of her friend Dia (who runs things) and the monetary sponsorship of Princess Lydia, sets up the Queen's Handmaidens. The Handmaidens consist of young ladies of good station but are poor, who are trained to act as general purpose ladies-in-waiting to the noble women at court and also function as spies on the nobles for the Crown.
• Lap Pillow: Tylendel does this with Vanyel the morning after they first get together. Vanyel’s reaction shows his gradual acceptance/realisation of their relationship.
• Large Ham:
  • Firesong, deliberately. He views showmanship as an inherent part of his art and when the opportunity comes to play at being a carnival charlatan, he hams it up with gusto.
  • After a bit of coaching, Hyllarr the bondbird hawkeagle proves hilariously willing to ham up his injuries to get Starblade's sympathy.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Occasionally inflicted on Heralds by their Companions to preserve their Masquerade as being nothing more than supernaturally intelligent horses. Need also does a spot of memory editing at times. Also, Vanyel's scheme to keep magic out of Valdemar is partly based on a massive node-powered amnesia spell that compels its inhabitants to forget that magic exists, or ever existed except in legend.
• Legacy of the Chosen: The Monarch of Valdemar has been from the same family for hundreds of years (and all reigning Kings or Queens must be Heralds). A notable, if hidden, contributor to that line was Herald-Mage Vanyel, which becomes significant when Princess Elspeth comes into her own.
• Ley Line: The basis of the magic system is Life Energy, which bleeds off of living things into the Background Magic Field and collects into "streams" and "rivers" of energy called ley lines that eventually flow to another plane. Where two or more ley lines meet, they form a node, an extremely powerful magical energy source.
• Life Energy: This forms the basis of all magic. See Ley Line above as well as Liquid Assets.
• Like Brother and Sister: Skif and Talia swear blood brotherhood after their failed teenage romance. Interestingly, they mean it, and any UST becomes moot after Talia acknowledges her lifebond to Dirk. Also occurs between Talia and Kris, although they were lovers during her internship.
• Liquid Assets: Healing magic (and its Dark Side counterpart, Blood Magic) explicitly work this way.
• Living Lie Detector:
  • All Heralds learn a "truth spell" which has this effect. Many can also perform an upgraded version which forces the subject to tell the truth.
  • Gryphons, Empaths, and powerful Mindspeakers such as dyheli can detect falsehood without resorting to magic. Occasional individuals, such as Herald-Chronicler Myste, seem to have the ability as an independent Gift, as well.
• Locked Room Mystery: The short story "Keys" requires Kethry to solve one of these. To add tension, Tarma is stuck outside fighting single combats with every warrior in the keep until she dies or Kethry figures it out, whichever comes first.
• Logical Weakness: Valdemar's Anti-Magic defense isn't absolute and there are major loopholes namely centered around Vanyel's original order to the vrondi, who are very literal.
  • The defense only activates if a mage uses magic inside Valdemar, thus any mage who simply doesn't use magic doesn't trigger the vrondi. This is how Hulda managed to operate for years in Valdemar.
  • The vrondi are only meant to watch and don't offer any other protection which means that a mage can still cast spells outside the borders and use them to attack Valdemar. The Sun-priests used to summon demons to attack Valdemar and the same with Hardornian mages. That is how Leareth bypassed the webs protection
  • The vrondi don't offer any protection outside of Valdemar so any Herald that is attacked on foreign land is vulnerable. In a mild aversion, Vanyel's protection extends beyond the borders during Vanyel's time and grew as Valdemar grew. That is because the vrondi define the borders not by any arbitrary line but by where Heralds regularly patrol.
  • A powerful, determined or crazy enough mage could simply ignore the vrondi long enough to accomplish an objective.
• Lonely at the Top:
  • A common theme used for anyone in a position of authority. When Kerowyn becomes Captain of her mercenary squad, the Skybolts, she is very conscious of the distance she has to keep between herself and even old friends. Rank-and-file Heralds largely avoid it, having their peers for company, but particularly powerful ones (whether politically, like the monarchs, or personally, like Herald-Mages in general and Vanyel in particular) do suffer from it.
  Vanyel: Heralds are all lonely; we’re different [...] Herald-Mages are one step lonelier than that. Then there’s me.
  • One of the functions of the Monarch's Own is to avert this, so that the Monarch will always have one person that they can count on to be a true friend to them. The system broke down with Selenay and Talamir, however. Talamir was her father's best friend, but he was a shell of himself after his Companion and his King's deaths, and his relationship with Selenay remained somewhat distant. Deprived of friends, with no one she trusted absolutely and seeking to be loved, Selenay ended up rushing headfirst into a very bad marriage.
• Long-Running Book Series: Arrows of the Queen was published in 1987, and the Tarma & Kethry stories predate that. Books are still being published to this day.
• Loophole Abuse: Valdemaran law requires that the monarch be a Herald—but it doesn't say anything about regents. So if you want to run the country but you're a right Jerkass who has no chance in hell of being Chosen, you could marry the monarch, have a baby, arrange an "accident" for your beloved, and rule in the child's stead for at least eighteen years, more if you play your cards right. Which is exactly what Prince Thanel, Selenay's awful first husband, nearly manages—it doesn't work because Thanel is working on the plans of someone far smarter than him and falls apart when not being explicitly instructed, and Alberich spots the assassination attempt in time.
• Lord Country: The Kingdom of Valdemar is named after its first ruler, King Kordas Valdemar. He in turn was Duke Kordas of the Duchy of Valdemar (demoted to Baron just before leaving) in the Eastern Empire, which he fled with his people when it became too despotic. When they settled, they insisted that he crown himself and named the land after him. His surname is taken from his former duchy, and so his people were already accustomed to thinking of the land as "Valdemar" and themselves as Valdemarans.
• Love at First Sight: Supposedly this is true of all lifebonds. By the Sword provides probably the most dramatic example without a lifebond.^note According to the Word of God.
• Love Makes You Crazy: Inverted with Lavan Firestorm, whose lovebond to his Companion kept him sane. When she died, he burned a mountain pass down to bare rock, along with the invading army that was in the pass at the time. (And himself, of course.)
• Love Triangle: Between Dirk, Kris, and Talia. At least, that's what Dirk thinks; his reluctance to "break up" Kris and Talia, while the two of them are trying to set Talia up with Dirk, causes a tremendous amount of heartbreak.
• Lower-Deck Episode:
  • The Mage Storms is the first trilogy to feature characters who are not Heralds (and largely not specially Gifted), to show how small acts at just the right moment can be enough to save the world.
  • The Owl Trilogy/Darian's Tale. Compared to the more kingdom- and world-shaking events of previous books, especially the previous trilogy The Mage Storms, Darian's books basically describe the world from the view of yet another cog in the machine and within a small local area as well. The more world-shaking events are merely looked at vaguely, hinting at future books and problems for Valdemar.

Tropes starting with M

• Magic A Is Magic A: Gifts and true magic are portrayed fairly consistently, despite a bit of Early-Installment Weirdness. Each novel in the series goes deeper into the underlying mechanics of the Valdemar 'verse and the actors behind it.
• Magical Guide: This is one of the roles that Companions play for their Heralds, especially the ones with strong Gifts. A Companion can boost his or her Herald's Gifts, whether those Gifts are in 'real' magic or mind-magic. They also provide both advice and comfort; a Herald always knows, without doubt or question, that they are never alone; there will always be at least one entity that loves them.
• The Magic Goes Away: Three times in the series.
  • At the end of The Black Gryphon, the Cataclysm shatters magic over the entire continent and it takes years before things settle down enough that it's safe to use again.
  • Following The Last Herald-Mage trilogy, Vanyel's efforts to protect Valdemar from foreign mages and to ensure that "normal" Heraldic Gifts weren't seen as inferior to magic have the unintended side-effect of causing the country as a whole to forget that magic even exists. This gets revoked at the beginning of Winds of Fury, setting the stage for the return of the Herald-Mages.
  • At the end of Mage Storms, the Final Storm causes most nodes and ley lines to be drained and scattered across the land, depriving mages of most of their power. Again, it's stated that things will get back to normal eventually.
• Magic Knight: Vanyel, Elspeth, and Darkwind are the most notable examples. Most Heralds and many Tayledras tend at least a little toward this. That said, true Magic Knights are rare, since keeping either martial or magical skills up to date is a full-time job, and doing both of them together pretty much precludes a social life.
• Magic Music: Downplayed with the Bardic Gift. A person can become a Bard even if they don't have the Bardic Gift, but it takes a lot more work and practice. The Gift doesn't allow a Bard to perform actual magic, but it does give their musical skills a substantial boost. A Bard who has the Gift can get the audience much more "involved" in listening to, and reacting to, their music, than a Bard who isn't so Gifted.
• Magic Is a Monster Magnet: This is a danger particularly in the Pelagirs, where magic use can attract magic-twisted monsters. It also makes the mage obvious to any enemy mage.
• Magic or Psychic?: The Heraldic Gifts, Healing Gift, and the Bardic Gift are related but distinct mental abilities; only the ability to manipulate outside energy is considered True Magic. (And just to muddy the waters, some magic users can work spells which are indistinguishable from psychic powers). After the death of Herald-Mage Vanyel, the Heralds were made to forget that magic ever existed, becoming specialists in MindMagic instead. Conversely, countries which specialize in magic often dismiss Psychic Powers. The Tayledras are shown to make considerable use of both; the Shin'a'in shun true magic and make only limited use of mental powers.
• Magitek: The Eastern Empire's infrastructure uses magical devices both in place of technology and in conjunction with it. Many of Urtho's devices also count.
• The Magnificent:
  • Vanyel picks up quite a few epithets through between-books exploits; among other things, he becomes known as Vanyel Shadowstalker and Vanyel Demonsbane.
  • In Brightly Burning, Lavan Chitward becomes informally known in the Herald's Collegium as "Lavan Firestarter." (He is unaware that the name was actually bestowed on him by the King.) Down south on the Karsite border, he became "Herald Lavan Firestorm."
  • Urtho (Mage of Silence) and Ma'ar (Mage of Dark Flames) as befitting the two great Archmages of their age.
• Makeup Is Evil: Actual makeup rarely comes up, but it's possible to use magic to permanently change one's appearance, whether that's altering hair color, facial structure, or just going for Animal Eyes. With Mercedes Lackey's tendency to celebrate pragmatism, espouse its virtues, and regard any degree of vanity as loathsome, only her villains ever do this and her heroes are universally repulsed and contemptuous to think that their enemies wasted time and effort on their appearance.
  • Vanyel Ashkevron is attracted to Krebain on first sight and dismayed. Beauty Equals Goodness! How can someone as loathsome as Krebain be beautiful?
    But then he thought, "Artificial - that's really what he is. He's changed himself, I'm sure of it - like painting his face, only more so. If I had a lot of power and didn't care how I used it, I suppose I'd make myself beautiful too."
  • The expectation that non-'natural' Beauty Is Bad is strong enough that in Winds of Fate, when Nyara is injured saving some of Darkwind's charges, he realizes that she's heavily altered to inspire instinctive lust in the people around her, and is torn between unease and pity as he reflects that people who modify themselves to be this sexually attractive usually do so with the intent to weaponize their attractiveness (and decides in a sudden rage that if she's in that category he'll kill her) whereas if it was something done to her it was probably with the intent of victimizing her.
• Male Sun, Female Moon: The two main gods of this setting, Kal'enel the Star-eyed and Vkandis Sunlord have this dynamic.
• Masquerade: The Companions spend over a thousand years as partners to the Heralds without ever revealing their true natures: reincarnated Heralds, or even actual divine avatars in the case of Grove-Born Companions. This is deemed necessary as knowing it could cause the Heralds to worship or even become dependent on them, not to mention the trauma of knowing that a loved one came back in a forever-inaccessible form... or worse, didn't come back.
• Masquerade Ball: In Exile's Valor, Selenay holds one when the official year of mourning is over for her father, partly as a way to see if Prince Thanel is serious about her.
• Massive Numbered Siblings: In one of the short stories, the main character is the youngest of twelve children in the royal family (his mother kept having twins and triplets). All of them were Chosen, which is why he rides on an Internship Circuit out in the field rather than being kept to the palace and capital city.
  • In the Collegium Chronicles, Herald Jakyr's parents belonged to a religion that believed in having as many children as possible for the Glory of God. He tells Mags that his parents had so many children that half the time they called them by the wrong names, and that according to the brother he still talks to, they never even noticed when he was Chosen and left. Jakyr ends the conversation by saying that "Just because you can have a quiverful of youngsters, it doesn't mean you should. Or any."
  • Dirk has six siblings: three older sisters, two younger sisters, and a younger brother. Talia has numerous half-siblings from her father's many wives (eleven in total, with nine still alive at the start of her trilogy). However, she does not have any full siblings, as her mother died giving birth to her.
  • Tuck, Lavan Firestorm's best friend, has nine siblings: five sisters and four brothers.
  • Prince Alain from Out of the Deep is the youngest of twelve princes and princesses, all of whom were Chosen. Their mother Queen Felice is lampshaded as being the most fecund consort in history, who was one of a set of twins herself and whose sisters all always had twins or triplets.
  Rumor had it that she was trying to fill all the extra rooms in the newly rebuilt Heralds' Collegium with her own offspring.
• May–December Romance: An Author Appeal. Several appear early in the series:
  • Stefen is 17 and Vanyel is 35 when they meet.
  • Talia (19-20) marries mid-30s Dirk. However, this is Retcon; when Talia first meets Dirk and Kris (who interned together) she is thirteen, and they are both new Heralds, roughly eighteen or nineteen.
  • Keren is ten to fifteen years older than Sherrill; though her first wife, Ylsa, was roughly the same age as her.
  • Ancar (late 20s) and Hulda (probably 60s, possibly older) are a less positively portrayed couple.
  • In the Herald-Spy series we have Lady Dia (early to mid-twenties) who is the second wife of Duke Jorthun; implied to be in his fifties at least, with grown children who greatly resent Dia, and was Herald Nicholas' mentor in spying.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Winterhart, which she chose deliberately in an attempt to conceal her tragic backstory.
  • Hawkbrothers take a use-name upon reaching adulthood, almost always reflecting some aspect of their personality. When something dramatically changes their personality, they may take a Meaningful Rename.
  • The High Priest directly appointed by the sun god is named "Solaris", Latin for "of the sun."
  • a bit of black humour version: Mags grew up as a child slave for a gemstone mine. No one ever bothered to give him a real name, instead being awarded the nickname 'Magpie', (a bird known to be a collector of small, shiny things) because of his skill at spotting small pieces of valuable gemstone while sorting through rocks.
• Meaningful Rename: Contributing to the tendency of the Tayledras to have Meaningful Names is the fact that they sometimes change their names following life-changing events. For example, Darkwind was called Songwind in the backstory of Winds of Fate, but he changed it when the Heartstone was sabotaged. The Mage Winds trilogy manages to play this for a bit of humor when Starblade quips that he considered changing his name to Starshadow to reflect that he feels like a shadow of his former self... but there's already a Shadowstar and it would be too confusing.
• Medieval Stasis: Averted, over the course of a series spanning three thousand years.
  • It's hinted that in the time of the Mage Wars trilogy, magic had allowed society to advance far beyond what we see in Valdemar, a few thousand years After the End. For instance, Amberdrake attended an "advanced" medical college that denied the reality of Healing Hands and other Gifts, and several non-magical Lost Technology weapons can be found in Urtho's tower (including something implied to be an atomic bomb). After the Cataclysm, no nearby kingdoms or even communities larger than a small rural town or fortress survived, though people a continent away were fine. From those small communities societies rebuilt themselves to the medieval status we see. Over the course of a thousand three hundred years, Valdemar is founded by migrants from The Empire, grows, absorbs smaller kingdoms, and enters into a long-standing a Space Cold War with Karse.
  • Up until Vanyel's time, this roughly applied in Valdemar and the surrounding petty kingdoms that would later join with Valdemar. Magic was widely used, particularly by the Herald-Mages, while technology and society remained essentially medieval. Vanyel, however, was the last Herald-Mage, and after that, Valdemar would have to rely on Gifts alone.
  • After Vanyel's death, Valdemar's society undergoes enormous upheaval as magic fades into myth and Valdemar has to adapt to governing a much larger kingdom without the aid of magic, and limited technological development begins. The Collegium Chronicles and The Herald Spy show the establishment of formal university education at the Collegium, the development of technology to supplement more-limited Gifts ^note For instance, Bear becomes a recognized Healer without a Healing Gift simply by becoming the Collegium's foremost expert on herbs and chirurgy, and most importantly the birth of the Artificer's discipline. Society also begins shifting away from the medieval; among other things, we see increased acceptance of homosexuality and development in women's rights. Much of the plot of Closer to Home is driven by the tension between the medieval values of the nobility (who see women as property to be traded off) and those of the Crown and Heralds (who are liberal Havenites who see women as equal to men).
  • By the reign of Queen Selenay, Valdemar is technologically into the Renaissance (with the exception of gunpowder), and significantly beyond that in societal advancement. Indoor plumbing can be found in decent houses, a system of public works has provided Haven with free fountains, and every child is taught to read, write, and figure (the latter two started to be implemented back in Vanyel's day, though it took a few generations for the public works projects to spread across the entire city because of the method the crown came up with to trick the nouveau rich into paying for it). The raw beginnings of Steam Age technology even emerge during Mage Storms, as the Artificers of the Collegium begin a crash development program to save Haven through both magic and technology. Elsewhere, it's more or less the Middle Ages, with the exception of the Eastern Empire, which has developed along a different technological path.
  • Militarily, knights and lance charges were obsolete even in Vanyel's time. (One party in Closer to Home is themed like an "ancient tourney," with centuries-old armor and banners dragged out of an attic in Haven.) Instead, the Valdemaran Guard develops into an early-modern national army, supplemented by nobles' household units in wartime. The Empire and Karse also have national armies, but elsewhere, the dominant army is a combination of feudal retainers and mercenaries, with an international Mercenaries' Guild providing the most elite and reliable soldiers and combat mages.
  • Sometimes medieval stasis is used, though. Need shows Elspeth some flashes of her human life from before she put her spirit into a sword - this was before the Mage Wars, a minimum of two thousand three hundred years ago - and while Need doesn't get into the state of the world, the technology and events she shows would neatly and easily fit into any other time in the series, with the only exceptions being the technique for putting her soul into an inanimate object and the names of her gods.
• Medieval Universal Literacy: Queen Selenay had an especial interest in fostering literacy, establishing schools in Haven where children could take lessons and be fed, but even books set outside of Valdemar, and before Selenay's reign, generally have characters defaulting to knowing how to read. It appears Shin'a'in often can't, as nomads who can only carry so much with them, but the Shaman of Tale'sedrin taught Tarma so that she could deal more evenly with outlanders.
• Men Can't Keep House: Keisha refers to this in Owlsight, when she thinks back to when the village women cleaned up Justyn's old cottage. She concedes that he kept the treatment areas clean, but the living areas .... Later, when she first sees Darian's home in the new Vale, she can't believe at first that a single male lives there because it's so clean. (Darian does not score any aversion points, since the hertasi clean the place for him.)
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Ulrich, Karal's mentor and Karsite ambassador to Valdemar, gets this deadly straight; he's killed by a magical assassination attempt halfway through Storm Warning, forcing Karal to take his place.
• Might Makes Right: The philosophy of the Bear Clan barbarians, as exemplified by "Song of the Bear Clan." Soft virtues like compassion are useless and meaningless; there is only strength or death.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: Mages do very little animal shapeshifting in this series not because it's difficult, but because there just isn't space in an animal's brain for a human mind. Although bondbirds are partially uplifted and much smarter than their wild counterparts, Tayledras dread the possibility of being caught in their bird's bodies when their human bodies die. For a time they're still able to think and act as themselves but inevitably, they start losing memory and coherence, declining into a confused, mentally crippled bird. Animal-shaped sentient beings - Companions, dyheli, kyree, Firecats, and various one-offs - are always described as having broad foreheads.
  Kethry: "When you shapechange, you become the thing you've changed to. You're subject to its instincts, its limitations. Including the fact that there's not enough room in a beast's head for a human mind. That usually doesn't matter much. Not so long as you don't spend more than an hour or two as a beast. You don't lose much of your humanity, and you probably get it back when you revert. But it's not guaranteed that you will, and the stronger the animal's instincts, the more of yourself you'll lose."
• A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: Hoo boy. There's a reason most Mindspeaking Heralds won't poke around in another's thoughts without cause, and why many with untrained Gifts who haven't yet been Chosen have a miserable time.
• Mindlink Mates:
  • Lifebonded pairings, with all the angst and drama that typically accompanies the trope. Discussed in Winds of Fate between Stefen, Skif, and Nyara, and then again at greater length throughout the "Mage Storms" trilogy when Firesong (mistakenly) believes that having a lifebond would be the end of all disagreements and misunderstandings.
  • Eldan and Kerowyn. They're not lifebonded - they're just both strong telepaths and linked that way.
  • Alberich and Myste as well. Like Kero and Eldan, they aren't lifebonded — they're just both capable of Mindspeech and sharing basic emotions.
  • Talia and Kris, who are involved during her internship but don't have serious romantic feelings for each other, are also shown to add a psychic dimension to their lovemaking.
  • Empaths know exactly what their partner is feeling and what they need to do to please them. As most Healers have at least a touch of Empathy, the profession has built up a reputation for being wondrous lovers. And Don works as a Hooker with a Heart of Gold before being recruited as a Mindhealer.
• Mind over Manners:
  • The Incorruptible Pure Pureness of all Heralds means that they basically never abuse their mind-magic.
  • Kerowyn uses hers as little as possible mostly out of the fear that the people around her would not be able to trust her if they knew she could read their minds.
  • Most individuals with mind-gifts are either Heralds (and thus nigh-immune to corruption), or otherwise trained in a profession that comes with a code of ethical conduct. Twisted Empaths and telepaths are rare and horrifying.
  • Companions are supposed to obey this rule, though the Omniscient Morality License means that Rolan is willing to mess with his Herald's memories to protect Companion secrets. Also, Dastin from one of the short stories is individually a bit loose about the rules, and has to be rather forcefully reminded to keep his brain to himself. Need also makes a hobby of reading minds and commenting; when she's 'asleep' she's worse. Kero manages to get her to largely back off by threatening to drop her into a well.
  • The trope is also sometimes ignored. Companions are framed as always correct for making alterations to other characters' minds, which go a lot further than Rolan meddling with Talia's memories and are quite frequent. Talia herself gets no pushback for altering Skif's mind to un-traumatize him without any warning and her 'is Empathy ethical?' crises don't include that at all. In Owlflight, Tyrsell makes some drastic edits to Darian's mind to make him happier and more pleasant to be around. Snowfire objects and makes strawman arguments that are then knocked down. It would have taken an inconveniently long time to explain what he wanted to do to the traumatized adolescent but Darian totally would have agreed if he understood, and the changes are to help him. Therefore, consent is irrelevant.
• Mind Rape:
  • Practically a hobby of several villains, most notably Mornelithe Falconsbane. It's established that anyone with strong Empathy is capable of this, but since most of them become Healers or Heralds, it's extremely rare.
  • Talia, while mostly using her Empathy to help other Heralds who have had traumatic experiences, has done this as well on at least four occasions. The first was when she simply overwhelmed the mind of a madwoman to knock her out. The second occasion involved taking the worst nightmares of a boy who tried to seduce Elspeth and forcing him to experience it, then threatening to make him repeat the experience every time he closed his eyes if he said a word to anyone about what had happened. The third was when she lashed out at a dungeon guard who was hoping to rape her. The most extreme use of her powers ever, which she herself calls a Mind Rape, happened when she forced a man who had raped his stepdaughters to relive what they had felt in a constant neverending loop, from which he could only be freed if he acknowledged that what he'd done was wrong.
  • interesting variant with Mags. He's been kidnapped by two agents of the Assassin society his parents defected from; after putting Mags in a smoke-induced trance, (implied to be the local equivalent of hashish) some kind of magical technique is used to implant memories copied from others in the Sleepgiver cult, which is meant to overwrite his morals and loyalties to convert him to the Sleepgivers while leaving his personality more or less intact. It doesn't work mostly because of Mags' bond to Dallen, and to a certain extent his Mindspeaking training. It does, however, leave him with the memories, so Mags now possesses a great deal of potentially lethal and dangerous knowledge.
• Modest Royalty: Nearly every good ruler. High Priest Solaris would be one if her role didn't require episcopal pomp; the Emperors of the Eastern Empire wouldn't be one except for their philosophy that austerity is more intimidating than opulence.
• The "Mom" Voice: At one point in the Mage Storms trilogy, Tremaine knows he's needed for a magical ritual to shield Hardorn but is reluctant to start. Solaris delivers a Mom-voiced lecture (complete with Full-Name Ultimatum) telling him he's about to screw up everything ... at least, the words come out of Solaris' mouth. It's strongly implied that, since Solaris is a Willing Channeler for Vkandis, the Hardornen earth-mother deity was able to "borrow" her vocal cords to lecture Tremaine directly.
• Monochromatic Eyes: The Shin'a'in Star-Eyed Goddess, as implied by her name, appears as a woman with starfield eyes. Souls chosen to serve her, called Avatars, have the same eyes.
• Morality Chain: Lavan's Companion. When she dies, everything burns.
  • played with for Mags and Dallen. Mags is an unusually strong Mindspeaker, being trained as a master spy. Thanks to his Sleepgiver memories (see Mind Rape) he comes up with ideas for some highly effective techniques of dubious morality, which in the right circumstances could mean the difference between life and death. In discussing this with Dallen, Mags is wondering when the needs/end justifies using them. Dallen immediately replies (paraphrased) "Trust in me. If things get that bad, I'll give you permission."
• Most Writers Are Writers: Her aforementioned Author Avatar is a chronicler or, in other words, a writer.
• Mugging the Monster: Lavan Chitward was bullied at school by the older students. During one such session, his powers manifested and his tormentors paid the price.
• Multistage Teleport: In the Mage Storms trilogy, Altra's "Jumping" is range-limited. When Altra jumps from Shonar (in Hardorn) back to Haven (in Valdemar) with Karal, it takes multiple jumps to cover the distance, which makes Karal's resulting Teleportation Sickness worse than normal. The exact reason for the limit isn't spelled out, but is implied to be due to Altra stepping physically into the plane of mage-energy to jump—as the Mage Storms get worse, his range decreases.
• Multilayer Façade: Falconsbane can easily sense and see through illusions, and Companions stand out and won't take dye. Kero suggests a trick her mercenary mages once used: layer one illusion over another, so that anyone who senses magic and looks past the first illusion will think they're being hidden for more mundane reasons. The Companions are disguised as worn-out nags, with an illusion of fancy show horses over that. Nyara is disguised as herself, over an illusion that makes her Cat Girl features look like cheap makeup.
• Mundane Luxury: Used repeatedly with heraldic trainees, who are provided comfortable-but-not-decadent lifestyles; for nobility, it's a significant step down, but for others this trope is in full effect.
  • Talia was raised in a culture with extremely strict traditions, and gender roles in particular; she's initially overwhelmed by such concepts as "not being forced to marry someone she doesn't want to" and "being allowed to read during her free time". And "having free time", for that matter.
  • Skif, a former thief, is amazed that trainees receive a modest stipend. The idea that anyone would just give them money is utterly foreign to him.
  • Mags, a child slave at a gem mine before he was Chosen, is probably the best example. He considers it the height of luxury to have food that is both wholesome and plentiful, not to mention clothes that are more than rags.
  • Regular hot baths are an Author Appeal and available freely at the Tayledras Vales and in Haven's palace complex, and they are always appreciated by the various characters who come from backgrounds without such ready access.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Averted in Valdemar, where the prevailing philosophy is that any use of magic or psychic powers which costs energy should be saved for real emergencies.
  • Contrasted with Valdemar is the Eastern Empire, which relies so heavily on Magitek that their society is thrown into chaos when the Mage Storms hit and magic becomes unreliable.
  • Mags and his Companion Dallen share Mindspeech so strong that Dallen can control Mags' hands remotely. They use this to weave Midwinter presents.
• Mutant Draft Board:
  • A borderline example. The Companions don't ask permission of their Chosen before they Choose them, and have, on a couple of occasions, forcibly seized the Herald-to-be and dragged him off against his will. However, the Omniscient Morality License is in play: the Companions never choose anyone who would not accept the Call to Adventure if they knew all the facts, and no Herald has refused to serve once he or she is made aware of the situation. There are also some Gifted in Valdemar who aren't Chosen and don't end up as Healers or Bards, but since they don't get that in depth training, and Companions inherently strengthen Gifts, they're usually minor players who do things like predict the weather.
  • An in-story subversion occurs in Stefen's backstory in Magic's Price: as he relates to Vanyel, Bard Lynnell kidnapped him right off the street declaring that "you belong to Valdemar now." In fact Lynnell had recognized Stefen's extremely potent Bardic Gift and - being as undiplomatic as a sack of hammers - stopped only to confirm that he was in fact living on the street with no blood kin before grabbing him to pack off to the Bardic Collegium for training.
  • Owlsight features an implied aversion when Keisha sees a Companion coming and panics at the thought that she'll be Chosen and expected to leave her village without its only Healer and herbalist - only for the Companion to turn towards her sister instead. Whether she was really on the verge of being Chosen or just jumping to conclusions is left deliberately unclear. However, elsewhere in the series it's stated more or less outright that some people who would otherwise make very good Heralds are specifically not Chosen because there is some other role that it is more vital for them to play; Arrows of the Queen specifically notes that those with the Healing Gifts are almost never Chosen because they are needed far more as Healers than as Heralds. Ultimately, as in so many other things, Because Destiny Says So is in full effect regarding who does or doesn't get Chosen.
• My Death Is Just the Beginning: Ma'ar, who goes so far as to declare the fact with his dying breath.
• Mystical White Hair: Adept-level mages who work with nodes gain white hair at a relatively young age. All Tayledras see their hair whiten as well, simply because they live their lives around powerful magic. The Companions are all pure white, blue-eyed steeds, and eventually reveal that this is because they use nodes as well, to fuel their incredible speed and endurance.

Tropes N

• Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom: The Hawkbrothers' use-names.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Ma'ar's army are basically medieval fantasy Nazis. Ma'ar himself was into racial purity and 'cleansing' Predain of Kaled'a'in.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: Elspeth and company get into Hardorn by pretending to be over-the-top carnival hucksters within a larger caravan of same.
• Never Accepted in His Hometown: Vanyel gets acceptance from his family eventually, but it takes a very long time. Talia and Kerowyn, meanwhile, get this trope in full—especially Talia, who is completely disowned by the Holding she came from (A pity nobody ever found humor in-universe about the fact that the Sensholdings disinherited their daughter for becoming the Queen's personal adviser).
• Nice Guy: Karal, contractually due to being a priest, but this is his genuine personality and puts him in excellent standing with the good guys, as opposed to his political rivals and enemies who constantly underestimate him.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: History tends to gloss over the fact that Skandranon directly caused the Cataclysm and unleashed the World-Wrecking Wave of magic by being Hot-Blooded. Urtho assumed that Skandranon would use the anti-magic weapon to strike at Ma'ar at some point in the future, as part of a plan laid out by surviving leaders. Instead, he rushed off to unleash on Ma'ar's fortress at the same time Urtho's own magic was unraveling. This double-disaster caused devastation throughout the world — which could have been averted if Skandranon had waited a bit.
  • For that matter people don't think of Urtho as being the cause of the Cataclysm with that weapon and unravelling his own magic. Ma'ar winning would have been bad but would it have been as bad as most of the continent becoming uninhabitable for millenia and magic being shattered?
• Nobility Marries Money:
  • Kethry has a vicious version of this in her backstory: when she was twelve years old, her brother decided to fix his Impoverished Patrician status by marrying her off against her will to a rich and ambitious merchant with a thing for little girls. Kethry's old nurse managed to help her escape, but unfortunately not before the wedding night.
  • A common way for wealthy merchants to move up into the Valdemaran nobility is by marriage, as explored most thoroughly in Closer to Home.
• No Biological Sex: Kyree can be born male, female, or neuter. Famous kyree, including Warrl, tend to be neuter, since without any duty to have cubs, they're more free to leave the pack and go adventuring. Neuter kyee still go by male pronouns.
• Nobody Poops: Sometimes averted in a genteel way. Mercedes Lackey likes to talk about plumbing and, as in To Catch A Thief, sometimes that extends to what kind of toilet arrangement a character has. During Arrow's Flight there's a mention of Rolan and Talia having to pause in headlong flight to take care of their physical needs. When she and Kris are trapped in a remote Waystation by a terrible storm, they muse that it's fortunate their pack animals are chirras, which can be housebroken; their Companions take charge of letting the Heralds know when all the animals need to go out.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Dudley Remp, one of the villains in Eye Spy, is a VERY unsubtle and unflattering portrait of Donald Trump. He's described as having "a perfectly square face, a shock of blond hair, small eyes, a pouty mouth, and oddly small hands," he inherits a shady real estate business from his father, and at one point, under Truth Spell, more or less recites a slightly softened version of Trump's infamous "grab them by the pussy" speech.
  • We get an update on him in Spy, Spy Again - he keeps trying to hire assassins and mercenary armies, who laugh heartily while turning him down, because he won't pay in advance - the merc army, in particular, is 'to be paid upon victory'. There's also a short but pointed Take That! about what a stupid idea it is to build a wall around a country.
  • The Eastern Emperor of King Valdemar I's time is also a fairly obvious Trump stand-in, from what we see of him in person.
• Non-Action Guy: Karal, in so many ways. It doesn't stop him from being The Hero of Mage Storms, though. Amberdrake too, in Mage Wars; his lack of martial skills becomes a plot point a few times.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Specifically averted for the gryphons. At one point in Mage Storms, a general assumes that a group of gryphons must be all-male because none of them are, shall we say, "equipped" for nursing babies. Elspeth tells him gryphon chicks are fed the same way hawk or eagle chicks are fed.
  You didn't think something with a beak like that could suckle milk, did you? I wouldn't want to see the result if one tried!
• Noodle Incident: There's more than a few among the way, many of which were explored with Lackey's permission in the anthologies, or expanded upon herself, most notably with Alberich. ^note In Arrows of the Queen Talia is told about how Alberich was Chosen, and how he thwarted Prince Thanel's assassination attempt on Selenay. Some years later the circumstances of his Choosing was expanded in novella 'Stolen Silver', then further expanded to become the first part of Exile's Honor. The assassination attempt became the climax of Exile's Valor. An early one that is a real pity was never expanded was exactly what happened to Kris and Dirk during the five or six years/fifteen years (depending on what you consider Dirk's age to be) of their partnership; when he and Talia are snowed in together in the Forest of Sorrows in Arrow's Flight, Kris tells her a few general details about the 'special missions' he and Dirk often get sent on because their Gifts and personalities mesh incredibly well, with a bent towards professional skulduggery. Reading between the lines, they seem to have been Valdemar's two-man equivalent of James Bond. (One of the very first things Kerowyn thinks about Dirk when they meet is that he moves like an assassin, and she would know) It's highly unlikely that we'll ever know the details, however, as Lackey has not only done several books already with Doomed by Canon characters, but her longest ever character-specific story arc about another Herald-Spy, Mags.
• No Ontological Inertia: Magic spells tend not to last past the mage's death, unless they are powered by a Tayledras Heartstone. Some enchanted objects are also quite durable.
• No Periods, Period: The Arrow books mention Talia's courses being steady as one reason the Holderkin think she's ready to marry at thirteen. When she gets to the Collegium a female trainee shows her "moon day" supplies and Talia notes that the sponges are neater and more comfortable than the rags used in the Holdings. She's also given access to medicines that let her control her cycle and fertility.
  • One of the Vows and Honor short stories involves a bad luck amulet. One of the ways this bad luck manifests is giving Kethry incapacitatingly painful menstrual cramps, forcing her to brew tea to move and making it difficult for her to concentrate enough to use magic.

Tropes starting with O

• The Oath-Breaker: The "Oathbreaker's Curse" is specifically invoked in Oathbreakers by Tarma and Kethry in order to get revenge on the king of Rethwellan for the brutal murder of his sister. In By the Sword, the Skybolts also identify Ancar of Hardorn as an oathbreaker, and only the absence of any mages (the initial ritual requires the participation of a mage, a priest, and a commoner who had suffered irreversible personal harm as a result of the target breaking an oath) prevents them from invoking the same curse on him.
• Occult Blue Eyes:
  • Just about any powerful magic user is going to wind up with blue eyes regardless of what they were born with as a side effect from the amount of magic they use. The only real exceptions are mages who were born with grey eyes, like Vanyel.
  • All Companions have blue eyes, caused by channelling node-energy, which bleaches hair and eyes to white and blue, respectively. Their eyes are frequently mentioned, with newly Chosen Heralds usually spending a while staring into them when they first meet.
  • In general Tayledras, Shin'a'in, and Kaled'a'in both past and present are strikingly blue-eyed unless they have recent ancestors with different eyes. This may be related to their close association with the Star-Eyed Goddess, who takes an active interest in their lives. It's specifically noted to be a different shade of blue than magic-bleaching. All Tayledras, since they live in the magic-heavy Pelagirs and specifically in Vales next to nodelike Heartstones, bleach out their hair and eyes eventually, though it takes longer for non-mages.
• Oddly Common Rarity:
  • Lifebonds, supposedly very rare, are all over the earlier novels. In later books, they are less common and the drawbacks of being tied to one person for life get as much attention as the advantages.
  • Companions bespeaking humans who are not their Chosen is said to be exceedingly rare and always draws comment. At first it only happens in times of dire need, but much of the Mage Winds trilogy takes place away from Valdemar and involves numerous characters who readily believe Companions are people and talk to them — after a bit of hesitation Cymry and Gwena engage quite willingly in conversation. In books written after that, it seems Companions in general are entirely content to engage in Mindspeech with anyone who is not a Herald, whether or not that character displays any skill at Mindspeech. On a similar note, Talia is the only Herald POV character in the series who can't talk to her Companion with Mindspeech.
  • Adept-class mages are said to be exceptionally rare. In the Oath books, the king of Rethwellan employs only one; in Arrows through Mage Winds Ancar only commands (or 'commands') one or two. You wouldn't know Adepts are rare from looking at the heroes and their allies, though! There are more prominent Adepts than there are Masters, the next rank down, and there are very few Journeymen. Later books tone down the amount of Adepts and powerful Adept magic is matched by creative thinking and mages pooling their powers together. Somewhat justified when the characters are Tayledras. As an isolated population empowered by their Goddess and living in absurdly high-magic environments for thousands of years, and when they do take in outsiders those are usually quite magically Gifted, it makes sense they'd produce a higher than usual number of strong mages.
  • Divine intervention is said to be extremely rare and costly, often demanding a sacrifice. It's explained that God's Hands Are Tied due to a pact made by the gods to preserve the Balance of Good and Evil. Yet both the Star Eyed and Sunlord Vkandis in particular rather blatantly and unsubtly interfere in the lives of their followers. Though the various godly representatives (Companions, Firecats etc) are the gods working around restrictions and exploiting loopholes.
• Offered the Crown: Grand Duke Tremane, for Hardorn (with conditions); a couple of Valdemaran monarchs wound up King or Queen after accidents befell their predecessors, King Randale, for one. Strongly implied to have happened to King Valdemar, the original monarch and namesake of the kingdom.
• Oh, My Gods!:
  • The setting has all manner of different gods and goddesses that various characters swear by; "Lady Bright" is popular among Valdemaran characters, while Kerowyn mostly swears by Agnira and sometimes one or both of her sister goddesses as well - occasionally very colorfully, when the situation calls for extra emphasis.
  • The Eastern Empire honors the "Hundred Little Gods" — all the former Emperors and their consorts. As Tremane remarks, there aren't exactly a hundred, but it makes a nice round number to swear by.
• Older and Wiser: Tarma and Kethry in By the Sword; Talia in The Mage Winds, Kerowyn in and after The Mage Storms. Among others. Alberich is this retroactively, a middle-aged man in the first books and a young one in his focus books, the Exile duology.
• Omniscient Morality License: The Companions exhibit this tendency from time to time, especially in the earlier novels, although Elspeth calls them out on it in Mage Winds. It later becomes subverted as we learn more about what Companions are.
  • Companions generally operate on the unspoken rule that they will only advise their Heralds, and then usually only when asked. Many tangled interpersonal squabbles could easily be resolved if the Companions would just get their hooves into it and sort their Heralds out, but when called on it, the Companions themselves state that their humans are expected to solve their own problems whenever possible. Justified in the sense that they are effectively avatars of the gods and obey a general divine Alien Non-Interference Clause about not messing around with human affairs unless absolutely necessary.
  • The few times the Companions do directly intervene with their divine authority, they usually wipe the memories of their Heralds afterwards. Again, this is specifically to prevent the Heralds from coming to worship the Companions or rely on them to solve all their problems.
  • The Gods themselves are revealed to have been playing this game for millennia; nearly every single one of the myriad disasters and near-disasters that have occurred since the first Cataclysm was engineered for the specific purpose of putting in place all the pieces necessary to avert the second Cataclysm.
  • Need gets a weaker version of this. She's not a god or a Guardian Spirit, but gods have worked through her before. Like Companions she reads minds with abandon. Unlike Companions, she pipes up about some of the things she sees because she's expedient. She also tests her bearers, once going quiet for days when alone with Nyara. That test has Nyara weeping and howling, pleading for hours for her to wake up, terrified of being alone and without her teacher's protection. She's angry when Need speaks up again, but this cools immediately upon being told that it was to make her realize that she's strong enough to survive on her own.
  • Also claimed by the dyheli, the sentient and highly psychic but not divine deer people, who happily mess quite extensively with peoples' minds without asking first. A human watching this can only protest inarticulately and then be defeated by the facts and logic that it's fine since it's well intentioned and no one has time to look out for a traumatized child, so they might as well have a happy one.
• Only the Chosen May Ride: The Companions are magical horselike beings which bond to a particular human rider. The Companion always chooses the human, never vice versa. Being Chosen by a Companion makes someone one of the titular Heralds, who serve as a combination of Mounties, circuit judges, military scouts and Search and Rescue service, among other things. Heralds are considered to be intrinsically incorruptible, because the Companions don't Choose people who would take bribes or the like. It is also required that the ruler of the country be a Herald, and no one who has not been Chosen by a Companion is eligible to be ruler or heir.
  • In Exile's Valor, Prince Karathanelan assumes the Companions are just distinctively-colored horses and heads off to Companions' Field to break one of them to saddle. The only reason he survives to the novel's final fight scene is because Caryo goes easy on him.
  • Under special circumstances, non-Chosen may ride Companions. Karal of Karse was in a sense Chosen by Altra the Firecat, the Karsite version of Companions. The Companion Florian didn't Choose Karal, but befriended and helped him, because he needed a better perspective of Valdemar than a Firecat could provide. Near the end of Magic's Price, Yfandes directly mindspeaks Stefen to help care for a traumatised Vanyel, and carries them double. Talia is also prepared in Arrow's Flight to pull a fugutive up onto the saddle behind her and book it. And at the end of the Mage Storms trilogy several Companions volunteer to help transport a party of mages, none of them Chosen, to Urtho's Tower to try and avert The End of the World as We Know It.
  • Blink and you'll miss it, but it's mentioned that Keren and her brother Teren can mindspeak each other's Companions as well as their own; this is outright stated to be because they're twins. Whether this holds true for Selenay and Daren's twins is yet to be seen.
  • in the short stories about Herald Wil, he's eventually pulled off assignment to Haven to go back on circuit; however, this causes him major issues because he's a single father, still not over his wife's loss, and intensely bonded to toddler Ivy as a result. He asks permission to take her on circuit with him; this is allowed once an unpartnered Companion volunteers to go along to carry Ivy when in transit and play nanny while Wil's busy Heralding.
• The Order: The Heralds—Chosen for their abilities and Incorruptible Pure Pureness to defend the kingdom however they can. This Order is especially closely tied to its Kingdom, since the Monarch is required to be a Herald—being Chosen ensures that he'll put his people's good above his own. They're called Heralds out of tradition; after the original King Valdemar and his Heir, the third person Chosen was Valdemar's royal herald.
• Our Angels Are Different: The word 'angel' is only rarely applied in the series, but outside of appearance descriptors when it is it's to the Companions. The first several Companions were Grove Born and appeared fully adult. These are incarnations of primal benign spirits and don't age, but are still physical creatures with needs. The first Grove-Born gave birth to 'regular' Companions, which make up most of the ones in the series. These take about ten years to grow up and into the memories of their past lives as virtuous humans, usually fomer Heralds, before they Choose Heralds-to-be. They age and die with their Chosen, who they guide and support through life but rarely interfere with unasked. Companions come across as impossibly beautiful horses with the intelligence of humans and tend to downplay the extent of their powers, including that they can just magically freshen up and be well-groomed. Companions also reproduce and give birth, noted as being as difficult as it is for humans.
  • The rarer Karsite equivalents are Firecats, who also incarnate as adults and resemble flame-point Siamese cats three feet tall at the shoulder. These are explicitly virtuous Sunlords or religious leaders of Karse and it's a much bigger deal when they appear and bond with someone. While they're more demonstrative of their powers and vanish to parts unknown a lot, Altra at least downplays his existence as a physical being that has needs like food and sleep until he's found out.
  • The Star-Eyed Goddess has her Sword-Sworn among the Shin'a'in, who swear to her service in life. After their deaths they may appear as spirit warriors, normally only in the spirit world or training and advising living Sword-Sworn, but sometimes briefly incarnating physically as veiled humans, usually for a fight. Under the Vale, an essay written by the author's husband, reveals that the Star-Eyed will also sometimes choose virtuous Tayledras to become spirit-beings that may interfere with the world in small ways and may answer prayers, though not always ones to the Star-Eyed herself.
    History has shown that such a transformation is most likely if they have been a strong, stable mix of heroic, loving, resourceful, and wise in their life.
    • In the Mage Winds trilogy the Star-Eyed additionally transforms Dawnfire and Tre'valen into her Avatars. While Companions and Firecats are mostly physical beings that may appear and have influence in the spirit world, and the goddess's other chosen are spirits who may be manifested or incarnated to affect the physical world, these Avatars are both.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Colddrakes or icedrakes were created before or during the Mage Wars as living weapons, since long gone feral. They're serpentine with short legs, somewhat equine heads, and spiky frills and spines, and hibernate through all but the coldest summers. They're most dangerous for their hypnotic purple-eyed gaze, which holds people transfixed.
  • In A Dragon In Distress, a crossover short story with Elizabeth Waters which isn't in any Valdemar anthology, Tarma and Kethry follow Need's call through a mysterious portal and into another setting, where they have to help a dragon whose princess has been kidnapped. This dragon is a civilized tea-serving person who rescued the princess in the first place and is panicking without her.
• Our Gods Are Different: The precise nature of the gods is one of the few mysteries about the setting's magic system that remain unexplained.
  • Several Gods and Goddesses are worshipped; it's implied at some points that they may all be different faces of a single God and Goddess, which may in turn both be faces of The One, but the details don't always quite line up to support this. At least two gods — the Star-Eyed Goddess of the Shin'a'in, Tayledras, and Kaled'a'in clans, and Karse many centuries earlier, and Vkandis Sunlord of Karse and Iftel — are proven to exist and take active hands in the lives of their followers. Both are benevolent, but they're neither truly omnipotent or omniscient, and they can sometimes be jerks; their philosophy is that humans have a right and responsibility to solve their own problems whenever they can, but they aren't above abandoning that rule whenever they have an objective that needs to be accomplished. The big examples are the Laser-Guided Amnesia they use to protect their secrets, and Vkandis very unsubtly reorganizing his church hierarchy when he needed Karse on the Good Guys' team.
  • Several beings are worshipped that are clearly not a part of this pantheon. The Hundred Little Gods are the spirits of deceased emperors, although they grant no powers and may be fictitious; and Thalhkarsh is a demon who gains actual power from worship and aspires to godhood, though since he's stopped before his plans are complete it's never confirmed if he would have truly attained divinity or not. Demons and elemental spirits clearly come from somewhere, and it's unclear whether these are under the jurisdiction of the aforementioned gods or not. In addition, when the Star-Eyed puts in an appearance in Oathbreakers she comments with interest on the concept of Companions in a way that suggests she has no personal involvement in their creation or direction: she greets them as "children of my other self," but her wording leaves it unclear if she means that she and the force behind the Companions are actually separate facets of the same entity, or if she's simply recognizing their motives and values as aligned with her own.
    • Kethry believes the Star-Eyed is another aspect of the goddess she worships. When she prays to her for Tarma's sake, the Star-Eyed confirms that she's another face of this goddess.
  • There are also the tribal totems of the Northern Barbarians, who take animal shapes and are not omnipotent like the Star-Eyed or Sunlord; they rely on the prayers of their respective tribes, and will die if their tribe dies.
  • Under The Vale, a short essay from Larry Dixon in the same named short story collection, reveals that the Tayledras, with their Heartstones, could all together perform god sized feats of magic. Not that they knew this and it becomes moot after the Mage Storms.
• Our Gryphons Are Different: Gryphons are highly intelligent beings who were created by the Great Mage Urtho thousands of years before the founding of Valdemar, as explored in the Mage Wars trilogy. They are universally noble and brave but also vain and hedonistic. Unlike some of the intelligent races, which lacking human mouths communicate solely through Mindspeech, gryphons can speak aloud but are prone to Sssssnaketalk and Trrrilling Rrrs. Many of them are mages and they're all quite large. They are not capable of carrying a rider, but if you magic up a basket to be weightless you might find a gryphon to tow it for you.