I'd go with World of the Five Gods, or World of the Five Gods Series, or Five Gods Series, in about that order of preference. We haven't seen Chalion since the second book of the series at this point.
- First Guy Wins/Last Guy Wins: Zigzagged in Paladin of Souls. Bujold implies that Ista is too old and heartbroken for romance. Then sets up several potential love interests and whips the reader back and forth between them like a terrier with a rat. Then after getting the reader's hopes up she implies that Ista was deluding herself all along. Then she subverts that, too.
This needs untangling, and I haven't read the book recently enough (and don't have a copy at hand). A single work can't be an example of both tropes — one or the other must turn out to be correct in the end.
So, is Umegat's lover actually dead? Umegat implies it very strongly when he's describing his torture, but lets Cazaril assume it rather than specifically state it, and the old groom who accompanies him everyone has been mutilated in exactly the same way, and is clearly the person Umegat is closest to.
"Don't we make a fine pair..."
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I'm guessing that the author means to imply that the lover is the groom, by the end.
Umegat doesn't imply anything, he says it straight out: "He died a martyr, hanged." On the other hand, this is a report he got secondhand, so I suppose he could be speaking From a Certain Point of View—this is what he was told at the time, and later he found it wasn't entirely true. I don't think the book particularly suggests this, though. Aside from there not being an obvious reason to deceive Cazaril about it, Cazaril never registers the groom as Roknari—unlike Umegat, where it's the first thing he notices—and Umegat's known the groom twenty years, while Cazaril estimates Umegat to have been serving the Bastard for forty.
The Dowager Provincara: what to classify her as? I listed her as Meddling Parents shading toward Evil Matriarch, but she's clearly not evil...she's just extremely strong-willed and tries to take charge of every situation she's involved in. Other option was My Beloved Smother, but I didn't get that vibe off her...perhaps because her son had run away to Taryoon over a decade before the first book.
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I would say Grande Dame.
Screaming along at mach .2 with my hair on fire.
Since Bujold herself now refers to this as the "World of the Five Gods" (according to the afterwords in the Penric ebooks) rather than as the Chalion series. I'll float the idea that there needs to be a redirect here from "Five Gods" or something of that sort.
I'm floating the idea in this discussion, rather than going ahead and creating a redirect because (1) I've never done a redirect before, and (2) the more I think about it the less l'm sure about what the exact redirect should be: Five Gods? Five Gods 'Verse? World of the Five Gods?
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