Dragons Made Me Do It: Season 2, Episode #3: Arrows of the Queen

Lleu: And welcome to Dragons Made Me Do It, one of potentially many podcasts about the cultural context and legacy of Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series, but still the only one by us.

Tequila Mockingbird: I’m Tequila Mockingbird, and I have read every single book in Mercedes Lackey’s, Heralds of Valdemar series possibly a dozen to 20 times.

Lleu: Wild. I’m Lleu, and I had never read anything by Mercedes Lackey until preparing for this episode.

Tequila Mockingbird: (This is editing Tequila: apologies, there’s a lot of hiss in the background of my audio for the first 20 minutes or so; the radiator was radiating, and I was not able to fully mitigate that —)

Lleu: Yeah. Just as a warning, in this episode we will be discussing child abuse and corporal punishment somewhat extensively, as well as ambiguous childhood sexual abuse, sexual assault, and suicide.

Tequila Mockingbird: Alright, so we are going to be focusing today on the Arrows of the Queen trilogy, by Mercedes Lackey, although we will also be pulling in a couple of things from her Valdemar books as a whole, especially from Brightly Burning. The Arrows of the Queen trilogy is the first of Lackey’s Valdemar books, and it follows Talia, a young farm girl who gets swept away on a magical adventure and becomes a Herald. This comes with a magical animal Companion who psychically bonds to you and loves you forever (does it sound familiar?) and involves becoming essentially a special agent of the royal Crown, who does all kinds of dangerous jobs. We follow Talia through her selection process, her education as a herald, her independent fieldwork assignment, and then through a war against the dastardly and evil King Ancar of the neighboring kingdom of Hardorn, which culminates in, of course, his defeat and Talia falling in love and living happily ever after.

Lleu: We’ve talked about Valdemar enough, on and off over the years, including references in this podcast — I was not expecting the book to begin like this:

Lleu: “A gentle breeze rustled the leaves of the trees, but the young girl seated beneath it did not seem to notice. An adolescent of thirteen or thereabouts, she was, by her plain costume, a member of one of the solemn and straight-laced Hold”

Lleu: “families that lived in this borderland of Valdemar—come there to settle a bare two generations ago. She was dressed (as any young Hold girl would be) in plain brown breeches and a long, sleeved tunic. Her unruly brown curls had been cut short in an unsuccessful attempt to tame them to conform to Hold standards. She would have presented a strange sight to anyone familiar with Holderfolk; for while she sat and carded the undyed wool she had earlier cleaned, she was reading. Few Hold girls could read, and none did so for pleasure. That was a privilege normally reserved by longstanding tradition, for the men and boys of the Holdings. A female’s place was not to be learned; a girl reading—even if she was doing a womanly task at the same time—was as out of place as a scarlet jay among crows.”

Lleu: Okay, I was not expecting this book to just be about Menolly. If these books can be published, traditionally published through a major publisher — published by DAW — anything is permitted. Write whatever you want. Go wild.

Tequila Mockingbird: Now, to be fair, you can’t copyright the idea of a tween girl who’s an outcast because she’s smart and nerdy. That’s Beauty and the Beast.

Lleu: It just happens to be up north in the mountains instead of on the coast. But don’t worry, there are people from a fishing community also in the book. They’re just not conservative.

Tequila Mockingbird: Oh, my god, Lleu — it’s like you haven’t even memorized the map of Valdemar.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes, Talia as a Menolly figure or, more broadly, what that specific narrative figure is achieving is an interesting avenue to discuss. There’s something to — this is just a good set of tropes. I don’t think this is the only character that fits those tropes.

Tequila Mockingbird: And your comment when you originally read it was, this is if Menolly had stayed in Benden Weyr, right?

Lleu: Yes, that is the premise of this book, is, what if Menolly had stayed at Benden Weyr and Impressed a queen dragon?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because, in a lot of ways, Talia’s storyline is different because she does get absorbed into the institutional power of a Herald, and specifically she ends up as the Queen’s Own Herald, so she’s not just a regular Herald, she’s a special magic Herald.

Tequila Mockingbird: Well, and Menolly’s tall, so they’re very different. They’re not at all the same.

Tequila Mockingbird: While Menolly also gets to be the specialest, her ultimate plotline is to be Sebell’s wife, right? Her specialness gets de-emphasized over the course of the books as they progress.

Tequila Mockingbird: And while Talia does definitely end up in a relationship with Dirk and having kids, and she’s kind of a background mom figure, like Menolly in some of the later books —

Tequila Mockingbird: I do appreciate that she continues to be the most specialest Monarch’s Own for the entirety of the ongoing series.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so, like Menolly, she shows up, but she shows up to tamper with people’s emotions in a dubiously ethical manner and then fade away. So she’s like Menolly but with Lessa’s ethics about mind-controlling people.

Lleu: Yeah. Part of the gimmick of the Heralds is that they all have some kind of magical Gift.

Tequila Mockingbird: That is a relevant plot distinction, that Elspeth ends up discovering magic again, and it’s, like, actually something slightly different.

Lleu: Okay, it’s very funny to me that you’re maintaining this distinction, and yet you’re like, “People don’t have psychic powers; that’s magic” in Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: It is magic, it’s just that in-universe it’s a different thing.

Lleu: Okay. Everyone has some kind of magic Gift that’s not actually magic. The other, I think, major frame of reference for this that really, really struck me as the books went on is Tamora Pierce’s Song of the Lioness quartet.

Lleu:Which started publishing a few years earlier, and I think has to have been on Lackey’s mind as she was writing this — there’s just so many things that add up to it. Heralds all have some Gift, and Talia’s Gift is that she is an empath, both that she can receive other people’s emotions, and that she can project emotions onto other people, and manipulate what they are feeling, which…most of the time she uses to give people impromptu —

Lleu: — dubiously consensual therapy, but the books spend a lot of time — especially the second book, where Talia’s control over her abilities completely collapses, and it turns out it was never there to begin with, which I didn’t think was a great plot device, but whatever — the books spend a lot of time with Talia thinking about the ethics of using her abilities and wondering, “Am I doing it subconsciously?” There’s rumors going around that she’s been controlling people on the governing Council, and she’s like, “Have I been? What if I hadn’t noticed? How would I know?” The books really, really, really want us to be thinking about the ethics of using your psychic powers on people —

Lleu: — and then what Talia does with these psychic powers is absolutely unhinged and evil.

Lleu: Including, most notably, most egregiously, in the third book, when she and one of her fellow Heralds — who’s also her lover but not the person that she eventually marries — before they have been officially captured, but when they are aware that they are de facto captured by the ruler of the evil kingdom, they combine their abilities to mind-wipe two random servants to make them believe that they are “Talia” and “Kris,” so that the servants will go to the fancy dinner in their place and let them escape. And then, of course, everyone at the fancy dinner gets assassinated. There’s simply no way to argue that you didn’t know you were condemning these two random servants to death. I’m sorry. You have no plausible deniability here.

Lleu: You knew exactly what circumstance you were in, and what was going to happen to them when they were inevitably discovered, as they would have been.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. On one hand, the book very much does not want to engage with that, and does not worry about it. On the other hand, I think if the books had talked about it or thought about it, it would not be out of the bounds of what has been textually discussed as Heraldic ethics.

Tequila Mockingbird: Because one of the things that I do think is interesting about this book series, is that there isn’t such a tidy reason for Heralds to exist. We’re not saving the planet from Thread, right? And ultimately, in Pern, the dragonriders are exercising perhaps too much social and political power, question mark? They’re behaving in some ways that are a little bit sketchy, especially Lessa and F’lar as they slowly try and take over complete control of the planet’s politics.

Tequila Mockingbird: But in a very utilitarian, “Yeah, we’re doing this because we need to save everyone from Thread; we’re all gonna die otherwise.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And we do see, in Red Star Rising, the way that they explicitly expand that mandate, basically, to include protecting people from general bad treatment, under the auspices of, “Hey, we’re supposed to make sure that everyone on this planet lives a full and happy life and doesn’t die in Threadfall.” But the Heralds — what they’re in charge of is the continuance of Valdemar, the political state.

Tequila Mockingbird: They are special and magical and they tell this story that, “Oh, a Herald never lies; a Herald is fundamentally impossible to be a bad person.”

Tequila Mockingbird: “Their Companion would repudiate them if they crossed the line” — and we do actually see that happen in one of the other books. A Herald — his family gets murdered, and he retaliates, and his Companion repudiates him.

Tequila Mockingbird: So we’ve got this aura of “Oh, a Herald is morally better than the average person” —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but when we actually look at what they do, and some of the conversations that they have — not really.

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that I think Lackey is open to thinking about and talking about as the series progresses, which I kind of think is fun.

Lleu: For me, the thing that made it stand out was the disconnect between —

Lleu: — this is obviously an evil thing to do, and the book makes no attempt in the moment to justify it on the basis of “This is what Heralds need to do to protect Valdemar” —

Lleu: — and instead is just like, “Yeah, this is the good and correct thing to do in this situation.” Like, I don’t think that’s true, actually.

Tequila Mockingbird: But don’t worry, we have to spend a lot of time worrying about whether we can kiss Dirk ethically.

Lleu: Yeah. One of the things that exacerbated it for me was the fact that it didn’t even matter in the end, right? The servants die, and Talia and Kris are trying to escape, and they get caught immediately.

Lleu: Then what was the point of that? Just have them get caught. Don’t have Talia mind-control someone.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. Another place where the ethics of the world-building really stood out to us was: how much child abuse is too much child abuse?

Tequila Mockingbird: Because, much like Menolly, Talia is experiencing physical abuse and emotional abuse at home, and in her case it’s not just parents trying to control her behavior and her emotions and her soul — one might argue — with cruelty. It’s specifically that compounded by a sibling who is torturing her on purpose, for kicks.

Tequila Mockingbird: And adults who are not protecting her from that. And that’s bad, and the text says so, pretty unambiguously.

Tequila Mockingbird: But, when Talia comes to Haven, part of the reason that she’s been chosen as a Herald is that the princess of Valdemar is being manipulated or groomed into a horrible human being by the evil baddie, in a very contrived way.

Tequila Mockingbird: After they get rid of Hulda, they have to quote-unquote “civilize” Elspeth and stop her from being a horrible human being — at the age of seven. Some of the strategies that are used to accomplish this are legitimate parenting strategies, like, for example, when Elspeth breaks a toy on purpose, she doesn’t get it magically replaced; she has to fix it herself. But mixed in with that is corporal punishment.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s treated very much the same way, as, “Ah, this is a good parenting strategy that Talia knows about and is using effectively to help Elspeth become a better person.” And it’s fascinating — so we knew that that child abuse was bad, but this child abuse…

Lleu: Is fine, apparently. Which did jump out in relation to Talia’s position as Menolly, because — certainly McCaffrey shows us dysfunctional parents who are not awful people to the extent that Yanus is, namely Aramina, but also McCaffrey doesn’t expect us to be, like, “Yeah, actually, Aramina’s parenting is good.” She expects us to be like, “Well, now that Readis isn’t living in the same house as Aramina, they can have a healthier relationship in the future.” Which is very different. It does feel like, for all her many flaws, McCaffrey is conscious of the fact that actually hitting children is bad. Don’t do that. And Lackey’s like, “Mm…not too much. But also…some.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I acknowledge that this is still an open topic of debate in our world today — spanking is not illegal in the state of New York. You are allowed to hit your child, not with a closed fist, but with an open palm, and not with an object, such as a hairbrush. So this would, in fact, cross the line of what is legally acceptable in the state of New York, because after Elspeth hits her maid with a hairbrush, Talia gives the hairbrush to the maid and says, “Hit her back.” I personally think that, overall, the studies have shown that spanking children creates children who understand that violence is the way that you respond to negative emotions and who learned the lesson that, when adults are upset, they can get hurt, rather than the lesson that they should moderate their own behavior and regulate their own emotions effectively. But I think it’s fair to say that at the time that this was written spanking children was not a niche position, right? It was not thought of as socially aberrant.

Tequila Mockingbird: I suspect that this was a blind spot, rather than her trying to actually articulate a position on how much hitting was enough or too much for children.

Lleu: Yeah. Well, also probably with a certain amount of, “Well, of course people in this medieval setting would think it was okay,” but with no interrogation of that.

Tequila Mockingbird: I will also just say, Lackey does not have children, so I can’t speak to, obviously, her experiences as a child or spending time with children who are not hers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was just kind of passing on this cultural wisdom of “this is what medieval parents did” or “this is a thing parents do, and that’s fine.”

Lleu: Especially given how similar Talia is to Menolly up until that point —

Lleu: — and suddenly I’m like, “Wait a minute — Menolly would never do this.”

Lleu: — but she would not hit them without first challenging them to a duel that they had agreed to.

Lleu: This speaks, maybe, to one of the broader worldbuilding things that we were talking about a little bit before this, which is the aesthetics of the series, in particular in comparison with Pern, because I do think you’re right that, like, Pern feels very early medieval, despite the fact that it is feudalism in the quote-unquote “classical” form that didn’t actually exist, but would have been in the 12th, 13th century. But Pern is very unheroic, unromantic, and a little bit grimy in the “this is kind of the Dark Ages” way, whereas Lackey is very much —

Tequila Mockingbird: We’ve got these weird little moments — and she’s not the only one — where you can’t resist having a modern thing and justifying it with magic, like plumbing.

Tequila Mockingbird: But because of that, it does feel, I think, a little more early modern — technologically, sociopolitically — than high medieval.

Lleu: Yeah. I think a lot of ostensibly medieval fantasy has relatively little in common with an actual medieval political realities [sic] — very much people are projecting modern things back.

Lleu: It also makes me think about more ancient states. Especially the way Lackey is thinking about borders here is incredibly goofy.

Lleu: Yeah. People don’t just come to Valdemar. People can only come to Valdemar if they have —

Lleu: — an immigration sponsor, and there are state records of everyone’s immigration sponsors. That didn’t exist before, like, the ’50s.

Lleu: But even more broadly, the whole way that Lackey is thinking about borders — in the third book, we visit the border. Talia and Kris cross the border to the evil neighboring state that they don’t know is evil yet. The border is a literal line. There’s a fence that is the border.

Lleu: At no point prior to, I don’t know, the 1870s were borders strictly policed and enforced like this.

Lleu: Especially because of the ways that language is distributed. We’re told — when they cross the border, they talk to the border guard on the Hardorn side, and he’s like, “Do you guys speak Hardornen? Because if you don’t, we can work around that; we just need to know.” And they’re like, “Yes, we do; don’t worry about it.” And he’s like, “Good, because once you’re more than a mile or two from the border, everyone just speaks Hardornan; no one speaks Valdemaren.” And that simply is not how it works.

Tequila Mockingbird: In my job as an unpaid defense lawyer for authors who have never met me, there are some world-building considerations, and I do think we see that other borders are not this structured and immigration between other kingdoms is maybe more realistic — although still the concept of states is more modern than it ought to be — because we will eventually learn that the reason that there is no magic in Valdemar is that there is a literal magic shield defining the border of Valdemar, and, if you walk through it, there’s a magical ping that goes up and Vrondi assault you, and it’s all to do with the truth spell, and there’s all kinds of plot stuff that eventually gets unraveled.

Tequila Mockingbird: So it is not impossible that that results in some weirdness, where basically you are either in Valdemar or you are not, and it is hard to go back and forth. Also, it’s textual that nobody knows about this, because part of the magic makes you forget that the magic exists.

Tequila Mockingbird: So, I would believe that the people in Hardorn don’t cross the Valdemaren border, and they don’t think about why they don’t cross the Valdemaren border, and so they don’t speak Valdemaren. Valdemar is a weird, reclusive, all the other political entities are like, “What the fuck is going on?” The rest of Velgarth is not like Valdemar, on purpose. And we do see in other books, again — Tarma and Kethry cross back and forth between Rethwellan and Karse without any of those. Karse has some weird shit because Karse is going through serious religious upheaval and, but, even then, there’s a mountain: one side is Karse, the other side is Rethwellan; that’s all we worry about, unlike the way Valdemar is policed.

Lleu: Okay, so Valdemar is just a police state, is what I’m taking away from this.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. A magic police state where they’ve convinced everyone that the policing is ontologically good.

Lleu: And is one of the other things that we had wanted to talk about, which is the relationship between Heralds and the state.

Lleu: — down to, you look into the Companion’s eyes, and the Companion telepathically tells you its name, and that’s the moment you’re gonna remember forever, and people are tearing up when they’re thinking back to it. It’s straight-up just Impressing a dragon but with horses instead.

Tequila Mockingbird: Absolutely. And, textually, it is the most perfect love and companionship, and that kind of love can never be equaled, all of that.

Lleu: Yeah. But: where dragonriders are very purposefully outside of any other social and political structure — at least ostensibly; obviously they interact with other structures, and they occasionally intervene in other structures, but it’s bad when they do, right? The fact that Kylara is messing around with Hold politics is bad; that’s one of the things that marks her as a villain.

Lleu: Here, Valdemar is like, “What if Lessa and F’lar were the King and Queen of Pern, actually, and all of the dragonriders were their supercops who traveled around enforcing the law?”

Tequila Mockingbird: But also they were allowed to dispense unilateral justice, because they’re ontologically correct and moral in every way.

Lleu: Well, as long as they can convince the quote-unquote “Special Messengers,” with capital S and capital M, who show up at the end of the second book in the trilogy, Arrow’s Flight, after Talia has dispensed summary justice, and ask her, like —

Lleu: “‘Yes,’ she replied, meeting their eyes. ‘I did. And I would do the same if the circumstances warranted it.’

Lleu: “‘Is shooting raiders an ethical use of my hands?’ she countered. ‘It’s part of me; it is totally in my control, it does not control me. I made a reasoned and thought-out decision—if the man ever accepts his own guilt and the fact that what he did was wrong, he’ll break free of the compulsion I put on him. Until then, he will suffer exactly as he made his victims suffer. That seemed to me to be far more in keeping with his crime than imprisoning or executing him, so I judged and meted out punishment; I stand by it—and I would do it again.’

Lleu: “She regarded them both with a certain defiance, and somewhat to her surprise, they both nodded with a certain amount of satisfaction.

Lleu: “‘Then I think that we are not needed here after all,’ said the woman. ‘Clear roads to you, brother—sister—’

Lleu: “They wheeled their Companions and rode back out the gates without a single backward glance.”

Lleu: So, this seems like it’s probably supposed to be a big moment, where the Special Messengers show up to be like, “Talia, we are here to investigate the rumors about you.” And they have one conversation, where Talia speaks one paragraph, and then they say, “Okay,” and turn around and leave. And then that’s the end of the book.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Like, what? What other ethical investigation did you want, Lleu?

Lleu: I mentioned this to Tequila as I was reading it, and she was like, “I don’t remember the special messengers, I have to be honest.” And I was like, “I mean, I understand why, because they’re there for a page and a half.”

Tequila Mockingbird: And also they never come up again. She ditched that world-building.

Lleu: So they’ve got the equivalent of the Special Investigations Unit — that’s what they call it in Ontario, anyway — that investigates police misconduct, and it’s exactly as effective as the real ones.

Tequila Mockingbird: Just like in the real world, yeah. I do think this is textually consistent, because we do get reminded that, again, like, the Heralds are not actually supposed to do what is abstractly “correct”; they’re supposed to do what is in the best interest of Valdemar the nation-state.

Tequila Mockingbird: The Elspeth trilogy really goes into this more — we do get some interesting tidbits showcasing the fact that, yeah, often what is in the best interest of Valdemar the nation-state is not necessarily what is in the best interest of the individual people being affected.

Tequila Mockingbird: The Companions are okay with that, and are okay with using mind control to make you forget that you’re not okay with that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Does that really, deeply get engaged with? No. But it definitely is textual.

Lleu: In very weird ways. Talia meets her Companion, and her Companion introduces himself and then immediately mindwipes her, so that she doesn’t remember that they’re Companion-bonded, and then takes her to the city, and then people are like, “Surprise! You’re a Herald now!” And she’s like, “What!?” And then she remembers, and I’m just like, why was this extremely contrived plot necessary?

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. Honestly? It just felt like she wanted to write Talia on the road with Rolan, not knowing that she’s chosen, and have a little angst about “Oh, no! I’m gonna have to give the Companion back.” It was just so narratively unproductive.

Lleu: I mean, it’s cute. It did also raise questions for me, like why there’s no axe for chopping wood at the waystation. Sorry, I’m not over that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Look, the person stalking that specific waystation was not doing their job correctly, maybe, or they just assumed you had an axe. Everyone carries their own axe in Valdemar, at all times. And it’s possible she put that in deliberately to lay the groundwork for the fact that Companions can and do just mindwipe their Heralds if it’s awkward.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and that does end up being a big plot point in the Elspeth series.

Tequila Mockingbird: So maybe she was just setting the groundwork for that? Oh, Gwena; oh, Gwena…

Lleu: In interesting contrast, I think, to McCaffrey, it does seem like Lackey had in mind already that this was going to be her Series; this was gonna be a series that would go on.

Lleu: As we’ve discussed previously, there are definitely, I think, a number of points in Pern where it seems likely that McCaffrey…

Tequila Mockingbird: Didn’t realize she was gonna have to come back to that later.

Tequila Mockingbird: Mhm. I think there’s something to be said for the influence of Pern —

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and so it’s been shown that that’s a successful model, and I suspect that Lackey, because she’s a consummate businesswoman, was like, “Okay. I can sell a bunch of books that way, so I’m going to.”[1]

Lleu: The contrast between dragonriders who are explicitly removed from the broader political sphere of Hold and Craft life —

Lleu: — by entering into the Weyr, where they have one job, and that job is fighting Thread and occasionally to perform other services as requested or situationally required. Whereas, in contrast, not only are Heralds agents of the state, but also they’re going home to hang out with their families for winter break.

Lleu: Which is wild and seems like a sever cont-, conflict of interest when you’re supposed to be an impartial supercop.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you are supposed to, very emphatically, recuse yourself from anything involving your birth family, as a Herald.

Tequila Mockingbird: Does that work? Uh… All Heralds are absolutely ethical under all circumstances, is the party line. Kris is torn between — his uncle is, it turns out, one of the baddies, and says, like, “No, he’s my uncle and he’s a nice guy!” and this causes a lot of friction between him and Talia and Dirk, in a way that I do think is interesting, but I don’t think that issues are really resolved or, like, engaged with deeply —

Tequila Mockingbird: — because, again, I don’t know that the book really wants to talk about that. I also think it’s an interestingly different positioning, because dragons, as much as they are sometimes, like, wiser than the humans, or emotionally more in tune — Canth, the unpaid therapist of the entire Weyr —

Tequila Mockingbird: — are intentionally not quite human intelligence, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re definitely sapient, but they’re kind of like an animal in some ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: And white! What does it all mean? Companions are, textually, not just a human-like intelligence, but a semi-deity. They’re kind of like angels in some ways.

Tequila Mockingbird: The Grove-Born are sent by god to enact a plan for Valdemar.

Tequila Mockingbird: Even the ones that are not Grove-Borne are, we do eventually — I don’t actually remember if it’s explicitly, textually stated or just very clearly hinted — reincarnations of previous Heralds and Companions.

Tequila Mockingbird: We sort of get Ilsa kind of appearing from beyond, and Kris’s death scene hinting towards, there’s an afterlife, textually.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we do get confirmation that one of the options you could have as a Herald is to come back as a Companion. It kind of seems like sometimes you get to come back swapped, because there is a Herald-Companion pair that — it’s pretty clear that Sayvil is Savil; it’s less whether Kerowyn is Savil’s Companion, or if they just have similar personalities and names. So we know that there’s some cases where this happens, and I — if I recall correctly, I think we meet a Herald or a Companion who is pretty clearly Kris, reincarnated —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but in the other direction, so, like, hundreds of years ago.

Tequila Mockingbird: And so there’s this implication that basically the Companions remember the reincarnation and the Heralds don’t, so that even if you’re not an angel sent by god, Grove-Born Companion, you are working with more lived experience than anyone who else is alive, because you have multiple lifetimes of experience as a Companion.

Tequila Mockingbird: Which is all to say that they are smarter than their Heralds. They are more knowledgeable.

Tequila Mockingbird: But we definitely get Elspeth’s Companion having to have a conversation with Elspeth where she’s like, “Yeah, I was kind of railroading you down the path of destiny,” and Elspeth’s like, “Fucking don’t! That’s really not cool!” She’s the Aramina of Valdemar in her refusal of the call. Elspeth gets to be like, “No, I’m not gonna do this whole grand destiny that you want me to do. I’m gonna fuck off and become a Tale’edras witch instead.

Tequila Mockingbird: Hot boys are calling me. So I think that’s a very interesting difference between a dragon and a Companion.

Tequila Mockingbird: And it’s possible that that is an intentional choice to reflect the things that they are trying to do, right? Dragons want to fight Thread. That’s not complicated. In fact, often you have to kind of talk to your dragon about, like, “Hey, cool it,” like, “We’re gonna get to fight the Thread.”

Tequila Mockingbird: They’re not entirely rational; they’re not making a complicated approach. See Thread, fight Thread. Where a companion is trying to enact political jurisprudence, and so they are thinking about politics —

Lleu: Which aligns with one of the other points of intersection but also disconnects between these books and Pern that I was thinking about. I was a little bit unfair, perhaps, when I was writing my reviews of these on tumblr, in my assessment of them as “Pern without the interest in political economy that McCaffrey has.” That is true, in that Lackey has no interest, basically, at all, beyond a sort of vague awareness of how medieval taxation worked, sort of, in how Valdemar as a state, has the administrative capacity that it does to do things like have a standing army, maintain strictly policed borders, have this education system and also this complicated internal communications network and the, like, guards stationed everywhere. There’s a lot of things that are far beyond the capacity of an actual medieval polity to do. She’s not really thinking about how Valdemar accomplishes these things.

Lleu: But, she is much more interested than McCaffrey is in what states actually do.

Lleu: What does Fort Hold do? What does Lord Groghe do on a day-to-day basis? He’s the Holder.

Lleu: Yeah, we simply have no idea. We see Lord Holders do things occasionally.

Tequila Mockingbird: He goes to the Conclave and votes between one and six times.

Lleu: And Lackey is extremely interested in the day-to-day exercise of state administration, what it means to go and sit down in the Council every day, talk about policy, even if the policy is a little bit abstract, or abstracted from the broader political and economic situation of the country.

Lleu: And to go out and be administering the law, announcing changes to legislation, conducting sort of preliminary tax audits — which is one of the things that —

Lleu: — that Heralds do. Not officially; they’re not actually taking a record of the books, but they’re assessing the situation and leaving a report, so that, when the tax auditor does come, the auditor can compare what people told the Heralds with what people are telling the tax auditor.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the fact that Heralds can compel anyone to speak truthfully —

Tequila Mockingbird: — is another arrow in the quiver of the political machinations of the state.

Lleu: Even after just these three books, we know a lot more about how law works in Valdemar than we ever learn in Pern about how law works in Pern.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think the closest comparison is what we see in Dragonseye/Red Star Rising, right?

Tequila Mockingbird: Where they do get into, what are the punishments for sexual assault on Pern? And, what kind of law do we have?

Lleu: But even that is a little bit vague, I would say, and is coupled with there being no mechanism for changing the law.

Lleu: Whereas we know where law comes from in Valdemar: there’s a governing Council, and the Queen and the Queen’s Own Herald can overrule everyone else on the Council if they vote together —

Lleu: — but the Council also does theoretically have a say in how law happens, and what laws get promulgated.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I will also say that, as the series continues, we do see various different structures of government, with a similar, if not quite as zoomed-in, level of engagement. So we find out Karse is a theocracy, and we kind of see a little bit about how that works. We get a little bit more of the internal workings of Rethwellan. We do a lot of focus on how the Tale’edras are governed — and their names do have an apostrophe in the middle, so…you can tell that there’s a Pern connection. We get a little bit more about some of the other worlds of Velgrath, mostly from the Tarma and Kethry books, because basically that’s a sort of sword and sorcery, and they travel all around killing monsters and earning money.

Tequila Mockingbird: Did your version of Arrow’s Fall have the musical collection at the end?

Tequila Mockingbird: Okay. Some of the songs at the end — “Kerowyn’s Ride” and “Threes” — are actually for that book.

Tequila Mockingbird: It’s delightful, because “Threes” is a story, and then when she actually wrote the novel — or the short story, I think, because this is a Tarma and Kethry — she didn’t have her copy next to her, and so she fucked it up. The plot doesn’t line up, and so to resolve that, she created a character who’s an annoying bard who follows Tarma and Kethry around and writes songs about them and gets things wrong, and they’re really annoyed by this.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I love that. Another kind of point of comparison is that they are both very musical worlds —

Lleu: Yeah. Her voice isn’t good enough to be a capital-B Bard, but she does have a good voice and is good at playing the harp.

Tequila Mockingbird: We do find out in another series that in order to be admitted to the Bardic Collegium, you need two of the three: ability to compose, ability to perform, and the Bardic Gift, which is basically the ability to channel mental control and coercion through music.

Tequila Mockingbird: So all of these people who are capital-B Bards are using their ability to play music to psychically manipulate crowds of people for the political well-being of Valdemar.

Lleu: I didn’t know that there was psychic manipulation happening, but the head of the Bardic Collegium does explicitly say to the queen, when they’re gearing up for war —

Lleu: “Alright, and you need the Bards out in the field to rally support, right?” And she’s like, “Yes.” Alright, Robinton, off you go.

Tequila Mockingbird: So that’s a propaganda arm of the state, much in the same way that the Harpers are on Pern, but made even more textually explicit. Another point of similarity is that Lackey, like McCaffrey, is not doing great at the villains in this one, or honestly, in general. I think she, like McCaffrey, is at her best when the villainy is an abstract force, as opposed to a bad guy.

Lleu: Yeah, I was not impressed by the villain here, for a variety of reasons.

Tequila Mockingbird: Both in the sense that Hulda is just sort of cartoonishly evil to no purpose —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and in the sense that it’s pretty clear that Ancar is a horrible person, but also she has been literally grooming him since childhood and is now in a sexual relationship with him, and when that started is very unclear.

Lleu: Yeah, and the plot would fall apart if we acknowledged that Ancar is also in any way a victim.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and also the triumphant solution is, “We’re just gonna kill everybody who’s bad, and then the people who are good will be left, and it’s fine.”

Lleu: Yeah. I had had some spoilers going in, but I had not, for example, read the back cover blurb. So I knew that, at some point in the future, the Queen of Valdemar remarries, and I had not read the back cover blurb, which makes it very clear that Ancar is evil. So, the plot of the third book is that the neighboring kingdom of Hardorn is proposing a diplomatic alliance with Valdemar by way of a royal marriage of Prince Ancar to Princess Elspeth. I believe the idea is that the throne of Valdemar would effectively inherit the throne of Hardorn —

Lleu: — through Elspeth and Ancar’s children, assuming that they fulfilled the requirements of being monarch of Valdemar —

Lleu: — which is that you have to be a Herald. So I…was expecting that the solution to this situation where Ancar is a solid 10-15 years older than Elspeth and that Elspeth’s mother is in her 40s — she married young — would be that Elspeth’s mother, the Queen, would marry Ancar instead. And I was like, okay, that would be interesting. You could do some interesting diplomatic wrangling. And then it was like, no, no, actually he’s evil. There’s necromancy happening, and don’t worry about it. Magic’s back. Blah. And I was like…oh. I kind of knew magic was coming back, because it’s been really heavily foreshadowed earlier on, but that’s a little bit disappointing, I must say. I was kind of hoping for some interesting diplomacy, and instead they have one conversation with him and are like, “He’s evil; we should leave.”

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. But Lackey is capable of engaging with the fact that abused children turn around and do further harm sometimes and that this is complicated. The key narrative element of the Lavan Firestorm books is that he has fire-starting ability, like Griffin —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and it’s completely uncontrolled, and he’s being relentlessly bullied, and he snaps and sets the school on fire and kills four of his classmates at the age of 12. And this then precipitates in him getting chosen by a Companion and removed from any legal consequences, because he’s now a Herald, and this doesn’t go over well politically in his community —

Tequila Mockingbird: — or with his family, for obvious reasons. And the book devotes a fair amount of mental and emotional energy to the way in which this is not good and that Lavan is not emotionally stable about it, and this is a problem that needs to be solved. But Ancar doesn’t get any of that.

Tequila Mockingbird: And the other thing that I wanted to talk about with Lavan — he is, in many ways, I think, the realization of the project that McCaffrey creates with the human-dragon bond.

Tequila Mockingbird: We talked about this when we talked about the literary history of dragonriders. We asked the question — the next step, surely, is falling in love with the dragon, right? And some authors do take that to that next extent, and Lavan is lifebonded to his Companion, which is, in some ways, part of what the book wants to think about. And I think that is in really interesting conversation with Pern, and specifically with Moreta, because I think she’s the other place where we see a dragonrider whose primary emotional relationship is with her dragon and who very specifically is, like, “Any intimate relationship I have with a human is great, but it’s going to be secondary to my relationship with my dragon” — which I think is also true, but not as explicitly marked out in other dragon-rider relationships.

Lleu: Yeah, well, I do think, for all of the many ways in which I would say I’m less interested in the Heralds than I am in dragonriders, one of the things that Lackey absolutely does do well is that McCaffrey talks a good game about dragons being riders’ primary relationships and sexuality works different in the Weyr, etc., but she never actually really commits to that, except with Moreta. Lackey is all-in on that.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and we get, in Kris’s voice, basically, saying, like, “Hey, I don’t think that I can give as much as a partner would need to a partner. I have my Companion, I have my interest in the political future of Valdemar, and then my duty” — as he puts it — “and any human would kind of be playing third, and I don’t really think that’s fair, or not something I want.” We do see a lot of very casual sexual and queerplatonic relationships among Heralds, backgrounded.

Tequila Mockingbird: In a way that I think, yeah, is fun, and is what I wanted McCaffrey to engage with more in the Pern books.

Tequila Mockingbird: And, as you say, the exception is lifebonding, which is basically a magical special soul bond that we find out in other series can survive reincarnation and come back to get you where you least expect it. Lackey is fundamentally much more interested in romance than McCaffrey is.

Lleu: — is that these books are like what Pern would be if McCaffrey were actually interested in sex with men.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, and I think there’s something to that, because we spend a fair amount of time thinking about sex, and most of it is positive? We also spend a lot of time thinking about sexual assault.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I think maybe that’s the other side of that coin, that this is something that the narrative is preoccupied with —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but we get Talia and Skiff having a, like, “Hey, maybe we should have sex! Oh, our schedules don’t work; let’s just be friends,” which I think is a very weird, fun little subplot. Why is that there? Who can say?

Tequila Mockingbird: I think also more, maybe, realistic to weird teen experiences where you’re like, do I have a crush on this person or are we just friends? Are we gonna do this? Oh, we’re not. Okay, chill.

Lleu: Yeah. At one point, they’re literally in Skif’s bed. Skif is naked, Talia’s trying to get started, and Skiff falls asleep, and Talia’s like, “Okay, this is…this is done. I guess it’s just not meant to be.”

Tequila Mockingbird: We’re just getting cock-blocked by the universe. Accept our fate. And then she has a sexual but explicitly not romantic relationship with Kris, where they’re very good friends and they have great sexual chemistry, and he explicitly is like, “Wow,” like, “having sex with an empath fucking rocks. You’re really good at this. That’s it…’bye.” They also have a great awkward, like, “I hope you’re not in love with me.” “Oh, god, no; I thought you might be in love with me — thank goodness!” “Phew!” Which I think is very funny.

Lleu: It got a little old, but it took longer to get old than I might have expected it would.

Tequila Mockingbird: And then, of course, she and Dirk are lifebonded and meant to be magically whatever.

Lleu: Although I thought the dynamics of that were interesting, because everyone around them is well aware that Dirk and Talia are lifebonded. There’s a little bit of uncertainty at first, and then they spend more than five minutes thinking about it and observing Talia and Dirk interacting — or not interacting — with each other, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a lifebond.” And nobody tells Talia or Dirk this. For months.

Lleu: Is it illegal to tell people that you know they’re lifebonded to someone? Because it would save everyone a lot of trouble if you just told them. “It’s fine. You guys are magic soulmates.”

Lleu: “Go have fun.” Because the first third-ish of the third book is this miscommunication love triangle thing where Dirk thinks Talia and Kris are in love, and Talia is mad that Dirk won’t just talk to her about it, but she doesn’t want to talk to him — problems that could be solved if any of the many people around you who all know that you are magic soulmates would just say, “Talia. He’s your magic soulmate.” Or, like, “Dirk, she’s your magic soulmate. There’s no competition here.”

Tequila Mockingbird: It definitely feels like the idiot ball — this exists to create drama so that as the plot unfolds we have angst about it, rather than because it’s actually necessary or sensible.

Lleu: Yeah. It did also seem a little bit interesting that that was coming up in a series that — again — puts its money where its mouth is in terms of queerness and also at least hypothetical polyamory.

Tequila Mockingbird: We immediately replace her with a new lifebonded lesbian.

Lleu: Yeah. And the new lifebonded lesbian and the surviving lifebonded lesbian have a conversation where the surviving lifebonded lesbian is like, “We kind of thought you were interested in us, and if you’d asked, we would have been happy to be a throuple.”

Lleu: And I’m like, “Huh. I wasn’t expecting that.” Too bad Ilsa died, I guess.

Lleu: But the fact that it came up at all — I mean, first of all, the fact that there were lesbians at all.

Lleu: That’s huge, and the fact that the prospect of polyamory came up, as something that would have been basically unremarkable and just a failure of communication that it didn’t happen, I thought was really striking and made the Talia–Dirk–Kris triangle that much more frustrating, because I’m like, again, this is a problem that could be solved if Kris and Dirk were fine with each other or were into each other, even.

Tequila Mockingbird: If Kris and Dirk were in love the whole book would be better. I just think it would be a more interesting and compelling story. Even if they weren’t romantically in love but they had best-friends-and-question-mark, there’s some tension there, energy.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I will say, in terms of lifebonds, we do get queer lifebonds, we do get heterosexual life bonds —

Lleu: Yeah, it’s a little bit blink or you miss it, but the very beginning includes an excerpt from the story of Vanyel —

Lleu: — and there’s, early on, when Talia is talking to someone, her point of comparison for that is, “Oh, like Vanyel and (character who was in the Vanyel interlude who we know from the interlude at the beginning is also a man).”

Lleu: The interlude at the beginning doesn’t go into their relationship, but later —

Tequila Mockingbird: I think it’s clear that she got a little bit too enthusiastic about lifebonds.

Tequila Mockingbird: Where in the first half of the series everyone is lifebonded, and then she was like, “Okay, that’s a little boring,” and walked it back. And eventually, you end up explicitly with a relationship where they’re not life-bonded and one of them starts out as having angst about this, like, “Oh, why don’t I have lifebond?” And his partner is like, “Actually, I’m not that into magic soulmates. I like choosing to be in love with you and the fact that you’re choosing to be in love with me, and I actually think that’s a much healthier way to have an emotional relationship, like, it’s cool.” In a way that I think is maybe her looking back 30 years later in maybe a similar way to McCaffrey does at times, and going like, “Hm, okay, maybe I should moderate that a little bit.”

Tequila Mockingbird: The Lavan book, where he’s lifebonded to his Companion is really interesting in that it’s implied, I guess, that that’s not really what’s supposed to happen —

Tequila Mockingbird: — and it does indirectly, perhaps, contribute to his death, in that, basically, Kalira is his entire mental stability, and when she dies he sets himself and the entire invading army on fire. There’s also some interesting implications about, again, the utilitarian aspect of Heraldry, of, like, should this mentally traumatized 16-year-old be on a battlefield? Probably not, but that’s what they needed to do to keep Valdemar safe, so they were rolling the dice on whether he would come back or not.

Tequila Mockingbird: But I do think it’s very funny — McCaffrey and Lackey co-wrote a book in the Brainships universe, The Ship Who Searched, and I think you can really see Lackey’s fingerprints on the fact that in The Ship Who Sang chronology, as we talked about in I think our ’60s retrospective —

Tequila Mockingbird: — basically, there’s all of this complicated angst about the fact that you can never be together with your brainship/brawnship partner. You’re this intimate partnership, but one of you is physically encased in a spaceship and physically has a body but is not connected to your body in any real way, and this is psychologically devastating — all of this. And then Lackey rolls up and is like, “Mm, android. Get an android and fuck about it. It’s fine. It’s literally fine.” And I love the fact that she’s just not interested in the psychosexual angst in the same way that McCaffrey is.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah. I think it’s fair to say that McCaffrey is not a romance writer, and Lackey is.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yeah, but she’s not a natural romance writer, where Lackey has a whole series of romantasy before romantasy was really a genre, which I quite enjoy.

Tequila Mockingbird: Her obsession with sexual violence is not absent from them, but they’re still a really good time.

Tequila Mockingbird: Yes. Yes — she’s very conscious of sexual violence. She puts sex workers in a lot of her books. She does, I think, a solid job of, like, “Yeah, this is a job that I do for money.”

Tequila Mockingbird: — but I think there’s something interesting in the sexual her commitment to representing the sexual economy of her fantasy world.

Tequila Mockingbird: In the end, I gotta say, I don’t know that I’m gonna recommend that you read Mercedes Lackey’s Arrows of the Queen trilogy.

Lleu: Here’s what I will say. I went into the first book expecting to only read the first book. And, you know what? It’s fine!

Lleu: No. But it was engaging enough. The Heralds are different from dragonriders in ways that make me more interested in dragonriders, but there’s enough there that still is similar that it worked well enough that I got out of it, and I was like, “I’ll read the second one.” And then as I was reading the second one, like, “I might as well just read the third one. At this point I’m in.” And they’re fine. Are they as good as, say, Dragonflight and Dragonquest? I don’t think so, but…

Tequila Mockingbird: Because I think that has to be our metric moving forward.

Tequila Mockingbird: And while you think about that, I will say, I was deeply, deeply obsessed with these books when I was 11. As I said, I have read them a dozen times, maybe two dozen times. They shaped my personality, in a way that is maybe not good. I don’t know that I would really say that you should read them —

Tequila Mockingbird: — but if you do, I can’t say I blame you. Some of them are better than others.

Lleu: I might put this about on par with Masterharper, in that there’s something about it that appeals to me —

Lleu: — it’s not, maybe, quite on the same level as the weird psychosexual relationship between Robinton and F’lon —

Lleu: — but there is something really appealing about the portrayal of the Heralds’ Collegium as this space of collegiality —

Lleu: — where they’re all friends. I enjoyed the scene at the beginning of the third book where all of the Heralds have gathered together — they don’t usually do this, so lots of people are here, and everyone’s having a good time, and they’ve sort of snuck off to have their secret party, because they don’t all get to be together that often, and it’s a nice change of pace to see people. It’s s a nice vision of a community that I’m like, yeah, this would be appealing to be part of.

Tequila Mockingbird: And you don’t even have to have weird sex if you don’t want to.

Lleu: Unless you’re empathically bonded to your extremely horny horse and constantly aware whenever your extremely horny horse Companion is having sex —

Lleu: And it does tell us that this apparently gives her transferable skills for human sex, which is…

Lleu: In the same way that Masterharper is largely a pretty boring and timeline-wise very incoherent book but does have one thing that compels me, I would say that these books are a little bit incoherent, not a lot of plot —

Lleu: — but they do have a thing that compels me, which is the community of Heralds.

Tequila Mockingbird: And I would say I put it kind of with, um, Dragonseye/Red Star Rising, for me, in that I like some of the character beats, and I really like some of the world-building beats, but I find the kind of point of view a little bit weird, and it doesn’t ultimately come together in a satisfying way.

Lleu: Mm. My recommendation to go with these books is Anya Johanna DeNiro’s short novel City of a Thousand Feelings, which, when I saw that Charlie Jane Andrews’s blurb for the novel describes it as a “huge epic fantasy,” I was like, okay, yeah, right — this book is 80 pages long. But it is, actually, a huge fantasy epic. It is about a whole bunch of things — about two trans women fighting to enter a walled city where emotions take visible form, which is why I’m recommending it, because it deals with emotion stuff. It is about cruel necromancers and an undead god and the Beast. It’s about escaping transmisogyny, it’s about tearing down walls and refusing to rebuild them, it’s about a whole lot of things, and it’s only 80 pages, and it’s really good. Highly recommend.

Tequila Mockingbird: I don’t think Arrows of the Queen, by Mercedes Lackey, is terrible, but there are other, better things you could do with your time, and one of them is Elatsoe, by Darcy Little Badger, a book about a young girl and her ghost dog who set out to solve a mystery of the murder of her cousin. I think it’s a lovely coming-of-age story about a young woman who has access to magical powers, and much like the Valdemar books, she has a really great support system around her that cares for her, even if she does ultimately have to carry the weight of the story herself.

Lleu: Thanks for listening to this episode of Dragons Made Me Do It. If you enjoyed it and want to hear more, you can follow us on tumblr at dmmdipodcast dot tumblr dot com for updates, or to send us questions or comments, and you can find our archive of episodes along with transcripts, recommendations, funny memes, and more at dmmdipodcast dot neocities — N E O cities — dot org.

[1] Lleu would also note that this is the period when the larger fantasy publishers — Tor, Ballantine, Del Rey, DAW, TSR, among others — were in basically an arms race to find the next big epic fantasy series following the successes of Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (1977–2013), Terry Brooks’s Shannara series (1977–2020), and David Eddings’s Belgariad (1982–1984), among other early series from the epic fantasy boom. It’s also worth noting Katherine Kurtz’s Deryni series (1970–2014), which Lleu also thinks was probably an influence on Valdemar and which has a similar structure.