Magic’s Pawn, Mercedes Lackey

With two more sets of papers to read and comment on before the end of the semester, I was looking for more easy reading and all out of Louise Penny books, so when I read about Magic’s Pawn by Mercedes Lackey at RoofBeamReader I decided to try it. It is an easy read of a fantasy novel with familiar elements but also with a few twists on the usual. The sixteen-year-old hero, Vanyel, is not chosen. He has no powers, at least at first. He is not saved by the love of a good woman or even a good man. He falls desperately in love with a man who is, like Malcolm Reynolds in the Firefly episode called “Shindig,” trying to be a “great man” but who ends up able to say only “guess I’m just a good man….Well, I’m all right.” Just human, in other words. And quite mortal.

Growing up as the son of a rural landowner in the fictional land of Valdemar, Vanyel doesn’t even know he’s gay until he is moved to his aunt’s household and some gossipy girls define the term “shay’a’chern” for him, saying that it means “he doesn’t like girls. He likes boys.” The boy Vanyel likes is called Tylendel and is in the last stages of his training to become a “Herald Mage,” one of the magical officials who protect Valdemar. As they fall in love, we find out that Tylendel has a twin brother and that his family is involved in a feud with a neighboring landowner. We know the neighbors, the Leshara, are evil because after Tylendel’s father dies they “hired some kind of two-copper conjurer to convince Mother that Father’s ghost wanted to speak with her.” This is necromancy and it’s always bad, you know. But so are feuds, and no matter how aggrieved one side gets, there’s no winning, as Tylendel ultimately and tragically finds out.

Left with magical powers and no will to live after Tylendel’s death, Vanyel must heal and figure out how to manage his new powers so he doesn’t hurt anyone with them. He is chosen by one of the magical horse-people, Yfandes, and she helps him find a way to cling to life. His aunt, Savil, a teacher of Herald Mages, finally decides to take him to another land where the magical Hawkbrothers can help her heal and train him. She does, and they do, and when Vanyel feels the first stirrings of civic responsibility and kills a dragon who is menacing a lady and her children, we know he’s going to be all right.

One of the amazing things about this fantasy adventure, as RoofBeamReader points out, is that it was written in the 1980s and features an unabashedly gay hero. Someone who picks it up today might not react much to that, but Magic’s Pawn was one of the first to do it.