32-34. Queen's Own (Trilogy)

by Mercedes Lackey

32. Arrows of the Queen
33. Arrow's Flight
34. Arrow's Fall

I explained to a couple of kids on my cross country team during a recent meet that some books are like old friends. You can read them over and over and, instead of getting boring, they reveal new facets and comfort an over-stimulated mind. They had caught me, the scary brit lit teacher, reading a battered old fantasy novel and couldn't quite get it to fit with my rep for high brow literature. However, when I explained that it was a part of a series I'd discovered when I was about their age (14 or so), it lead to a very interesting conversation about why reading novels is valuable.

These three books are the launching trilogy for a fantasy world that contains over 30 books and kept me entertained through my teens. While these are not the books I started on, they are the logical entrance into the world. They follow the early years of the Queen's Own, Talia.  In this world, the monarch of Valdemar needs a person that they can trust absolutely and this need is filled by the Queen's (or King's depending) Own.  The position is filled they way all Heraldic positions are, by being chosen by the enigmatic Companions who look like pristine white horses but are in fact human smart and magically endowed.

In Arrows of the Queen, a young Talia is whisked away from a extraordinarily repressive and restrictive set of religious outliers called Holders. The culture seems similar to a fantasy adaptation of the worst stories of Mormons in the real world. Despite cultural expectations, Talia loves to read and resists blind conformity. However, the world turns upside down on her thirteenth birthday when her father's wives tell her it is time to get married. She runs away in a blind panic and is chosen by her companion Roland who promptly absconds with her to Valdemar's capitol, Haven. Once there, she discovers a world where her interests in learning are actually encouraged and where she is welcomed with open arms into a warm and accepting community. Not everything comes up roses though: the queen's only child has turned into an unruly class conscious brat, many suspect that the previous Queen's Own was murdered, and not everyone in the castle is as accepting of her as the Heralds.

By Arrow's Flight the heir to the throne has been turned back onto the right path, and Talia has earned her full-whites. In other terms, she's graduated to her full position. The only thing left for her to do before taking on the full responsibilities of the Queen's Own, is her internship circuit. A kind of rite of passage for all Heralds where they travel a route through the kingdom dispensing justice and providing an official conduit of information both to the outlying reaches of the kingdom and from those outlying areas to the capitol. So she packs up and heads off on her internship only to realize her control over her gift of empathy is imperfect at best and that there are many disturbing rumors circulating about her.

Finally, in Arrow's Fall, Talia returns triumphant to Haven having passed her internship with flying colors only to find that the High Council of Valdemar is pressuring the Queen to marry off her daughter post-haste to the son of a neighboring kingdom. Things seem a little too good to be true and Talia is sent back out on a diplomacy mission that goes disastrously awry.

I think as a teenager I identified with Talia a great deal. Not the repressive family life bit but the sort of awkward shyness of her mixed with deep empathy for others and a strict personal sense of morality.  I like that she's so strong but also vulnerable and confused much of the time. It makes her endearing and believable. These days, I reread them and I find a piece of my childhood which was often wracked with confusion and the comfort I always found in how Talia got through it.