Wrapping up

 In what looks to be the end of the 11 book Megs cycle, Mercedes Lackey has given us Spy, Spy Again, book 3 of The Family Spies. This one follows the youngest sons of Megs' and the Royal Families sons as they end up adventuring across Karse. sort of.

We open on Tory and Prince Kyril as they explore their oddly twinned Farsight gifts that allow them to see members of their families, wherever they may be. Then we switch to Meg's cousin Bey's daughter Sira, who takes care of Karsite incursions into territory close to the Sleepgivers' Mountain. Eventually, Sira gets careless, and gets taken by Karsite priests. Which sets off alarms on the part of Kyril and Tory, who gets a brief glimpse of it. Bey sends his son to Valdemar to call in the Life Debt owed by Megs, and sweetens the pot by making Valdemar untargetable by the Sleepgivers in perpetuity. 

With a bunch of negotiating, Kyril and Tory end up helping track Sira into a Southern Karse prison, while Sira learns to break medallions used by ancient Sleepgivers to bind Afreet (various elementals) to help them. This becomes bittersweet, as much of the focus is on the relationship between Tory and Kyril, as Kyril is in love with Sira, and she with him, and Tory must learn to live with the loss of his best friend who is also Mage gifted and therefore not likely to be able to live in Valdemar after that awakens. 

While this hews closely to the tropes long ingrained in a Lackey novel, it remains entertaining reading, and again showcases her love of character. I look forward to her new trilogy, which will evidently finally tell the tale of the Founding.

Abi Normal

So, as is prone to happening, I had missed the release of Mercedes Lackey's continuation of her Family Spies Series, Eye Spy, following around the second child of Megs and Amily, Abi.

Like her brother before her, Abi has a gift that doesn't quite fit in with the mind-magic so prevalent in Valdemar. In her case, she discovers early on she can detect stress in architecture, and indeed, figure out when something is going to collapse. She figures this out when the bridge she's crossing starts to go.

From there, she gets enrolled in with the Artificers and learns to use her gift for other things, like finding hidden rooms. Mind you, while in school, she also has to defend herself from Dudley, who ends up saying the quiet part out loud. (Much of Dudley's actions seem to be a cypher for certain people. "When you're rich, they let you get away with it.")

And then, after coming up with her Masterwork, a bridge to replace the one that collapsed at the beginning, she, along with 3 other Master Artificers get sent to a strip outside Valdemar and Menmellith that wants to join Valdemar. Unfortunately, while things go well at first, their third stop results in agents who came ahead before and ruined the reputation of the Valdemarians.

As we go about trying to resolve that, we find out the Merc escorting them is a lesbian, and after she kissed Abi, we find that Abi is Asexual.

While I enjoyed reading this, and indeed enjoyed some rather thinly veiled political commentary and a few hidden memes, the plot stretches over several years, and it reads less like a novel than a series of connected stories. Still fun.

Here We Go Again and Again

Funny note about Mercedes Lackey's The Hills Have Spies: The description on the book jacket has absolutely nothing to do with the actual plot. Indeed, the description mentions Mags's son Justyn and Hawkbrothers. Then you read and find out it involves Mags's son Perry and a trip to the Pelegir Hills. Indeed, none of the children is named Justyn.

So, anyway, at the outset, we learn that Mags and Amily have four children that they're raising along with the current King's brood. While all the children are being raised to be escape artists, Perry is in the running to be the next Herald Spy, unless he doesn't get chosen. Perry has Amily's gift of Animal Mindspeech, which while good, doesn't allow him some of the fun things his father can do.

After everyone's been properly introduced and roles established, Perry and Mags end up taking a father and son trip out to the Western edges of Valdemar to investigate something a semi-retired Herald is noticing with odd disappearances among the people out that way.

Posing as traders, they get out to Herald Arville, where upon Perry promptly gets chosen by the neuter kyree Larral. They help the village form a mining pact for the garnets in the ground, then wind up finding out about the kidnappings happening from an inn in the forest.

Perry, with Larral's encouragement, ends up leaving his father while he sleeps to scout out where the people are being kidnapped to, which leads to a city in the hills. (We're skipping over various species of intelligent animals they encounter, like raven Bondbirds and dyheli, and eventually firebirds.) Said city is controlled by someone using blood magic and mind magic to control a mercenary company and those they kidnap. While it's not mentioned if this is another incarnation of Ma'ar, it could be, although Ma'ar's incarnations usually were more subtle in their intrigues.

Perry disguises himself as a dog trainer and takes over the kennel.

What follows is cloak and dagger type things, as father and son try to outwit and outlast the Master and figure out how to come away from this alive.

While parts of this could use more fleshing out, it's a pretty good entry in the larger world that it's set within. If we're going to continue to be stuck with Mags, adding in others will help.