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    The Oathbound
    The Oathbound
    The Oathbound
    Audiobook10 hours

    The Oathbound

    Written by Mercedes Lackey

    Narrated by Christa Lewis

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The first book in the Vows and Honor trilogy unites swordmaster and sorceress in a quest for revenge in this thrilling epic fantasy.

    She was Tarma. Born to the Clan of the Hawk of the nomadic Shin'a'in people, she saw her entire clan slain by brigands. Vowing blood revenge upon the murderers, she became one of the sword-sworn, the most elite of all warriors. And trained in all the forms of death-dealing combat, she took to the road in search of her enemies.

    She was Kethry. Born to a noble house, sold into a hateful "marriage," she fled life's harshness for the sanctuary of the White Winds, a powerful school of sorcery. Becoming an adept, she pledged to use her talents for the greatest good. Yet unlike other sorcerers, Kethry could use worldly weapons as well as magical skills. And when she became the bearer of a uniquely magical sword that drew her to those in need, Kethry was led to a fateful meeting with Tarma.

    United by sword-spell and the will of the Goddess, Tarma and Kethry swore a blood oath to carry on their mutual fight against evil. And together, swordsmaster and sorceress set forth to fulfill their destiny . . .
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 10, 2019
    ISBN9781977386137
    The Oathbound
    Author

    Mercedes Lackey

    Mercedes entered this world on June 24, 1950, in Chicago, had a normal childhood and graduated from Purdue University in 1972. During the late 70's she worked as an artist's model and then went into the computer programming field, ending up with American Airlines in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In addition to her fantasy writing, she has written lyrics for and recorded nearly fifty songs for Firebird Arts & Music, a small recording company specializing in science fiction folk music. Also known as Misty Lackey.

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    Reviews for The Oathbound

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Not Mercedes Lackey's best. I am reading/listening to the valdemar books in order as much as I can, and I want to learn what these books would reveal of the world of velgarth outside of valdemar and particularly of the peoples descended of Urtho's armies. But just... Ugh. As a woman myself I still found the characters totally unrelatable and honestly not even likeable. The plot often felt more like a series of loosely connected stories rather than having a sense of rising unified tension towards a climax. I know that there are short stories that come before this book published after it that tell the earlier story of the characters and how they met etc, but the way it's presented, reading this as the book one is supposed to be, just feels like stepping into a movie halfway through. I'll slog through the sequel and hope for better there but I'm looking forward to getting back to other characters again.
    • 5/5
      I am definitely not disappointed with this book. I have enjoyed reading Mercedes Lackey's work for years.
    • 4/5
      {First of 5 Valdemar : Vows and Honour series; fantasy, sword and sorceress} (1988)This is part of Tarma and Kethry's story which seems to have started in Sword Sworn, a short story found in anthologies such as Sword and Sorceress III. Tarma is one of the Shin'a'in, a nomadic tribespeople, who is the sole survivor of the Tale'sedrin clan. She is bound to the Shin'a'in Star-Eyed goddess who protects her as the Warrior and she is celibate as part of her oath. Kethry was an unwilling child bride but is now a sorceress of the White Winds school. She carries the magical sword Need (short for 'Woman's Need') which augments the powers its carrier doesn't have, so it gives Kethry the skills of a master swordswoman while not increasing her mage powers. The pair have sworn a goddess-blessed blood sister oath.Both were ill used as very young women but have found their revenge and are now moving on to the next stage of their lives. Tarma wants to revive her clan through Kethry's descendants while Kethry, once she reaches Adept status, wants to found her own White Winds school. But first they need to earn the money and the reputation to attract high calibre clanspeople and mages. This book is a series of their adventures as they seek to do so.Although there is a story arc, the chapters read like short stories collected together; there often seems to be a period of time between each adventure and we are often re-introduced to the characters at the beginning of a new adventure. The stories are fun but the reader is often left to guess at information that everyone is assumed to know, like commonly known legends (unlike Lackey's later writing where she 'tells' rather than just 'showing'); I would really have liked to have been told those legends. Do be warned, there is a fair amount of rape threaded through the book especially in the second half, although it is not graphic.These stories are set in the same world as Valdemar but we don't visit the actual country although it (and the Pelagir Hills and Pelagiris Forest) are mentioned.An interesting excursion into a world of mercenaries and magic.3.5 starsJanuary 2022
    • 5/5
      This is truly one of the best sword-and-sorcery novels I've read. The heart of sword-and-sorcery is the old-fashioned "buddy novel." This book has the twist that the buddies are women, competent in their fields of expertise. Add to it the sorceress has a magical sword takes over the fighting for her and that negates most of the bad side of being a mage (an actual physical attack will distract or disable most mages in a lot of fiction) so the warrior doesn't have to spend all her time making sure her sworn sister is safe and the stories become more believable. There is a sequel and short stories associated with the original book. These are collected in the ebook Tarma and Kethry, making it easy to read everything associated with the characters. This is highly recommended. You don't have to be familiar with the rest of the Valdemar books to enjoy these.
    • 4/5
      Having read some Tarma-and-Kethry stories in german translations of Sword and Sorcress, I already knew the characters and setting (and one of the chapters in this book). This book gave a more complete picture and I really liked that. What cost it the fifth star was, that it somehow retains the feeling of a set of short stories throughout the whole novel.
    • 1/5
      Did Mercedes Lackey even write this? Disjointed, uninteresting, flat characters, and really badly edited (worse than some recent self-published ebooks I've suffered through). I'm a big fan of Valdemar and was looking forward to more about Tarma and Kethry; this book was not it. Other goodreads reviewers say next in series reads less like a bunch of jumpy episodes and more like a real novel. On the fence whether I even want to start it, even from a free public library edition. Definitely not top of my "to read" wants.
    • 4/5
      This is the opening book in the duology of books dealing with Kethry and Tarma, Mage and Sword Sworn fighter. Although these are mostly quite good fun, there is an air of preaching in some of the tales that sometimes overcomes the storytelling. On the whole, though, they are worthwile reading as a different take on the heroine feminine fantasy fighter. Though there are other books with some of these tales in them so you may quickly find yourself with a sense of deja vue all over again. The stories are at least presented chronologically in this collection so you can see how the characters develop in internal chronology.
    • 3/5
      Pulp fantasy in the grand old Conan tradition - wizards, demons, supernaturally talented swordsmen... er, swordswomen... well, it's not *quite* Conan. There's a little more rape-revenge to the various adventures than I really care for - more on that in a bit - and this is very clearly an early work of Lackey's style-wise. The writing is supremely unsubtle and the characters, while fun and vivid, spend a lot of time in "As you know, Bob" conversations or having inner dialogues to make tediously explicit every single bit of emotional tension. (The recurring villain is worse - he's basically a cardboard-cutout demon who does awful things simply because they're awful, and the sexual nature of most of them doesn't bear too much thinking about - again, see below.) It's also basically a collection of short stories - a number of the adventures actually were originally written as shorts, and the seams show. All that said, it's still good solid adventure all the way through, and with a heavyhanded and somewhat juvenile but refreshing (for the genre) feminist outlook.

      And now a minor rant: I don't always hate rape-revenge fantasies, but I usually find them lazy at best. They tend to strongly imply that rape is the worst possible thing that can happen and a properly independent and powerful woman will drop everything to hunt down and get revenge on her rapist. This can be satisfying, in a gruesome sort of way, but often - and this book is definitely an example - it just seems to reinforce the patriarchal assumptions that a woman is only good for sex and her virginity is the only possession of value. It's a lot better than assuming that rape is just what happens and women should ignore - or, worse, come to enjoy - it, but it's still not really a position I can really get behind.
    • 4/5
      Outstanding, extremely enjoyable.
    • 5/5
      I can remember Tarma and Kethry's introduction in a short story in the Sword and Sorceress III anthology, and they stood out to me even then. This particular book is more a collection of those early short stories, rather than an integrated novel like the sequel Oathbreakers, but it's not any less of a good read for that. This starts out as one of those hoary rape and revenge plots, but the characterizations lift this book beyond that. These are two of Lackey's most appealing characters, not just individually, but because the books featuring them show them as partners and friends rather than a focus on romance. It's also just plain fun action adventure in the classic sword and sorcery vein. Go read. Makes for a strong introduction to Lackey's works.
    • 3/5
      Though I have read almost all of the Velgarth books before, this was actually a new one for me, and I was eager to see what I'd make of it. I am sorry to say that I'm of mixed opinions.One one hand, you can see that Lackey has advanced rather smoothly in her style in only the short time since publishing her first novel, and it was easier to fall into than, say, Arrows of the Queen.This book also features Tarma, who is one of the very few human asexual characters I've found in fiction who are presented in a positive light. As a person who identifies as asexual myself, finding those rare few role-models is a treat, and this books deserves some praise on that alone. Think it's hard finding gay or trans role-models in fiction? try looking for an 'ace' hero and suddenly finding a gay or trans hero seems like a walk in the park!On the other hand, this book did suffer from some very noticeable flaws. This book, the first in the Vows and Honour series, takes place after the previous publication of a few short stories involving Tarma and Kethry, including the tale of their meeting and vow-sharing. As a result, you open this book and feel like you've come in during the middle of the tale, which doesn't leave one with a very favourable impression.The pacing suffered at times, too. This often felt like a collection of short stories that only halfway through turned into a cohesive novel. One quest presented devoted more pages to the character conversing in a common room than it did to one of the characters getting kidnapped by her twisted ex-husband, and the tension there was very difficult to feel. Some plot twists weren't twisty in the slightest, and sadly, the meat of the story could be seen coming a mile away.Also in the "it felt like a book of short stories" vein, there was a great deal of repetition. The reader is constantly reminded of the fact that Warrl's shoulders came up to Tarma's waist, that Need was a magical sword, and that Kathry had amber-coloured hair. Perfectly fine to remind someone of if they're reading a collection of stories that were originally published far apart, but as for one book meant to tell a complete story, it got tedious.Everything being taken into consideration, that isn't to say that I didn't enjoy reading this book. It definitely had its moments, even if it took a while to really get started. While I wouldn't necessarily recommend this to those who aren't already fans of Lackey's work, I'm still glad I took the time to read it, and nothing will change that.
    • 4/5
      Overall, this is an OK book. If you like the Valdemar chronicles enough to read all of the books, you'll probably enjoy it. It's not badly written. It's not great. It has a vastly different feeling than the other Valdemar books. I don't like the Shin'a'in as much as I do the Heralds and Tale'edras, and I missed them terribly. The book is also written almost like more of a series of short stories rather than a building story, which made it feel as though the characters lost some development to me.
    • 4/5
      I've read this so many times I can't really review it - the story is part of my life. The stories in Oathblood are really a part of this, especially the first one - the one that doesn't actually appear in Oathbound except as the necessary base for how it starts! Tarma and Kethry (and Warrl) are probably my favorite Velgarth characters.
    • 5/5
      Tarma and Kethry are bound by oath to one another and to the Goddess. Accompanied by Wrrl and a vaguely sentient enchanted sword, the sword sworn Shin'a'in and the White Winds are bound to defend women in need of deliverance, whatever the personal peril.Engaging characters make this book. The plot is more episodic than continuous, which is somewhat problematic if you like things to flow smoothly. Nevertheless, this is a strong, enjoyable book, especially when accompanied by Oathbreakers.