What do you think?
Rate this book
460 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 3, 1991
I first met Mercedes Lackey while browsing the stacks at the public library in my home town. I don't remember what grade I was in but I was somewhere in the area that covers both Middle and High school. Regardless, before Mercedes Lackey, I'd mostly read a lot of Science Fiction and SF anthologies. I'd just found MZB's Swords & Sorceress anthologies when a brightly colored cover caught my eye as I wandered the stacks.
That book happened to be Winds of Fate (Mage Winds #1). And goodness! That cover was MADE for people like me! It felt like the book screamed my name.I mean, look at all that purple!!!! THAT horse! I grabbed a copy and continued on. I hadn't a clue as to how this one book would truly change my life.
That night (which also happened to be a school night), I started reading Winds of Fate. And I was entranced. I fell deeply in love: with the characters, with the series, with the author and with Fantasy. I stayed up all night reading that book. When my dad yelled at me to go to bed, I turned out the lights and immediately dived under the covers with a flashlight to read. I finished the book sometime in the early dawn hours. I was exhausted but oh, so emotionally satisfied. And I was "feining" like a crackhead and desperate for my next fix: Winds of Change.
It was a feeling. One that had been increasing, every step she rode toward Lythecare. The feeling that she was being herded toward something, some destiny, like a complacent cow to the alter of sacrifice.
-page 176
“That’s it,” she said. “That is it. I am not playing this game anymore.”
“What?” Now Skif looked at her as if certain she had gone mad.
“I am being herded to something, and I don’t like it,” she snapped, as much for Gwena’s ears as his. “I did want to do this, and Valdemar certainly needs mages, but I am not going to be guided by an invisible hand, as if I were a character in a badly-written book! This is not a foreordained Quest, I am not in a Prophecy, and I am not playing this game anymore.”
-pg 177-178
“Don’t you dare say it,” she snarled. “Don’t you dare say that you love me! You don’t love me, you love what you think I am. If you loved me, you wouldn’t keep trying to prove you were better than me, that I should follow your lead, let you take over, permit you to make all the decisions. . . .”I cackled when Skif pulled out the “Some of my best friends are _______” card, a move that is so tone deaf regardless of who you put on the blank line. Elspeth takes him down, reminding him that not only is she an heir, but a human being. Lackey has never made it a thing where male heralds protect female heralds, not that I can remember, and I’m glad she doesn’t start now.
“I’m not like that!” he bristled. “Some of my best friends are female!”
She very nearly strangled him.