She parted her full lips and smiled. “My name is Shahliha.” The mysterious, shapely maiden in the pearl-gray cloak who had shadowed his steps ever since he had alighted from Corsair’s Breakwater had been his sister all along, then! The lass he had not seen in eighteen years, since the night of the red doors – kin to him, and his last link to a family he thought lost forever.
“Thank goodness none of our previous interactions were tinged with eroticism,” Danveniel thought to himself as he helped her from her horse. They’d never touched one another, sexually.
“Know you what they say of the Lancienses?” The saege inclined his head toward the boisterous group of travelers. “They always marry their fiancées, and have consensual sex with strangers.”
“We are only half-siblings, Nierest,” Slannen whispered in silken tones.
“Yes,” Nierest replied, “but we are full friends.” They hugged for two seconds, without touching pelvises, then pulled away.
“See yon tall and stately figure across the hall?” Ana asked, guiding Morgana’s arm in the direction of the man who had drawn the attention of the entire room merely by entering it. “He is your cousin.”
“That,” Morgana said delightedly, “explains the fond and platonic feelings I felt for him once I saw his face!” She looked forward to meeting him. How uncomplicated it all would be.
“Let the night of the Three Loves commence,” Trelenium intoned before the gathered, writhing assembly. “Don the Masks of the Ancients, that we may love anonymously, and therefore as fit vessels for the Goddesses’ energy.”
“Except for you, Meleste,” she said suddenly, turning to a raven-haired youth in the corner. “You and Bendren are kin, and therefore you should both put on a wristband, so you do not accidentally copulate during our night of public love.”
They did, and nobody touched anyone they were related to all night.
“What woman could be fit for a king but a king’s sister?” Nuanna said from the Shadow Throne. His green-grey eyes met hers, and they flashed in a sudden, identical light.
“Then, my brother,” said Nianna, bowing low, “I shall leave the kingdom immediately and find one, who is related to a different king, to marry you.”
“Thank you,” Nuanna said.
“Bring me a handsome young man who is willing to sport in my bed for coin tonight,” Baron Lhelled-Rothnoy commanded his Cerebrant Hestat. “One who looks nothing like my nephew.”
Primhesh lifted the lantern and peered at the looming mass ahead. Instinctively he drew back shuddering. “Let us leave this place at once, lad.”
“Why?” Jack Naïvelinton asked him. “We have been long and footsore on this road, and yonder house seems as good a place as any to rest ourselves for the night.”
“Know ye not the name of yon house, boy?” Primhesh asked. Jack shook his head. “It is called Grimhearth, and for good reason. The Keeper of the East Woods dwells there, with his many daughters. They say he keeps them close and forbids them to speak to any man, until they get married and leave home and have children with their husbands.”
Ghendroahr looked with a steel gaze at his daughter across the campfire. How like a woman grown she had become this last sevenmonth.
“You look so much like your mother now,” he said wonderingly. “Chiefly in the eyes, and lips.”
“So they tell me, Father,” she said, eyes lowered.
“God, how I hated her,” he said. “Go sit somewhere else.”
He wasn’t much of a father, but she certainly had to admit to herself, as she crawled into her sleepsack later that evening, that he had never been attracted to her.
“Well,” Prince Haiglish said after some time staring at the grave, “let us return.” His aides looked at him. “My mother is dead, and while I’m quite sad about it, there’s no point in dwelling on something I can’t change. It’s very natural for a mother to die before her son, and while I plan on cherishing her memory, I certainly wouldn’t want it to stand in the way of my future happiness.”
[Image via]
“Trelenium”.
I’m dead, here.
She lost me with “Primhesh.”
Ghendroahr! I had to look at it three times while typing it out; the h’s are scattered about with the perfect High Fantasy unpredictability!
[Edit: Sorry, Hieu! Didn’t notice you’d gotten there first!]
I love the names…a lot of them read as if some random speaker of probably only English wanted to make up named that they felt sounded Welsh or Irish and all they knew about those languages is “involves the letter h more often than english does” and “vowel unpredictability” and just ran with it.
Wristbands! *smacks forehead* of course, it’s so simple in retrospect!
Next time! Next time.
This really demands to be read at least twice–once for the jokes and once just for the names.
The jokes are perfect! The names are perfect! This piece is so pitch-perfectly funny that I’m honestly a bit lost for words trying to express my appreciation.
I would enjoy this even more if I weren’t still somewhat busy enjoying HWAETEVER
HWAETEVER was an even more lovely thought to return to when my brain, addled by the ridiculous nonsense of last night’s GOP debates, went into a bizarre fugue state.
Jack Naïvelinton
Ghendroahr! Ghendroahr.
“Let’s name him Gendroar, darling.”
“Not imposing enough. Add some H-es.”
“It’s a good thing the monarchs of the Seventeen Realms regularly marry the children of powerful commoners,” mused Pr’othzy’x. “Otherwise they might all have hemophilia.”
They still tell the story of a previous era when one of the Seventeen Realms regularly intermarried, which resulted in a scion with an unconscionably large chin and a tendency to drool.
Brb writing a novel featuring Jack Naïvelinton.
It would be a very different series of Bran had only seen Cersei and Jamie playing Monopoly.
Pretty sure playing Monopoly in Westeros would have only made the body count higher, really.
You don’t know what happens when they play Risk in Westeros.
Probably the same thing that happens when they do pretty much anything else in Westeros.
“When you play the game of Candyland, you win or you shrug your shoulders and say ‘Fuck it, it’s all down to random chance anyway, everyone knows that.'”
“Lannisters always pay their debts,” he said, pulling something from his belt. “I believe I still owe you from that stay at Park Place. This should cover it.”
ohmygod i have missed the toast so much *sob*
thank you for this most perfect welcome home gift <3
I just listened to a podcast episode where they discussed Flowers In The Attic for like an hour, so this is exactly what I needed. Thanks, Mallory.
Ooh, what podcast?
I Don’t Even Own A Television, the best podcast about bad books I’ve ever heard. They just released the episode yesterday, actually. (in case my work internet breaks my ID login, here’s the url: http://www.idontevenownatelevision.com/2015/09/16…
AHHH MY FAVE PODCAST OH HELL YES
(Going to go listen to this RIGHT NOW.)
I just dug through DAYS of accumulated comments sections to find my way back here and thank you for the podcast recommendation. IDEOTV has been my jam all weekend. So nice to hear a couple of white dudes who GET IT.
THANK YOU!
They also did this on The Worst Bestsellers. http://www.frowl.org/worstbestsellers/episode-17-…
Ah, I knew exactly which podcast you were talking about! Go listen to Somebody Wrote This’s take on VC Andrews. They are great.
Giggling with recognition of some truly idiotic characters. What is wrong with high fantasy writers? Lately I’m hesitant to try out new series, because they ALL seem so obsessed with incest and ew, do not want to read that!
I have apparently been doing something right, because aside from Star Wars (high fantasy in spaaace!) and GoT, none of these situations are sounding familiar. What are some of the incest series you’ve run into?
It’s been a little while for me and I mostly read Terry Pratchett so.. Mists of Avalon? (And I think that’s low hanging fruit because, hello, Arthurian legends.) That’s definitely the fourth reference though.
In the Belgariad, Silk had a huge unrequited crush on his uncle’s wife?
Hild, lots of “but my half-sibling is so hawt!”
Whoops, forgotten about that one. Yuup.
Most Arthurian things (especially Mists of Avalon)!
I also remember incest as a feature of Evil Dynasties in David Eddings and Katherine Kurtz.
In Dune, Baron Harkonnen gets it on with his nephew Feyd-Rautha (played by Sting in one of the movies!).
I binge read the Mortal Instruments series last year, and the entire series is based on a star-crossed love between brother and sister. (See also, Twilight, where Jacob’s unrequited love for Bella is explained by making her infant daughter his sole mate and How We Live Now, not fantasy, but an apocalyptic thriller that revolves around a teen’s guilt over heavy petting episodes with her cousin. Man, the incest thing seems to be popular among the YA set.) Also, I’m reading my kids this incredibly strange book of fairy tales I found at a library sale, and it is full of queens banishing their daughters because the king favors them and brothers and sisters being banished together to some edenic forest.
Holy crap, somehow I read Mortal Instruments but thought His Dark Materials and had a moment of wtf Lyra and Will can’t be related THEY’RE FROM DIFFERENT WORLDS.
And yes, wow, I’d forgotten about How I Live Now.
This might be the right place to ask about a book I have read ages ago, and can’t remember the title of.
It is about a boy (of course it is) whose mother is dead and his father is a stonemason? He travels to a town under the water (might be confusing it with a different novel here) and falls in love with his cousin who is the king’s daughter. The boy’s mother apparently belonged to the under water people.
And they obviously save their world, because of course they do.
Anyone?
Is it Hero’s Song (The Songs of Eirren, #1)?
Please tell me these are all scenes from a single book.
Can we also discuss Serious Literary Fiction where twins end up sleeping together? You know, they’ve both just been through so much, and to comfort one another, they turn to sex. I’m pretty sure twins comfort one another the same way I comfort my brother: cute dog pictures and normal hugs.
You know, there used to be a Wizard Rock band who had a song called “Brotherly Love”. It was about Fred and George.
Yeah, what is with that? It suggests the Story Logic is kind of veering off from whatever contact it had with Real Life Logic. It also suggests a kind of imagination that has a reeeally hard time thinking about how non-sexual relationships work.
Every now and then I check the “personal life” section of John Irving’s Wikipedia bio, because I’ve been worried about him ever since I had to read Owen Meany and Hotel New Hampshire in high school. He still doesn’t seem to have married any relatives, which is good – though he has married his publisher/agent, which is a different kind of incestuous.
I read two (2!) books this summer that ended up being about half-siblings having sex. At least in one, they turned out to NOT be half-siblings, but only after one had spent half the book tortured over whether or not he should tell the other.
… is one of these books Hild? I feel like I read them both, but can’t place the other one.
They were Dark Rooms by Lili Anolik and The Half Brother by Holly LeCraw! Sorry for spoilers, anyone who might be planning to read those books.
for most of your comment i thought you were describing the Mortal Instruments, and then I realized at the end you probably were not, but it is disturbingly similar.
Yes! Only it was four books of tortured are-the-or-aren’t they!
Like Veronica Mars!
To be fair, that comes into play in a surprising number of tv shows too – Gossip Girl, Veronica Mars, Pretty Little Liars verges on it.
I am a triplet, and comforting either of my siblings in that way is a thought that fills me with horror. I’ll just pat them awkwardly on the head instead.
I’m one of 4, we’re all close in age – 2 brothers, 2 sisters. I love most of them, but only sort-of hug any of them, and only from oblique angles. Yes, we used to take baths together when we were 5 or thereabouts. No, it didn’t translate to adolescent or mature fantasies. GROSS.
Same here – also a (non identical) triplet. Whenever I read incest storylines, I just want to take the author by the shoulders and say DO YOU EVEN HAVE SIBLINGS??
You know, I never realized it before now, but there is a lot of incest in high fantasy, isn’t there?
I want to read this book. In fact, I wouldn’t mind an entire series.
his Cerebrant Hestat
Dune is pretty much high fantasy tho
This is perfect, thank you so much!
If you’re not writing sensible high fantasy professionally, why the hell not?? I would buy all of your books.
The saege inclined his head toward the boisterous group of travelers.
You are perfection.
Thank you thank you thank you.
Could be Diane Wynne Jones – part of the Dalemark quartet I think?
Perfection, with this being the most perfect of all: “Then, my brother,” said Nianna, bowing low, “I shall leave the kingdom immediately and find one, who is related to a different king, to marry you.”
This all goes back to modern High Fantasy’s roots in European legendry, where the gods (especially the Greco-Roman ones) ignored incest taboos, and involuntary (or voluntary) incest was a common theme in plotlines. Even Tolkien had one such incident, although the book-length version of it was not published until decades after his death.
Also, don’t kid yourselves: it’s one of the perennial spices in porno/erotica, from Japan to Cleveland.
But: hurrah for the names; fantasy languages and naming based on an almost total ignorance of linguistics is a topic that could support an entire blog by itself.
I feel very strongly that this post is the best thing that ever happened to me.
As someone who has edited fantasy books for 30 years, this post makes me insanely happy.
Lot’s two virgin daughters realized that they and their father might be the last three people on Earth. Just in case they weren’t, though, they walked for a while until they luckily met some people to whom they were not related.
"When you play the game of Candyland, you win or you shrug your shoulders and say 'Fuck it, it's all down to random chance anyway, everyone knows that.'"
And Turambar found a naked young maiden on the tomb of Finduilas; he gave her clothes and did not initiate an affair with her because by this point, he knew he had shite luck. And so Glaurung had nothing to reveal when he was slain, and everybody lived while Morgoth was Royally Pissed.