Peculiar. Why doesn't this feel like home? He pondered for a moment, for it seemed to him that his modest, goldenoak-paneled quarters had the anonymous, overly-neat look of a room without a current occupant. I suppose that's only logical, he thought reluctantly. They haven't been occupied, much. I've been living out of my packs for the last year, and before that I was only here for a couple of weeks at a time at most. Gods.
This paragraph out of context could give the impression that the novel is narrated in the first-person. It is not. It is actually narrated from a third-person perspective with the omniscient teller of the tale freely swooping in and out of the thoughts of certain characters as is seen fit. The mind being penetrated here is the protagonist and hero of the trilogy. What is going through Vanyel’s mind is his return home after an extended military campaign along Valdemar’s border with neighboring kingdom of Karse. Even when the home one returns to is a castle of the king, it can still feel alien and out-of-sync after a prolonged absence.
“You look like hell.”
There is something of a little running joke running throughout the first part of the book. It is related to Vanyel’s prolonged absence in his role as warrior fighting for the kingdom. His return is notably characterized in the above example as endowing his own feelings upon returning home with a sense of alienation and disconnection from the life he lived before. This alienated status is lent further credence through the recurring theme of people telling him that his absence has taken quite the physical toll upon him. Very early on he asks if the experience makes him look “seasoned” and the reply is that he looks like hell. This comes literally right on top of hearing himself so described to which he is moved to rhetorically inquire, “Can’t anyone greet me without saying that?” The answer to that question is yes, but not many.
Vanyel had no doubt whatsoever what the boy thought he was offering in return for music lessons. The painful - and very potently sexual - embarrassment was all too plain to his Empathy. Gods, the poor child - Medren wasn't even a temptation. I may be shaych, but - not children. The thought's revolting.
The protagonist of this fantasy series is quite unique in one very significant and singular respect: he is openly homosexual. That is what the term “shaych” is referring to here. While homosexuality is an overarching theme unifying the three books within the trilogy, in this particular entry the thematic exploration also gets quite specifically narrowed at some points. The novel examines the issue of how homosexuality is viewed by outsiders with respect to the widely held contemptuous acceptance that homosexual implies by definition promiscuity and that this promiscuity implies by definition pedophilia. In this particular extract, the issue narrows even further to implicate homosexuality as existing entirely within a realm of unbound perversion: Medren is not just any teenager, but Vanyel’s own nephew. Thus, Vanyel finds that existing outside the mainstream of sexuality, he must not deal simply with suspicion of pedophilia but incest as a matter of course.
