I like the books Mercedes Lackey writes, she is good at creating a believable world and people to populate it. While her writing is not the strongest I do find it engaging ang and enjoyable. I like a series I can live inside of and her books are ones that have characters I feel invested in and a world I believe could exist. ( )

This is a collection of short stories featuring Kethry and Tarma. Some I had read in anthologies. but others were totally new to me. Two had been subsumed into Oathbound. Those I skimmed as I had just read that book and they were nearly the same.

Both the characters and the author matured and the stories steadily improved. In the end, I could tell that Tarma and Kethry knew they were good at what they did, but also didn't consider themselves "real" heroes. This quotation sums it up: "There’s your real heroes—the people who keep coping, keep trying, no matter how many blows Fate takes at them. Nobody’ ll make a song about them, but they’re heroes all the same."

If you read and enjoyed Oathbound and Oathbreakers, you'll enjoy finding out more about Tarma and Kethry. ( )

This is technically listed as the third part of the 'Vows and Honor' series of books featuring Kethry amd Trama, Lackey's answer to the fighting heroines that began to feature in the eighties and nineties. While similar to other females in the genre, this pair of mercenaries are somewhat more realistic but I believe that thinking any female fighter being an equal to a to a man one on one with the same sort of weapons falls foul of biology to a greater degree than any fantasy writer is willing to accept.

Despite that, most of these tales are good fun at the very least and sometimes thoughtful and not too preachy. One of the things I found difficult in these stories was to date them in terms of the rest of the Valdemar Cycle but later books in the Cycle make it fairly clearthat these are a generation or two before the original Heraldic books. ( )

Collected in one place, the Tarma and Kethry short stories originally published in the Sword and Sorceress anthologies.

http://allbookedup-elena.blogspot.ca/2015/01/oathblood-mercedes-lackey.html ( )

This is a Tarma and Kethry short story collection - including the story of their meeting, which really would have made sense as the beginning of Oathbound. We get bits and pieces of it in that and the middle book, but it's nice to see it all laid out.

The stories are a mixed bag, as might be expected. A couple of them are the basis for scenes in Oathbound (more or less exactly - I didn't bother to reread them, in fact.) A couple of them are basically concept pieces - a poisoning mystery, a Murphy's Law farce, and couple of explorations of fantasy tropes. Those are generally fine, although slight. The ones I like best are the ones set later in the duo's career - the excursion into Valdemar to play with horses is a great deal of fun, and the final story involving Kethry's kids is top-notch.

Overall it's a fun collection, and probably works as well or better than Oathbound. Tarma and Kethry are just perfectly designed for short, episodic adventures. ( )