Literature / The Immortals

“If you look hard and long, you can find us. If you listen hard and long, you can hear any of us, call any of us that you wish.”

The Immortals is the second series set in the Tortall Universe, taking place ten years after Song of the Lioness. Veralidaine Sarrasri, more commonly called Daine, is a a thirteen-year-old girl on the run from her past. She has a "knack for animals" that borders on the supernatural, attracting the attention of Numair Salmalín, The Archmage of Tortall. As he instructs her, they realize that her power may be greater than either of them can imagine.

Meanwhile, a centuries-old barrier has been broken in the world. Fierce and mythical creatures known as immortals start to invade the human lands, and while many are benign, many begin to attack and prey on humans. Joining Tortall's efforts to deal with the sudden menace, Daine finds herself caught up in a conflict that spirals far out of the mortal scale.

Not connected to the 1995 action movie of the same name.

A character sheet can be found here. Beware of spoilers.

• Wild Magic
• Wolf-Speaker
• Emperor Mage
• The Realms of the Gods

Numair's backstory is expanded on considerably in The Numair Chronicles, which calls back to this series frequently.

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Tropes present in this series include:

• 90% of Your Brain: In Wolf-Speaker, Daine refers to the (now discredited) idea that humans use little of their brains when comparing them to Brokefang who, changed by her magic, had ideas in "each nook and cranny of his skull." She is horrified by her discovery.
• Action Mom: Two!
  • Alanna the Lioness, heroine of Song of the Lioness and still King's Champion, is now a mother of three.
  • Thayet, founder of the Queen's Riders. They're a cavalry group with many female members.
• Age-Gap Romance: Controversially ends with the sixteen-year-old Daine finally winning over the thirty-year-old teacher she'd been crushing on since she was thirteen. Unusually for this trope, the controversy is discussed by the couple in-universe.
• The Ageless: The immortals have this form of immortality, though ones with human features do age slowly until they appear to be in their fifties. They live until they're killed, either by accident or malice.
• Air Vent Escape: Zek flees up a wall hanging and into an air vent to escape. He's a pygmy marmoset, about the size of a large rat but much more agile, so this isn't difficult for him.
• Altar Diplomacy: Part of the negotiations between the Carthaki Empire and the Tortallan delegation in Emperor Mage go sour because Emperor Ozorne tries to secure a marriage between his nephew Prince Kaddar and the Tortallan Princess Kalasin, who's only ten years old at the time, and for her to immediately come to Carthak. King Jonathan and Queen Thayet do expect her to marry for the benefit of Tortall, but are averse to arranging such a match before their daughter could be reasonably expected to have any marital preferences. Kaddar and Kalasin actually do get married eventually, but only after Ozorne is dead and Kaddar is running the country on his own terms.
• Alien Blood: The blood of gods and most Immortals is silver. Spidren blood is black and burns like acid. Ogre blood is teal.
• Ambiguously Brown: Daine's father is described as being very brown with streaks of green. Being a god he might be of any ethnicity or none. Daine mentions in the first book that she stood out in Snowsdale among so many blue-eyed blondes, and some book cover renditions make her brown-skinned as well.
• Ambiguous Situation: In Emperor Mage, Rikash gives Ozorne a Stormwing feather and tells him "If ever you are in peril of life and throne, take this feather and thrust it into your flesh. When it mixes with your blood, you will fly from your enemies as if winged with steel, and escape beyond the Black God's reach for all time." Did Ozorne know this would turn him into a Stormwing? Immediately after he does, the Stormwing queen he imprisoned says he'll face justice at her claws and he's horrified, but when told he no longer has his magic he gasps that he has Stormwing magic. The feather appears when Rikash strikes a deal with the Graveyard Hag which suggests that it's specifically magicked by the goddess to have this effect. Published decades later in Tortall: A Spy's Guide, Daine says that any shed Stormwing feather can turn a human into a Stormwing. Rikash also mentioned that "most humans" who transform into Stormwings find it liberating.
• Ambition Is Evil: Yolane and Belden of Dunlath, who want to rule Tortall. And Ozorne, whose ambitions start with taking over the Northern Lands and get worse from there.
• Amplified Animal Aptitude: This happens to any animals that spend a lot of time around Daine, especially if they get any of her blood in their mouths. In the first book it's not a big deal, but Wolf-Speaker opens with a wolf she knows contacting her for help when humans start to ruin his pack's new territory. Normally wolves would just leave as conditions became difficult for them, but Brokefang has actual plans and doesn't want to go. Brokefang's experiencing a rushing-in of knowledge and awareness that he struggles to manage and keep up with - he understands that all other animals, and humans, are complex beings that do things for reasons that make sense to them, and that he and his pack-mates and children will die. Daine feels that she's taken his innocence and he won't be happy as a normal wolf anymore, but she can't prevent it.
• Amputation Stops Spread: In Wolf-Speaker, a mage cuts off her hand when she gets a drop of "bloodrain", a potent magic poison, on her skin. Had it reached her bloodstream, she would have rotted inside out. (And this is why you wear gloves in chemistry, kids.)
• Anger Born of Worry: Midway through Wild Magic, Alanna is white-faced and Numair positively shreds Daine, giving her a What the Hell, Hero? speech of truly epic proportions. Why? She was trying to contact dolphins telepathically in meditation and decided her heart was too loud — so she accidentally stopped it. No wonder she scared them so badly!
• Animal Espionage: When she's upset Daine's magic causes all animals in her vicinity to forget their own priorities and attack anything she feels threatened by. While she soon learns enough control to try to stop them, they're still compelled to want to act in her defense, and it's easier on her if she can give them things to do - starting, in Wild Magic, by having them spy on foes. This gives her allies major tactical advantages when it comes to, say, soldiers moving covertly at night. No matter how good they are, bats and owls know something's up.
• Animal Eye Spy: Daine learns to do this in Wolf-Speaker, where it promptly becomes a plot point, but doesn't use this ability afterwards as that's also the book where she unlocks Voluntary Shapeshifting.
• Animal Religion: Animals have their own gods, who mostly inhabit the Divine Realms. Animal gods are large for their species but not excessively so, and seem to have limited power.
• Animal Stereotypes: Wild magic, anyone? A number of them are also purposefully broken. Almost all the animals that appear in the books are portrayed positively, with Daine overturning humans' prejudice about many species traditionally seen as evil, such as wolves, hyenas, bats and crocodiles. Rats, however, are not so lucky (see You Dirty Rat!!). Daine also comes to dislike whales.
• Animal Talk: "The People" have one language which seems to be magical in nature. They usually don't think to talk to other species except when influenced by Daine's human intelligence. Interestingly, while young animals like the half-grown wolf cubs in Wolf-Speaker also talk, Daine doesn't perceive them as speaking in words until near the end of the book, after she's shared the senses of a young cat.
• Animate Dead: The Graveyard Hag, patron goddess of Carthak, can do this. She gives Daine the power — temporarily — as part of her plan to get rid of Ozorne, creating an army of skeletal dinosaurs that were on display.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • In Wolf-Speaker, Daine angrily says that wolves never eat people. This isn't completely true. It's not normal for wolves to eat human beings, but they've been known to do so (or try) if unable to catch their natural prey, and will scavenge already-dead humans more readily.
  • Zekk the pygmy marmoset is "an expert on plant foods" and can advise Daine on unfamiliar vegetable dishes. He himself mostly eats fruit. Real pygmy marmosets mostly eat specific forms of tree sap and insects. They supplement this diet with fruit and nectar, but not other plants. Lindhall asks through Daine if pygmy marmosets really are monogamous and Zekk says yes - really though, they're often polyandrous, with a breeding female having two male partners who each carry a baby.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence:
  • An unusual defied example in the last book. The gods give Daine the choice between this or remaining human (and being bound to whichever realm she picked). She chooses to stay human.
  • Played straight with Sarra. Weiryn petitioned the other gods to let her become a minor goddess instead of going to the Black God. She's now known as the Green Lady and aids in matters of healing and childbirth in her old village and the surrounding territory.
• Asleep for Days: This happens to Daine multiple times, from calling forth the Kraken, overusing shapeshifting abilities, and moving between the mortal and divine realms.
• Author Appeal:
  • Animals and Action Girls, as in her other books. Her characters often have an animal companion of some kind but this quartet is the most animal-focused of her entire output.
  • Pierce likes teen girls pairing up with older men. After the outcry over the fourteen-year age gap between Daine and Numair (later retconned to twelve years), she said she'll try for smaller gaps in the future. However, many of her books still have characters saying that "normally" characters as old as the protagonists or younger (Kel is fourteen when this is said of her) are married and having children.
• Badass Bookworm: Tristan makes the very, very stupid mistake of thinking Numair is a complete Cloudcuckoolander, which is what he came across as in their university days. He won't be making that mistake again. Because now he's an apple tree.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Used with Jonathan and Thayet, who Daine finds impossibly beautiful.
  • Subverted with Lord Imrah. Daine finds his looks forbidding and cruel until she actually gets to know him.
  • Also subverted with Yolane. She's described as being classically beautiful, but is involved in a plot to overthrow the rulers of Tortall.
• Because You Were Nice to Me: Other characters, seeing the darkings for the first time, are immediately suspicious-to-hostile towards them. Daine, having internalized her lesson in Wolf-Speaker that she shouldn't attack something until she sees it do wrong, protects and feeds them and they become friendly towards her, soon even turning on their master.
• Berserk Button:
  • See Numair. See Numair apparently get killed. See Daine crush the killer's palace WITH ZOMBIE DINOSAURS.
  • Numair isn't much better himself. Taking pot shots at Daine will get you turned into a tree.
• The Big Guy: Sarge of the Queen's Riders, a man so huge Daine wonders if he has bear blood in him.
• Big "NO!": Daine when Rikash is killed.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: This overlaps with Deliberate Values Dissonance, as Daine does not consider what is best for humans to be more important than what is best for animals - or even for Immortals, once she gets to understand them better. She's fine with hunting, but past that? She does conclude at one point that some of the predatory animals which she loves reduce her to tears with their hunting tactics, since she loves the prey animals as well, but she loves them still and doesn't consider them evil for having such natures.
  • In the fourth book, she argues with the Great Gods that instead of trapping all Stormwings in the Divine Realms again, they should be allowed into the human world, irrespective of how peaceably they get on with humans, as even the monstrous ones can't help their natures. Daine doesn't think she should tell her friends that she wanted this, knowing that having to deal with Immortals, Stormwings included, has and will continue to cause humans a lot of grief and bloodshed.
    • That's also the book where she's upset about encountering a tauros while bathing and having to kill it when, despite her warnings, it still tries to rape her. Some of this is the threat it presented to her and her Ma, since in the heat of the moment she forgot that her Ma is no longer defenseless, but she closes the scene saying that it's not fair for the tauros, either - are there even any female tauroses?
• Blob Monster: The "skinners" from the final book — giant nightmare blobs made of Chaos itself that are immune to weapons and most magic. Daine and Numair are only saved from them when they're yanked into the Divine Realm. The darkings are a smaller, noncombatant, and rather friendlier version. Okay, they're Ozorne's spies, but they turn on him with a combination of Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal and Because You Were Nice to Me.
• Blood Magic: In the fourth book Ozorne uses his own blood to create Blob Monster spies known as darkings. If they had been created in the mortal realms they would have been innately loyal to him, but because he worked in the Divine Realms he keeps them in line through torture, and they start to turn on him after Daine shows them kindness. When some try to help Daine in her final battle against him, though, he's able to turn those back into blood.
• Bows Versus Crossbows: Averted. Daine is just as good with a crossbow as she is with the longbow even though she prefers the latter. In Wolf-Speaker a Stormwing mocks her for using a crossbow, assuming that it's too short-range and slow-loading to be a threat at range. She shoots nonlethally and dislodges one of his feathers. When he and a friend attack her anyway, she shoots both out of the sky despite them flying at her out of the sun.
• Can't Bathe Without a Weapon: In the last book, Daine is interrupted in a lake by a tauros. She improvises a sling with her Modesty Towel and decides she can't bathe unarmed again.
• Carnivore Confusion: Daine initially isn't affected by this despite being able to talk to prey animals (though she stifles her magic when hunting in order to make it fair), because plenty of her animal friends hunt other animals. After she develops her power and learns to shapeshift she had an offscreen incident where she tried deer shape in the Royal Forest in hunting season, and another where she panicked while surrounded, changed into a goose, and almost lost a wing to a barbed arrow. After that she stopped eating game but for a time continues to eat farm animals, deliberately closing herself off from them to do so. However by the end of the quartet the only meat she can eat comes from chicken, mutton, and fish - and the word she uses there is 'manage', which suggests pescatarianism or outright becoming a vegetarian may be in her future.
• Cats Are Mean: Most of the cats present are quite nice. In Wolf-Speaker two bonded palace cats are nothing but helpful to Daine, even attacking a Coldfang when she's cornered. Queenclaw's voice, when Daine tells the animal gods that they must bring Scrap back to life, is cruel and she tells Daine the gods aren't at her beck and call, but also as it happens she thinks a kitten deserves another life.
• Cats Are Superior: Queenclaw, the goddess of cats, is incredibly smug.
• Central Theme: Just because someone's nature is different than your own does not mean it is wrong or that you should change it.
• Character Overlap: Jon, Thayet, and especially Alanna are prominent secondary characters. Alanna is a very strong presence in the first book and part of the delegation to Carthak in the third.
• Chased Off into the Sunset: The ending of Emperor Mage has new Stormwing Ozorne clumsily fleeing from Rikash.
• Chekhov's Gun: Every book in the quartet has at least one, however, the prize probably goes to the Badger God's claw, which he gives to Daine in almost the first chapter of the first book so he can keep track of her in the mortal realms. As a part of a god, it seems to be made from solid silver. She wears it as a pendant and finds that when she shapeshifts, unlike the rest of her clothing it stays with her. In the climax of the last book, Daine uses it to kill Ozorne the Stormwing.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Retroactively. Tempests and Slaughter has Arram (later called Numair) befriending an ancient crocodile god, taking care of a baby sunbird, and being favored by the Graveyard Hag. You'd think some of this would come up in The Immortals, set fifteen years later or so, especially when Daine is also 'favored' by the Hag, and when she and Numair are in the Divine Realms, passing through the swamp of another ancient crocodile god and watching sunbirds overhead. The Hag Loves Secrecy and gleefully prevents Daine from telling anyone about her so it's not hard to imagine she'd also keep Numair from talking, but you'd think he would share about the other stuff. Despite the chronology of events, The Immortals was written more than twenty years before Numair's book.
• Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: Tamora Pierce envisioned Numair as Jeff Goldblum.
• Continuity Drift:
  • Wild magic does not fit within the rules of magic as laid down in Song of the Lioness. Hand waved by being subtle enough in most practitioners, who usually simply have an affinity with animals of a specific species, to be commonly disregarded as folk tale fodder.
  • Also the Immortals themselves. In the earlier Song of the Lioness quartet, there were few unusual or 'mythical' creatures. Some animals were uncommonly large and might be made more dangerous by sorcery, there is a being in the shape of a yeti who Alanna duels for the Dominion Jewel, and there's Faithful a constellation, not exactly a real cat. Otherwise if creatures like dragons are mentioned, it's with the implication that they are as mythical in the Tortall-verse as in our world. In The Immortals we find that these kinds of creatures do exist, but have spent centuries sealed into the Divine Realms — from where they are now gradually being released by the bad guys. Since there was no hint of their reality and imprisonment in the Song of the Lioness except possibly the murals in the dwelling of the Ysandir, we can assume it's a retcon, but it's actually done very well. The explanation for the creatures' appearance isn't a hand-wave, it's a major part of the series (which is why it's called The Immortals).
  • Numair is unable to use healing magic in this quartet, while in Tempests and Slaughter (written later, set earlier) his healing prowess was quite central. It may be, given that healing takes very precise control per a conversation in Protector of the Small, that as he got stronger he lost that precision.
• Cosmic Plaything: Daine gets some first-hand experience with Tortall's Jerkass Gods.
  • The first time, in Wolf-Speaker, she objects somewhat on finding that the wolf god told her old wolf friends to get her to help set Dunlath right, so that it can be a place where humans, animals, and some Immortals live together peacefully. But she cares about the wolves and makes friends with some of the others in the valley, and the animal gods are relatively straightforwards about needing her help, so she's not bothered...
  • ...at least, not nearly as much as she is in Emperor Mage. The Graveyard Hag is far more mischievous and callous, and has distinct plans for what she wants Daine to do as well as a much firmer grasp on the situation. She drips bits and pieces of information for Daine to pick up and likes to laugh at her and prevent her from telling anyone the goddess is about.
• Covered in Gunge: The books do not forget that animals poop (oddly, Tempests and Slaughter does seem to forget) and Daine, as someone who readily lets bats hang off of her clothing or birds perch all over her, is often filthy. Horses also slobber on her.
• Covers Always Lie: The Random House cover◊ of Emperor Mage shows Daine with a golden lion tamarin monkey on her shoulder. The Simon & Schuster cover◊ shows her with a capuchin monkey. Neither animal is present in the text. She actually rescues a pygmy marmoset who's her companion for the rest of the book, a monkey that's much smaller and more cryptically colored than either of those.
• Deity of Human Origin: The Green Lady, a minor goddess of healing and childbirth. She's Sarra, Daine's deceased mother.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Prince Kaddar is in most ways good and humane and easy for Daine to relate to, once they have some initial awkwardness out of the way. Like the royals she's come to know in Tortall he wants to use ruling power to help citizens in need rather than for conquest or glory and he is actually part of a secret conspiracy to improve Carthak. But, as the heir to an empire that heavily relies on slave labor, he thinks knowing who random slaves are, let alone caring about or wanting to free them, is ridiculous, an opinion that has Daine repeatedly feeling as if she's been slapped in the face.
• Demoted to Extra:
  • There's significant Character Overlap with Song of the Lioness, particularly in Wild Magic, but many very important members of its cast appear briefly if at all. Raoul has a cameo in Wolf-Speaker. Duke Gareth and Gary are with the delegation in Emperor Mage but as Daine isn't remotely interested in the diplomatic proceedings she has little to do with them.
  • If you read chronologically, Tempests and Slaughter comes before this quartet. That book is much longer and goes into more detail about numerous characters who appear in Emperor Mage in much smaller roles. Most notable is Chioké, who here is just the most prominent of Ozorne's loyal mages. Varice fares a little better but she's no longer close friends with Ozorne, merely a courtier and functionary of his. Lindhall actually gets more depth here than in Tempests and Slaughter, as he's been actively working to smuggle slaves out of Carthak.
• Deus ex Machina: In Wild Magic, the "pirate" fleet gets destroyed by a Kraken who just happened to have been left behind 400 years ago when the other Immortals were barred from the human realms. True, Daine found and called him up, but she didn't set out to find him and hadn't expected him to arrive as quickly as he did.
• Disappeared Dad:
  • Daine never knew her father and was only aware that he's someone her mother met on Beltane. Sarra said she'd explain someday, but died before that day came.
  • Lady Yolane and Lady Maura are half sisters with the same father. They talk about him in the past tense, but don't elaborate on how long it's been or how he died.
• Divine Date: In the backstory. Sarra's unknown lover was Weiryn, which was why she never married a village man despite her neighbors' urging.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: Numair, magically speaking, especially when compared to the Queenscoves in Protector of the Small, who require incredibly precise control in their healing. In a variation on the trope, Numair is perfectly aware of his strength and its limitations, he just can't control it because he's trained himself in big, power-consuming spells his whole life and doesn't have the precision needed for small things and is openly envious of "lesser" mages. Most mages can use magic to put out their candles; Numair has to get up and blow his out because if he used his magic he'd blow up the candle, as well as the table it was on and the wall behind it.
• The Dragons Come Back: Ozorne and his ilk are not interested in summoning dragons from the Divine Realms because dragons, being intelligent and powerful mages themselves, are no one's pawns, but one gets accidentally caught up in a summoning spell anyway in Wild Magic. She dies, and her newborn dragonet is adopted by Daine. At the end of the quartet many Immortals remain in the Mortal Realms, but (aside from Skysong) the dragons stay in the Dragonlands, though they rather haughtily say that they can cross the worlds at any time regardless.
  • Dragons may have elected not to return but the impact of the other species' return is huge, and Protector of the Small deals heavily with the effects of this change in the world. Monsters are about, and strange people who may be dealt with as people but also have their own strange customs and criminals. In Tortall: A Spy's Guide a breakdown of the demographics of Tortall has one in a hundred Tortallans be a sapient, talking Immortal.
• Dragon Rider: Diamondflame takes Daine on his back in the fourth book.
• Elderly Immortal: Most human gods, Daine notes, look either young or mature. The Threefold or Great Mother Goddess can take an elder's form but is a straight-backed and dignified representation of age. The Graveyard Hag, on the other hand, is usually bent-backed with a cane, not much hair, and a wicked grin revealing that she has few teeth. She's as strong and lively as she wants to be, of course.
• Emasculated Cuckold: Yolene was cheating on her husband Belden. She and Tristan were openly affectionate in front of him, to the point where Daine, spying, thought he should do something, but the only possible sign that he noticed at all was that he drank heavily.
• Emergency Transformation: Rikash gave Ozorne a Stormwing feather and told him that if he was ever in a dire enough situation he could plunge it into his flesh and be carried away from danger on wings of steel. When the moment actually comes Ozorne is transformed permanently into a Stormwing, all of his injuries healed, all of his human magic inaccessible.
• The Emperor: There were bad omens on the crowning of Emperor Mage Ozorne. He spends the first two books covertly behind attacks on Tortall while pretending innocence, and reveals his culpability in the third book, when Daine and company come to Carthak to try to negotiate an alliance. Ozorne has barred people from worshiping their gods, wanting any of that effort and money to go to benefiting himself, which is a very dangerous tack for a ruler to take in this setting. Transforming into a Stormwing means being barred from his throne, but Ozorne then allies openly with the Queen of Chaos, trying to angle for power over mortals.
• The Empire: Of all people Prince Kaddar, Ozorne's heir, is the most critical of the Carthaki empire itself.
  "Our glorious heritage. The splendid empire. We loot our conquests until they can no longer feed themselves. Then we take the money from what food and goods they buy to pay for wars to acquire more conquests."
• Enlightened Self-Interest: The nobles running Fief Dunlath are strip mining for opals and clearcutting their forests. Sent by wolves to try to convince them to stop, Daine tries appealing to their self interest. Their activities are poisoning the big central lake and killing or driving off the wild game, which isn't sustainable if they want to support themselves and their people on their own land. Unfortunately for her, these nobles care only about their own futures and make a high profit from mining, so laugh her off.
• Entitled to Have You:
  • Ozorne doesn't understand that he can't just keep Daine to tend his birds.
  • Daine's magic causes most animals to love her just from being in her vicinity. Whenever she asks them to do something they're curious to eager and often think it sounds fun; at worst, they worry that it will be scary or hurt but a single line of encouragement causes them to obey her anyway. If she's sufficiently angry or upset they'll attack whatever's upset her without regard for their own lives. Daine feels the pain of their injuries and deaths and hates sending her "friends" to die, but she quickly comes to expect that all animals will want to risk themselves for her, and when she asks for their help it's really just a nice facade over a command. When Alanna's charger Darkmoon doesn't want to participate in Daine's training Daine wants to put him in his place. She's furious when she asks a pod of whales with calves to defend her and her friends and they refuse, not willing to kill or be killed for her sake, and tries to force them. She also dislikes rats, who are only willing to help her if they get something for it. When she's Older and Wiser Daine considers the effect she has on animals more carefully and prefers to leave them to their own devices more, but in Tortall: A Spy's Guide she still resents whales for being able to refuse her.
• Equivalent Exchange: Certain powerful spells known as "words of power" have an equal and opposite effect elsewhere in the world. So when Numair turns Tristan into a tree, somewhere in the world a tree becomes a man. His story is told in Tortall and Other Lands.
• Ethnic Goddess: It's said that the Banjiku tribe were birthed by the goddess Lushagui. They worship her along with her brother, Kidunka the World Snake.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Yolane is strip mining her fiefdom to sell opals to Carthak, an operation overseen by mages loyal to Ozorne and an assortment of Immortals they've summoned. Being third cousin to King Jonathan, she has ambitions to become Tortall's Queen. She falters when the mages discuss using bloodrain, which will poison the land for miles and kill everything in the vicinity, an effect that will take seven years just to start fading. Ambitious though she is, she did swear to keep Dunlath safe. Opal profits can keep her people fed even if the mining destroys their usual livelihood; this magical poison is something else entirely. The mages and her husband wave this concern away, though, and the implication is that she's not going to put her foot down.
• Eye Scream: The first Stormwing Daine meets is Zhaneh Bitterclaws, and Daine shoots her in the eye. Zhaneh doesn't appreciably react but is furious with her. In her two appearances afterwards, the Stormwing's ruined eye is black and oozing.
• Fake Kill Scare: Played with in Emperor Mage, when the titular emperor has a certain someone killed. This sends Daine into Tranquil Fury. Deciding that Ozorne has to pay, she reanimates all of the larger dinosaur skeletons in the Hall of Bones and commits them to destroying his palace. When that certain someone shows up, proving to her that it was a magical clone of himself that had been killed, she cools off, answering "What happened?" with "I thought you were dead. I lost my temper."
• False Flag Operation: Ozorne has warships disguised as pirates in their attempt to kill or capture Thayet and the royal children so that he can deny that the forces are Carthaki. The events of Wolf-Speaker cause enough countries to unite against the Carthaki Empire that it sues for peace, and several countries send a delegation to Carthak in Emperor Mage, where Ozorne swears that rogue elements were working without his knowledge. Late in the book Ozorne kidnaps Daine and hides her away, forging a note to make it seem like she ran off to foment dissidence against him. This causes the other countries to assume the talks failed because of Tortall and her specifically, so they won't help Tortall in an impending war against the much larger empire.
• Fantasy Pantheon: With the last book being called The Realms of the Gods, you can expect them to step into center stage. This series establishes that there are major and minor gods, and that mortals, like Daine's late mother, can sometimes become divine.
• Forgotten Fallen Friend: Daine's beloved dog Mammoth, who was killed along with her mother and grandfather in the bandit raid on their farm and whom she deeply regrets losing, is never mentioned outside of her recounting the bandit attack in her first book.
• Foul Medicine: Daine's given a tonic to help with her sunburn and muscle strain after she's been up on a wall firing arrows for hours in Wild Magic. It's tomato juice "laden with salt and other things". Whatever those other things are, she chokes and exclaims at the taste and has to brace herself to gulp it down.
• Fresh Clue:
  • In the second book Daine in wolf form tracks Yolene on horseback and notes that the horse's droppings are wetter the closer she gets. Traces of sweat and blood are also noticed as the horse's rider tried to drive her struggling mount on.
  • In the third book, Daine turns into a hyena - which she notes as having an even stronger nose than a wolf - to track Emperor Ozorne through his palace as things go to chaos. He wasn't well shod for a chase and his thin decorative shoes wear out on gravel, so he soon starts to track blood and fear becomes a stronger and stronger element of his scent. Also, Ozorne had to defend himself with his magic at several turns. As Daine tracks him she finds his felled enemies, first burned and melted all the way through, then increasingly more intact as his reserves dwindled. By the end of the chase she's finding more blood from an enemy who managed to injure him before being killed, as well as sweat and sour exhaustion.
• Friend to All Living Things:
  • Daine, naturally. Even before she's completely mastered her magic, animals see her as the "greatest of the People" and love her, and she loves most of them right back (she doesn't care for chickens). She's awkward around human children at first but soon comes to like and want to help them, and even comes to this point with many Immortals.
  • Deconstructed with Ozorne. He loves animals, especially birds, and goes to great lengths to provide the best care possible to them, even having any that can't thrive in captivity released back to their homes and fretting when they're sick. His birds love and trust him back, and when he sees how dedicated Daine is in caring for them he starts to like her as well. The Numair Chronicles, which have a younger, initially kinder Ozorne, show that he's had this trait for a long time. And if he was only in charge of aviaries etc that would be fine, but as The Emperor this trait is if anything a kind of Kick the Dog - he only loves animals and is indifferent to famines, mass deaths, and the fates of the people under his command as he goes into full A God Am I mode. Another character cautions Daine that if she voices a suspicion about the birds having been poisoned, even accidentally, Ozorne will have the slaves responsible for feeding them tortured and killed. Near the end of Emperor Mage, he decides to keep Daine as he genuinely likes her, and doesn't understand that she doesn't also only care about animals and may have strong opinions about him trying to kill her friends and invade her home.
• Full-Frontal Assault: Stormwings don't wear clothing beyond a bit of jewelry and hair ornaments, so are bare chested. When Daine learns Voluntary Shapeshifting she can't take her clothes with her, so this is an issue with her as well. The most spectacular example coming at the end of Realms; thanks to constantly shapeshifting to the point of magical exhaustion Daine is wearing nothing but her Badger claw during her final confrontation with Ozorne. It's in her narration but the scene is so intense that neither of them mention it.
• Genius Ditz: To those who don't know what he is, Numair comes off as one, as said by Kitten: "someone silly". That is, until he goes into teacher-mode and gets smart or mage-mode and gets dangerous.
• Genre Shift: Lightly so. Each book of the quartet has its own tone and focus. Wild Magic is highly concerned with characters from the last quartet and with a new cast of mostly low-powered individuals in Onua and the Riders. Wolf-Speaker has the lowest stakes and entirely takes place in Fief Dunlath, with a cast of mostly animals. Emperor Mage takes place in Carthak, where Daine is at the edges of an important political conversation and a tool of a malicious Goddess. The Realms of the Gods brings in a totally new antagonist and very high stakes, is generally stranger, and mostly takes place in the titular realms.
• A God Am I: Emperor Ozorne all but bans worship of the gods, declaring that "if the people need to worship someone, they can worship him." Carthak's patron deity is exactly as fond of this idea as you might expect.
• God's Hands Are Tied: Gods have a hierarchy which can vary by region. The Graveyard Hag, meanwhile, is a minor goddess everywhere but Carthak, where everyone but the Black God^note who is her dad, by the by, and usually doesn't intervene in Carthaki matters must bow to her. When she picks Daine to be her Cosmic Plaything, Daine is grouchy at every suggestion that there are rules and thinks these don't actually exist.
• Goodbye, Cruel World!: In Wolf-Speaker, Lord Belden kills himself and leaves a note saying that he won't bring more disgrace to his name by fleeing, in a kind of self-inflicted Leave Behind a Pistol.
• Gone Horribly Right: At the end of Emperor Mage, Daine and Rikash force Ozorne to turn into a Stormwing, and they both believe that despite Ozorne having a clumsy head start Rikash will catch up and get control of him, but it turns out Ozorne's an Instant Expert when it comes to both flying and Stormwing magic. In the next book, Ozorne has taken leadership of several Stormwing clans, used his immortal powers to create a network of spies and very nasty magic killers, and makes a deal with the ruler of Chaos that comes close to destroying the divine and human realms.
• Green Aesop: In Wolf-Speaker, Tristan and Yolane think nothing of exploiting the land to get at the black opals, leading to more then a few animals to become very angry over the loss of their homes. Daine tries to talk them out of it by "thinking selfishly" and pointing out that in a few generations, the land will be so ruined that they'll be beggared trying to support themselves. (They don't listen.)
• Harping on About Harpies: Stormwings are never called harpies, but they're plainly the setting's equivalent. Described repeatedly as looking like humans with sharp silvery teeth and bird limbs and tails, they're generally streaked with filth and absolutely reek. Sir Myles' research on them leads him to report that they eat only the bodies of the dead and drink only the energy of human fear, suffering, and anger. Despite this, they are people and their morality is varied. As Immortals, they live forever unless killed by accident or malice.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Daine can talk to animals. She proves on many occasions that, since she can do it at a distance and animals are always eager to do as she asks, speaking to animals gives her huge advantages in war and intrigue. For instance, animals will spy for her and she can prevent an army from marching as they have no edible food, no water, no horses, and hardly a strap of leather or piece of rope that hasn't been chewed through; a logistics nightmare.
• Heel–Face Turn: Rikash, introduced in Wolf-Speaker as markedly more of a Noble Demon than Zhaneh was and more rude than malicious, turns on Ozorne in the third book when he discovers that Ozorne has imprisoned Rikash's queen and her consort.
• Heroic Bastard: Daine is illegitimate, as indicated by her matronymic "Sarrasri" from her mother Sarra, and this affects her and how others see her throughout The Immortals. However, in The Realms of the Gods we find out that her father is really Weiryn, a minor god of the hunt, and her late mother has gone up to join him since her death, becoming the Green Lady, a minor goddess of gardens and childbirth. Daine very briefly considers changing her surname to the patronymic Weirynsra before deciding to keep her old one after having been through so much with it.
• Heroic Safe Mode: Daine's reaction to hearing that Numair was (apparently) executed in Emperor Mage.
• Hope Spot: This quartet was originally to be a trilogy, and Emperor Mage does seem to suggest a natural end - The Emperor, who's behind all the trouble in the first two books, loses his throne and magic and is pursued as a Stormwing by Stormwings. The palace is all but in ruins and the much more reasonable, peaceable Kaddar takes the throne. But, in the fourth book the Man Behind the Man suddenly shows up - Usoae, the Queen of Chaos - and Ozorne is still trouble, as well as Copper Islands and Scanran raiders and Carthaki rebels not pleased with Emperor Kaddar.
• Horsing Around: Daine's pony, Cloud, is a motherly if quite sassy voice of reason to her mistress.
• Hot for Student / Hot for Teacher: Daine and Numair. Daine had reached the age where she would be considered an adult and was no longer Numair's student before she even realized Numair liked her, and Numair himself seemed initially reluctant when Daine brought it up. Numair himself didn't realize he was in love with Daine (both would have happily admitted to platonic love years before) until she pressed the issue, but he was admiring of her appearance and jealous and prickly towards men closer to her age long before then.
• Humans Are Special: Rather, mortals are special in that their nature is half-Chaos.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Stormwings were dreamt up by a human in the hopes that their depredations (Stormwings defile the bodies of fallen soldiers rather than let them be honorably buried or treated with reverence) would discourage war by subverting the idea that there's anything glorious about it. Any time a human decides not to fight and die they have a kind of victory. Unfortunately, Stormwings have been gone from the Mortal Realms for so long that their influence has waned. Rikash points out that if humans would just stop waging war, there would be no war dead to desecrate and they'd go away. It's not the Stormwings' fault that they'll never be unemployed. (Well, not the fault of the Stormwings who actually follow the rules on these things.)
• Jerkass Gods: The Badger God, and the other animal gods that Daine meets, are mostly quite decent, but this series firmly establishes that many of the more powerful human-shaped gods are not nice beings. The Banjiku were given their wild magic by their gods and purportedly are slaves at their gods' will, but another god tells Daine that the Banjiku's creators actually never meant them to be slaves. Daine's mother has been raised to the status of a minor goddess who helps people in a small area with childbirth, illness, and matters of the heart - besides her, the kindest human-shaped god shown is Gainel, the god of dreams, who's good to Daine and Numair but likes that unleashing the Immortals on the human world causes humanity to have a lot more nightmares. In comparison, Mithros considers sealing the Immortals away again because their return has caused humans so much difficulty, but Gainel and the others persuade him against it. Also, despite Daine having saved the gods and both realms from being devoured by the queen of Chaos, trouble follows her around, so Mithros wants her to choose immediately between staying with her parents in the Divine Realms and returning to the mortal realm, with no further passage allowed.
• I Have Your Wife: As Daine gets to know Kaddar better and see how difficult life is for him as Ozorne's heir, she impulsively tells him to come with her to Tortall. He tells her that he can't, because his family, his friends, and even his horse are here and Ozorne, who's terribly possessive, would not hesitate a moment to hurt them trying to get him back. Despite this, when things go wrong, Lindhall mentions wanting to smuggle Kaddar out.
• Interspecies Romance: Daine's mother, Sarra, and Weiryn, the God of the Hunt — although Sarra was elevated to a minor goddess after her death.
• In the Blood: Daine's mysterious and absent father turns out to be Weiryn, an animalistic god of the hunt. This leaves Daine with a very high degree of animal-focused magic, but even setting that aside, even at fourteen and never having been trained by a human hunter she excells at it. Her low light vision is very good and she's capable with every kind of bow, including crossbows, and slings. While she's not as callous towards human suffering as Weiryn is, Daine also has a degree of Blue-and-Orange Morality with regards to humans generally, as Predation Is Natural.
• Involuntary Shapeshifting/Karmic Transformation: Emperor Ozorne is turned into a Stormwing at the end of Emperor Mage. Immortals are incapable of holding mortal office, meaning Ozorne immediately loses his throne, and they also can't use the mortal Gift, leaving him more or less powerless for some time until he figures out Stormwing magic - though it seems that his training in human magic gave him an advantage, as he figures that out very fast.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Daine tends to refer to Immortals she's met for the first time as 'it', even though she does note that there are identifiably male and female Stormwings. After meeting her first dragon, she corrects her human friends that the dragon is a she.
• Just Friends: Before their Relationship Upgrade, the situation between Daine and Numair was slightly... complicated, although it didn't show as much on the surface.
• Lizard Folk: Basilisks are sapient, bipedal lizards with a gift for languages and the power to turn things into rock. Tkaa, the only one to have a role so far, identifies their species' Hat as "travel and gossip"; he ends up teaching the pages' class on immortals in the next quartet.
• The Magic Comes Back: Magic itself already exists, of course. But the immortals, a collective name for all the immortal and fantastical creatures that show up, had been banished from the human world to the Divine Realms for over four hundred years. Not all of them are hostile (a number of them are sentient, and some wind up being enslaved by the locals when they arrive), but they cause severe disruptions in a world that needs to suddenly re-learn how to deal with them. These disruptions get more attention in the next quartet.
• Magical Defibrillator: A literal example, as Alanna uses magical electricity to jump start Daine's heart after Daine inadvertently stopped her own heart with wild magic.
• Master of Your Domain: Daine can control her heartrate with wild magic and meditation. However, accidents can occur, like when in Wild Magic, she was trying to contact dolphins telepathically in meditation and decided her heart was too loud — so she accidentally stopped it.
• Mercy Kill: In Daine's backstory, after her mother was killed she went feral and ran naked and on all fours with wolves. The villagers thought she'd gone mad. The friendliest of them wanted to put her down with as little pain as possible.
• Mistreatment-Induced Betrayal:
  • When Daine's in wolf shape and running with wolves to hunt a noblewoman on a horse, she tells the horse to dump Yolane and run for it. The horse is too scared of the wolves to respond to Daine as readily as most animals do, but she hesitates, and Yolane hits her with a riding crop. Having had enough, the horse bucks her off and flees.
  • Rikash served Ozorne because the king of his flock did. Said king had supposedly killed the previous queen, but in fact had struck a deal with the Emperor to have her imprisoned out of the way. Discovering this immediately shifts Rikash's alliances with regard to both of them.
  • The darkings are Ozorne's creations made from his own blood. Since they were made in the Divine Realms, where children and creations are inherently independent towards their parents and creators, the darkings aren't bound to obey him as blood-creatures would be otherwise, so he causes them agony to control them. After meeting and being befriended by Daine, the darking later known as Gold-streak turns on Ozorne, and by making contact with other darkings is able to spread this rebellion.
• Modest Royalty: Daine is shocked when she first meets Jonathan and Thayet since they don't look like her mental image of royalty. She has several hiccups in Emperor Mage - Ozorne is not so modest and, as Daine's become used to the idea of casually talking to royalty, she has to consciously remember to treat him with more formality.
• Mundane Utility: In Wild Magic, Daine uses her powers to manage farm animals and get a job herding ponies. At the time, she has no idea just how far her powers could stretch and simply sees herself as being good with animals - there are a few lines where it appears she doesn't fully understand that other people can't talk to them and be understood.
• Naked First Impression: The first time Daine is properly introduced to Numair, he's naked, having just shifted back into human form from hawk form. Not to be confused with Naked on Arrival, though, since upon arrival Numair was a hawk, and a hawk can't be considered naked.
• Nature Hero: Daine, who was raised in (relative) isolation and who is Friend to All Living Things. Except rats (see You Dirty Rat!!).
• Necromancy: It's not part of the wild magic toolkit, but the Graveyard Hag can bestow it on her 'favorites' when she wants them to make a point - and she does so with Daine, much to the confusion of Daine's friends as the Hag prevents her from explaining.
• Never Mess with Granny: The Graveyard Hag is the first Greater God to appear in the quartet. In most of the world she's a fairly minor trickster, but here she's more powerful than any other god save for her father the Black God, who doesn't meddle in her affairs anyway. She's mischevious and likes being sassed back a bit, but
• Nice Guy: Probably the nicest of the gods is Broad Foot, the male god of the duckmoles (platypi). Not only does he decide to accompany Daine and Numair on their journey based on only a brief friendly acquaintance with them, he takes basically one sentence of convincing to go to the mortal realm and attack one of the Sorrows for the sake of people he'll never meet. He's also just cheerful and good-natured.
• The Nicknamer: Daine's not creative about it.
  Daine: This is Skysong, but mostly we call her Kit, or Kitten.
  • She later nicknames another dragon (Kitten's grandfather) Big Blue. He finds it amusing.
• Noble Demon: The Stormwings appear first as enemies, because nobody is inclined to like beings who live on fear and desecrate the dead in war. Rikash, however, points out that they can't help the way they were designed, and says that humans could prevent their depredations simply by not having wars.
• No Name Given: The male god of the badgers is only ever referred to as that or "the badger god" for short.
• Non-Indicative Name: The cart horse "Mangle" is a perfectly docile gelding. Daine is startled and amused when Stefan tells her the horse's name, and he doesn't explain himself. Seemingly giving names like this is a trait of Stefan's - in Protector of the Small he calls a much more fractious horse "Peachblossom".
• Not So Extinct: All the immortal species returning from the Divine Realms. Only some of the humans having to deal with them knew they weren't all dead in the first place.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Numair in Wolf-Speaker refers to depending on Tristan remembering him as having been a "book-bound idiot" back in Carthak.
• Odd Friendship: Daine and Rikash the Stormwing, rather to her surprise in Emperor Mage as she finds herself settling into a mildly antagonistic banter with him. She even names one of her kids after him after he dies.
• Of the People: Animals, all of them, refer to themselves collectively as the People, while humans are "two-leggers". They also extend this to people with wild magic.
• Our Dragons Are Different: They give birth to live young, are powerful mages that can fling fire with their forefeet, and change color depending on their mood, although each has a unique neutral coloration. The fourth book reveals that they're extremely political and can take decades to come to any sort of consensus, and are semi-divine. An adult dragon feels comfortable backhandedly defying Tortall's Jerkass Gods.
• Our Gods Are Different: Some of the Great Gods appeared in the previous quartet, but the first one to appear in this one is the male Badger God. There are of course many gods of humans with many specialties. All animals, right down to gnats and midges, also have their own gods, made in their own image, with powers that are quite a bit more limited than the Great Gods' and almost exclusively work on the species they represent. It often seems that the less powerful a god is the less likely they are to be Jerkass Gods.
• Painful Transformation: Daine's partial transformations while looking through animals' eyes sometimes made her ache. When she figures out outright Voluntary Shapeshifting she seems fine after changing into a wolf, and some hours after changing back, but in the epilogue of that book she mentions spending several days in bed, drinking Foul Medicine to help with the pain as her bones protested having warped so much. By Emperor Mage it's not an issue.
• Parents as People:
  • Most of Daine's memories about Sarra are positive and they're both thrilled to be reunited in Realms of the Gods, but reading between the lines you wonder if she was actually all that responsible or sensible a parent. One of the first things we learn about Sarra is that she spent Daine's entire life periodically testing her for The Gift, either ignoring or oblivious to the fact that she's given Daine a minor complex about not having it. Then there's Daine's continuing trauma of being a bastard in a medieval society, and in a small town for her whole childhood - which wasn't Sarra's fault at the start, but she never acknowledges what it's done to Daine. Then there's the implications that Sarra was an Ethical Slut, something that didn't destroy her reputation in the village, but it made things harder especially when she refused to marry one of her long-term lovers since Daine's absent father wouldn't approve, making Daine's place in society even worse and it's definitely affected Daine's view on romantic relationships. When Numair hints at marriage right after they acknowledge their mutual feelings, her first thought is that "All her life, she'd been told that no one would ever want to marry Sarra's bastard". There's more than a few implications that Sarra was a Bunny-Ears Lawyer, being something of a ditz outside her work as a healer and the work she enjoyed around the house and garden - Daine's pov and even Sarra's dialogue implies that Daine looked after Sarra as much or more as Sarra looked after her, which isn't a healthy thing to burden a child with. Not to mention the hypocrisy of a woman who was murdered by bandits, leaving her thirteen year old daughter to find her mutilated body, telling her off for fighting and killing while in the middle of a war, because "that's not women's work" .
  • When Daine meets her father, he's much like any of the other gods worshipped by humans. Not as bad as the Greater Gods, but rather indifferent to people. While he cares for Daine, he doesn't understand her Carnivore Confusion and thinks she's soft and sentimental. Pain and suffering can trouble gods but it doesn't burden them as it does humans - when Daine says that maybe it should and that that would make the gods kinder, he scoffs and says that tenderness is bad for mortals and they grow strong through struggle. Daine thinks he sounds like the kind of human who says poverty leads to a nobler soul as an excuse to not help someone.
• Partial Transformation: Daine's Animal Eye Spy efforts soon start to transform her body, leaving her part animal when she returns to herself. Sometimes this is useful, sometimes it hampers her. She learns to control the changes and prevent or induce them when she wants to, and soon starts changing just her eyes or ears at need.
• Pet Gets the Keys: When Daine is imprisoned by Ozorne, she's rescued by Zek the marmoset, who brings her the key to the cell (having learned about cages and keys during a visit to Ozorne's menagerie with Daine earlier in the novel).
• Pet the Dog:
  • Stormwings are a race of harpy-like beings who live to desecrate the dead (in a largely futile effort to make people reluctant to wage war) and their feathers are made of sharp metal that can cut up birds, so Daine doesn't like them. Then she meets Rikash, who befriended the lonely Maura and reveals that many of them are fond of children, since their own fertility rate is low.
  • Lord Imrah of Legann is described as bald, with a large belly, hawk nose and pockmarked face, giving him a cruel appearance. Daine noticed him feeding one of the darkings, and when confronted, joked that it was a shadow of its former self.
• Please Put Some Clothes On: After Daine shapeshifts back into a human after saving Numair from a Chaos-dweller in The Realms of the Gods, she walks up to him — only to remember that she's naked except for her badger claw necklace. Awkwardness Ensues.
  Daine: Oh, for- !
• Poor Communication Kills:
  • Daine's parents didn't inform her of her true parentage and tell her anything about her powers until several years after her mother died, leaving her to blunder around alone and nearly drive herself insane with her half-god powers in the meantime. They were both on probation due to the whole new-goddess-and-guarantor thing and couldn't visit the mortal world easily. Her father tasked a badger god with keeping an eye on her after she was born - the badger checks in on her a few times when she's a baby, then loses track of time and doesn't talk to Daine until she's thirteen. Even then he's coy about her situation.
  • Numair creates a simulacrum in Carthak, but forgets to tell Daine about it. When the simulacrum is executed and Daine believes Numair is dead, her Roaring Rampage of Revenge leaves the Carthaki palace in ruins, the Empire crippled by Daine ruining all their important documents and their army, and Ozorne barely surviving by turning into a Stormwing. On seeing all the devastation, Numair vows to never get that careless again.
• Power Incontinence: Daine's powerful connection to animals is a different kind of magic than the human Gift and causes many unique difficulties.
  • When Daine's human family is killed before Wild Magic, she loses her sense of self and runs with a pack of wolves to seek Revenge, soon naked and Running on All Fours, barely remembering how to use a knife. Eventually she recovered but feared the return of the "madness"; even when she found a teacher, she found herself slipping whenever she worked magic involving pack or herd animals, until he helped her to keep her self separate from her magic.
  • Another of her problems is that animals within her radius (a mile and a half in the first book, ten miles in the second) will all rush to her aid and attack anyone who's made her scared or angry, or otherwise act according to her desires, without her conscious input. They will kill themselves in doing so, and she feels their pain and deaths, but if she commands them not to attack they struggle against her control, so that she has to constantly keep them at bay mentally. If they do attack, Daine can pass out instinctively healing them. This means she can't be trusted to be part of a unit of mounted fighters - the horses will defend her and her friends and ignore everything else. Daine's able to manage animal attacks by instead having them destroy enemy supplies and make a ruckus that keeps foes up all night but she still has to keep control.
  • In Wolf-Speaker Daine's advised by the badger god that she can inhabit the bodies of animals and use their senses, which she soon figures out, but she was not told that this also came with Partial Transformation into those animals and again fears she's going mad. Eventually the badger returns to tell her how to shift herself back of her own accord rather than waiting for it to wear off. Daine then figures out how to transform herself entirely into an animal, but the first time she becomes a wolf and turns back she ends up bedridden for days as her skeleton protests.
  • She's mastered her powers by Emperor Mage, just in time for the Graveyard Hag to make her a Cosmic Plaything and give her the power to Animate Dead - secondhand, and since the badger god was angry about having to involve Daine he told her nothing, leaving her to discover what happened if she touched a dead animal (or a pelt or taxidermy, or a fossilized skeleton) herself, and that the power she needed to do so came from her own life force so that accidentally touching several at once killed her. The badger brought her back angry at her foolishness only to become chagrined as she protested that no, he hadn't told her anything at all.
• Pregnancy Does Not Work That Way: In Wild Magic a pregnant dragon who's already at the point of having contractions miscarries and the contractions stop. Daine, who's only just learned how to heal mundane animals, has a bout of Power Incontinence and heals her - the dragon's fetus returns to life and the contractions start again, and she flies off to give birth. In live bearing animals, contractions happen regardless of whether a fetus is alive - it still has to leave the womb. Admittedly, this is a dragon and very large but giving birth to an infant not much larger than a newborn human, so perhaps she would have reabsorbed it.
• The Prophecy: Two!
  • The first is that hyenas will help bring about Ozorne's doom. He would have had them hunted to extinction if they weren't sacred to the Graveyard Hag, patron goddess of Carthak. As it is he keeps some in his menagerie in an attempt to show that he's not afraid of them.
  • The other is older. It's a bad prophecy! Uuosae, Queen of Chaos, will eventually defeat her divine siblings and turn all realms to Chaos; in other words destroying everything. Most of The Realms of the Gods is about preventing this from happening.
• Proportional Aging: The baby dragon Daine starts taking care of in Wild Magic will be an infant for thirty years. Dragons are Immortals, said to live forever unless killed, and grow very slowly. In The Realms of the Gods Daine meets a few more young dragons who're considerably older but still seen as young children.
• Really 17 Years Old: At the start of the first book Daine tells Onua that she's fifteen. Onua immediately notes that she's off by two years.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something:
  • Jonathan retains this role, as well as his wife Thayet jian Wilima, who will leave court functions to join the Queen's Riders.
  • Ozorne and Kaddar of Carthak are quite active too, although Kaddar thinks his uncle should pay more attention (read: any) to their people's welfare.
• Razor Wings: Stormwings are covered in steel feathers which are extremely sharp.
• Raised by Wolves: Daine wasn't actually raised by them, but the pack near her home did take her in and help her take Revenge after her mother's death.
• Raising the Steaks: In Emperor Mage, Daine's temporary Animate Dead power is first used on a tiger skin rug, that starts to move as if a living tiger is inside of it. When she demonstrates the new power to Numair and Alanna she touches a taxidermied vulture. Later she resurrects the dinosaur skeletons at the Imperial Palace to trash the place while pursuing Ozorne.
• Reality-Changing Miniature: The shield over Dunlath valley in Wolf-Speaker is created by a tiny map of the valley with magical opals embedded in it. The shield drops when Daine smashes the opals that power it. This is probably a form of "Image Magic", used by the BigBad in the ''Lioness'' quartet.
• Refusing Paradise: The choice Daine makes at the end of the fourth book. When Mithros demands she pick one realm and stay there Daine doesn't have to think for long — she feels more at home in the mortal realm, where most of her friends are. She feels obligated to stay with her mother as she'd promised to return to her for a properly long visit, but Sarra knows how much she yearns to go back and releases her from that promise.
• Relationship Upgrade: The Realms of the Gods has Daine and Numair getting together. There was some minor foreshadowing to this point, but the fact that Daine was in her early teens and Numair in his late twenties, and her teacher, had Numair in utter denial initially, though he was jealous of younger men interested in her and his interest was clear to Ozorne. Once he did figure it out, he was incredibly reluctant to bring it up, even after Daine reached sixteen.
• Remember the New Guy?: Numair's nowhere to be seen in Song of the Lioness, but three chapters into Wild Magic Alanna says he's one of her best friends. There's actually a gap of ten years between the quartets, but since they don't start the book saying it's been a decade since Alanna was knighted it takes several chapters and a mention that the Queen's Riders were formed nine years ago to quite realize that enough time has passed for Numair to have reasonably become as important to Tortall and Alanna as he is.
• Resurrective Immortality: The distinction between Immortals and minor gods, some of whom are quite minor, is that Immortals can be killed normally and gods appear instantly in fresh new bodies. Many minor gods are animals who are hunted and eaten by other gods, and may be annoyed at dying even if it's no big deal for them. Broad-Foot grumbles when the fish god he's just eaten surfaces to splash him in the face. When Daine and Numair traverse a swamp, they're pursued by many gods of mosquitoes, horseflies etc which just re-appear after being smacked and complain that the mortals are being selfish with their blood.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Daine. Once before the beginning of Wild Magic and later after finding out that Numair was killed. Sadly, the person her revenge was supposed to be directed at turned into a Stormwing and his innocent nephew had to pay the damages. Although the wreckage did make sure that Carthak doesn't neglect their patron Goddess, The Graveyard Hag again. Hard to forget when it takes years just to reconstruct the tax rolls; and who knows what she might unleash next time?
• Sapient Steed: Daine's pony Cloud got Daine's blood in her mouth and so is at the upper edge of the enhanced intelligence Daine's presence can give to animals. She's a Servile Snarker to Daine and often critical of her plans.
• Semi-Divine: Daine's father is a minor god and her mother Sarra was a mortal village healer. Sarra herself became a local goddess after her death.
• Sexually Transmitted Superpowers: Daine's mother used to be an ordinary midwife in a remote village, until she happened to have an encounter with the God of the Hunt during one of his visits to the mortal realm. It didn't kick in right away, but after she 'died', her erstwhile lover essentially helped her soul Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence, making her the brand-new Goddess of Midwives. So now they're married in the Divine Realms.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Daine doesn't run up against this herself but she knows that if she takes any Immortal form she won't be able to change back. Rikash teases her, saying that she must have wanted to try dragon shape, and says that she'd enjoy being a Stormwing.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Daine wears formal dresses in several scenes of Emperor Mage because she's with a diplomatic embassy; even when out and about in more casual settings, rather than treaty negotiations, she wears brand new, put-together outfits, a present from Thayet. In Wolf-Speaker Daine disliked formalware but now, a year later, she enjoys the way men look at her in her fancy clothing. Numair in particular wastes no time telling her how attractive she is.
• Shown Their Work: The animal behavior in these books is very well-researched, and Daine's healing abilities require her to learn their anatomy so she doesn't botch the job.
  • Particularly evident in Wolf-Speaker, when Daine is reunited with the wolf pack she knew at home. Just as you might be thinking how unrealistic it is for wolves to be able to strategise like this, Daine thinks the same thing, and concludes that they must have leveled up when they licked her wounds after she was injured.
• Slave Collar: Hurrocks, carnivorous winged horses, often show up forced to wear these, enchanted to make them obey a human master. Carthaki slaves are also collared.
• Stalking is Love: Numair stealing a lock of Daine's hair when she's bed-ridden with unicorn fever tends to be called out as creepy even by people who don't mind the age gap. It does have a specific magical purpose (it's part of a magical tool that acts as a homing beacon, something Numair feels a strong need for after Daine is kidnapped and imprisoned during Emperor Mage; but even Daine is uneasy about it and her POV says outright she wouldn't like anyone but Numair to have it, given what an enemy could do with it.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Daine's answer to an inconvenient Carthaki fleet in Wild Magic? A kraken. That girl don't muck about.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Usually media involving a Friend to All Living Things who's regularly perched on by numerous birds etc won't have the animals make messes, unless it's a gross out moment Played for Laughs. Daine's animal friends try to be clean but the sick birds in Emperor Mage absolutely ruin her outfit. Realistic again, she's someone who's loved and taken care of animals for her whole life and takes this in stride. She's only bothered when realizing that another human who'll be disgusted will see her, or when she realizes that she's forgotten to take off a beautiful garment and now it's ruined. People who are familiar with birds also take this with little comment.
• Take Off Your Clothes: Defied by Daine and Numair. After falling off a cliff, Daine strips her ruined clothes off so Numair can address her injuries, only for him to protest that she should stay clothed while in his presence.
• Tampering with Food and Drink: When Numair dines at Dunlath, the mages serve him heavily-drugged wine. Expecting just such a trick, he uses sleight of hand to get rid of it. Kaddar has an enchanted bracelet that neutralizes drugs and poisons in his food and has saved his life five times by the time he explains it to Daine. Ozorne feeds Daine pomegranate juice heavily dosed with dreamrose to get her out of the way - he is genuinely fond of her, and thinks that their shared interest in his animals means she'll rapidly forget what he's doing to her human friends.
• Took a Level in Badass: At the beginning of the series, Daine is a grieving fourteen-year-old exile who has a knack with animals. By the third book, she can command a herd of dinosaur skeletons and turn herself into a bear.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Sarge in the earlier set but later-written Tempests and Slaughter, where he goes by Musenda, is very careful, polite, and kind. In that book he is a slave, so it's dangerous for him to show a harsher side to Arram, a mage student in excellent standing with connections to the Carthaki royal family. In Wild Magic he's a free man with a good position training Queen's Rider trainees (as well as pages in Protector of the Small) and while he isn't cruel, he does shout and lightly condescend to trainees who aren't taking their lessons seriously.
• Transflormation: Numair turns Tristan Staghorn into an apple tree. This is considered such a feat in-universe that when Neal mentions it to Kel in the next series, she doesn't believe him.
• Trilogy Creep: The quartet was originally planned out as having three books. Emperor Mage has the fantastic spectacle of the undead dinosaurs, and ends with the Big Bad transformed into a form that leaves him without his magic or political power, then flying laboriously off with Rikash in pursuit. The fourth book takes place almost entirely in the Divine Realms and dramatically raises the stakes with the sudden introduction of Uusoae.
• Supernatural Sensitivity: In Wild Magic, Daine mentions that all animals have color associations to her. Immortals have gold lights in them that are absent from mortal animals. Numair also shows her a spell that reveals the magical aura of everything that exists (living, dead, inanimate). With all the various colors of bright magical light, it just begs to be Fan Art.
• Undead Fossils: In Emperor Mage, the Graveyard Hag gives Daine the ability to animate the dead by touch, leading to some Power Incontinence that's quite distressing for her. It even works on an archaeopteryx fossil, causing the bones to pull free of their slab, reassemble, and start flying around.The Hag wanted her to raise humans, but Daine was very against that. When Daine finally "loses her temper", she still won't visit the graveyard, believing that if the human dead get up and walk the streets, within a few months people will forget and see it as a bad dream, but if dinosaur fossils destroy the palace that's some real damage that will at the least force the Empire to commit to rebuilding and recouping rather than going to war against anyone. As she notes, they're immune to any conventional weapons, don't feel pain as living animals do, and require very powerful spells to disintegrate, making them essentially unstoppable.
• Unstoppable Rage:
  • Numair's mostly on the even-tempered side but his ire is truly roused while fighting Tristan Staghorn when Tristan tries to attack Daine, and he turns the other mage into a tree.
  • Please don't piss Daine off. At worst, otherwise you'll be dealing with skeleton zombie dinosaurs crushing your palace.
  • Perhaps less dramatically, if Daine's in the form of a giant bird, don't follow close behind her. Just... don't. She empties her bowels into the face of a winged ape, which inhales and chokes on it.
• Villain by Default: Used and then deconstructed with the Stormwings. They desecrate bodies on the battlefield and feed on human fear, so they are universally hated by nearly all humans, and most other creatures. In Wild Magic they simply seem to be evil, helping Tortall's enemies and attacking Daine. She goes into Wolf-Speaker expecting that they're Always Chaotic Evil but several characters tell her not to do so. When she meets Rikash, who's taken on an older brother role for a young girl, Daine is forced to grasp that Stormwings are individuals and anyway can't choose their nature, which was decided by a long-ago creator who wanted to show humans that War Is Hell.
• War Is Hell: Stormwings were dreamt into existence by a woman who wanted to make people realize this.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • So many people asked about what happened to the tree that became a man that Pierce wrote a short story about it, "Elder Brother", for an anthology; it's also reproduced in Tortall and Other Lands.
  • It was never specified what happened to Varice Kingsford at the end of Emperor Mage. We can't even be sure if she knows her ex-lover is alive, seeing that we never saw them speak to each other after Daine told her to run.
• What's Up, King Dude?: Jonathan and Thayet are very casual for holding royal power. Daine lampshades how downright uncommon (and, to her, baffling) this is.
• Wound Licking: While on her feral quest to hunt down the bandits who killed her mother, Daine tries to lick a wound in her side but, not yet able to shapeshift, she can't reach. Brokefang, leader of the wolf pack running with her, does it for her. This gets some of her blood in his mouth, leading to him being unusually intelligent.
• Wrong Context Magic: Wild magic is treated like this in-universe. In fact, one of Daine's greatest advantages over her opponents (the human ones, at least) is that they either don't believe that wild magic exists or that it functions like the regular Gift that most human mages have. As a consequence, her enemies repeatedly attempt to hamper or disrupt her with methods that would work on the normal human Gift, but end up having zero effect on her wild magic. The biggest example is when Emperor Ozorne kidnaps her and places her in a special room meant to completely neutralize human magic, but Daine's wild magic isn't even the slightest bit inconvenienced by this and she proceeds to escape without much trouble (once she calms down).
• Xanatos Gambit:
  • Emperor Ozorne is cornered and injured by Daine and the hyenas, who The Prophecy had stated would bring about Ozorne's downfall. His choices are apparentely two-fold - either he accepts Kaddar's offer to abdicate and be spared, Daine and the hyenas get him. He tries to Take a Third Option by cashing in a favour from Rikash, who offered him one of their feathers which can supposedly allow him to escape from any danger, "as if on wings of steel". Of course, Rikash had anticipated this and never exactly said how it would allow him to escape - Ozorne is transformed into a Stormwing and thereby stripped of his mortal throne and mortal magic, and placed under the jurisdiction of three vengeful Stormwings. He escapes, barely, and becomes more The Dragon to a much larger threat.
• The X of Y: Book 4, The Realms of the Gods.
• You Dirty Rat!: To a degree, rats get the standard trope treatment even in these animal-advocate stories — they are vicious, dirty, and generally unpleasant. But those aren't their only traits. They're also very independent-minded, demanding that Daine offer them something in return for their help, whereas most animals are eager to help her whether or not she asks. This fits their place as animals closely associated with the Graveyard Hag, who is among other things a goddess of chance and bargains (as well as death) and rather enjoys messing with people.
  • A indirect example in The Realm of the Gods; Malady of the Three Sorrows takes the form of a huge, ghostly rat that licks people, who then fall sick - and streams of smaller ghostly rats pour from their mouths and infect others.
• You Go, Girl!: Far less pronounced here than in the quartet before and the one after it, but Daine does encounter some friends of Kaddar who don't think she can shoot. When she proves her ability with a bow, they're astonished and gather around her, impressed and admiring.

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