Bardic Voices

About the Bardic Voices series

Set in a world where music carries literal magical power, the Bardic Voices novels follow the Free Bards — traveling musicians who operate outside the rigid, guild-controlled Bardic tradition of the kingdom of Rayden, and who use their music to protect ordinary people (and the nonhuman folk the establishment distrusts) from corrupt authority. The Lark and the Wren introduces Rune, a talented but penniless fiddler who wins a bardic apprenticeship through a duel with Death itself, and follows her collision with the guild's rigid hierarchy. The Robin and the Kestrel pairs a Free Bard with a disguised, deposed prince as they travel and perform together while he learns what his kingdom actually needs from him. The Eagle and the Nightingale sends its bardic pair into a war-ravaged land to use music as a tool of literal, magical healing. Four and Twenty Blackbirds closes the sequence by pulling several of the series' musicians together against a conspiracy threatening the fragile peace between humans and the nonhuman races.

Through all four books, Lackey uses the setting's magic system — where a sufficiently skilled performance can heal, curse, or persuade — to explore who gets to define "proper" art and who a rigid institution leaves out, a theme that runs under the series' otherwise adventure-driven plots.

How to read this series

Publication order is the intended order. The first two books, The Lark and the Wren and The Robin and the Kestrel, are loosely connected through the Free Bard community but follow different protagonists and can be read independently. The Eagle and the Nightingale and Four and Twenty Blackbirds draw more directly on characters and threads established earlier, so reading straight through in publication order is the simplest way to keep the returning cast straight. No prior knowledge of Lackey's other series (Valdemar, the Five Hundred Kingdoms) is needed — Bardic Voices is a self-contained setting.