DNFed at 35%. My rating is for that part only.
Nothing happens in the first third of this "fantasy". The book itself is a huge info dump of useless history, descriptions of unimportant things (plumbing) and family liaisons.
The language is pretentious and heavy, trying to camouflage as an "old charm".
The characters.... *sigh*
Rohyr the King is a push-over and a suck up, bending backwards in order not to upset his evil uncle.
Lassen is a "breeder", someone who can bear children. He is a hermaphrodite, identifies himself as male but acts like a female. Why not make him a woman from the beginning? Is it just for the sake of mpreg tag?
*
I made a list of important events, that transpired in the first 35%. Don't hold your breath.
1. Young Lassen finds himself given away to the king (Rohyr), in exchange for military protection of the province where he lives. Rohyr makes Lessen his whore concubine (never to be his consort), even tho the boy is underage at 28, because breeders do not reach sexual maturity until they are past 30.
(Long life span).
2. Lassen lives with Rohyr in his castle and every once in a while they run into each other and suck face and other body parts.
3. 10 years later (smack out of nowhere - not a warning, not a hint, nothing!) Lassen finds out that Rohyr's evil uncle has an evil plan at hand.
This is it.
All around and in between these three events we have:
- a lot of unnecessary history and geography lessons,
- lectures on Rohyr's extended family relations,
- overload of random alien names that for the life of me I can't remember past the sentence they were introduced in,
- lengthy descriptions of things in no way important to anything in the book - see me bitching about whimsical plumbing in the comments.
Once again, that's 35% of the book, and the book is not short.
1.5 stars.