The Never List

“By agreeing to participate in the Choosing, you are giving enthusiastic consent to intimate acts with one or all four of the Legends of Chaos if chosen as a mate. If you aren’t comfortable with these terms, do not accept a numbered pin at the gate and enjoy the festivities.”

The novel’s emphasis on consent, here articulated in the invitation to the Choosing, is reiterated throughout the text. Even after using this disclaimer to inform potentials not to enter the Choosing if they are not interested in sex, the various Legends confirm Rylee’s active, ongoing consent throughout the novel. This contrasts with the novel’s antagonists, Turner and Baydel, who are framed as malevolent specifically because they commit sexual violence.

“Contrary to my daily complaints, I like my life. Dying in the name of being the queen of Lumathyst is the last thing on my mind.”

Rylee here clarifies her stakes in entering the Choosing and offers insight into her life in the Ashlands—which readers never see on the page of the text. Though she regularly laments the inequality that Ashlanders face, she finds her life worth living. This tacitly argues that even the most impoverished people in Lumathyst are having fulfilling lives, something that fights back against the dehumanizing or dismissive language that many of the nobles use in the novel when discussing Ashlanders.

“Funny how a set of invisible lines between cities can change so much. My friends have never gone hungry or almost been arrested for wearing lipstick. Neither of them knows what it’s like not to eat, not to know where your next meal is coming from. And it’s not their fault, either, just a privilege of being born in the right spot on the map with the right familial titles, too. Just like it’s not my fault Erin and I were born on the wrong one. It’s the kings’ fault.”

Rylee here argues for the arbitrariness of Lumathyst’s strict class divisions, something she uses to highlight the injustice of such social stratification. Her comment that it isn’t her friends’ fault for being born into privilege sets the stage for the delicate line that the novel treads in terms of its anti-monarchic views; though Rylee disdains the kings and the cruelties they have enacted, noting that this “fault” is not heritable lets Presley enjoy the trappings of the “royal romance,” as Rylee is courted by her princes, without sacrificing its critique of the kings.