(This post contains minor spoilers for the Chronicles of Cain series by John Corwin.)

I’ve been reading the Chronicles of Cain by John Corwin, and I’ve reached the fourth book. In the third book, Cain finally has sex with his will-they-won’t-they assassin frenemy and it goes really well. However, in the first part of the fourth book (I’m only about 30% into it), the frenemy is having sex with other people.

And Cain seems to repeatedly have to explain that that’s how their relationship works, and he is happy with it. (I mean, he also has sex with other people, including an elf from another dimension, but what are you going to do, right?)

I knew going into it that these books had Cthulhu, gods, fae, witches, wizards, and assassins. I was not expecting polyamory as well.

At least Corwin isn’t (yet) beating us over the head with it the way Laurell K. Hamilton has been doing in the last ten or so Anita Blake novels. The books actually have very little explicit sex in them (I’d rate the sex scenes a hard R), and I don’t feel that they suffer from this not being a part of them. Nor would they have suffered had there been no polyamory in them. But there is.

Who knew?