Triple-decker fantasy novels are increasingly often trying for realism and grittiness, for instance by a exaggeration of the Parsifal lowly childhood before heroic glory. (The Deed of Paksennarion; The Books of Ash.) Micklem goes one better; her heroine is still a camp-follower at the end of the first volume, and might remain so; and it's no fun at all.
She is a witch, and the leman of the most glorious soldier of the aristocracy, and possibly the favored pawn of a god. None of these are without their cost. Witches, in this shamanic society, half-poison themselves and have no guild; the most glorious soldier is most likely to die in battle and leave her stranded; and the gods are not convenient allies. The Hallowed Hunt and 's other Chalion novels talk about the harsh and glorious duty of acting in the world for divinity, but that challenge is like a kind parent's treasure hunt compared to the bafflement and lack of affection Micklem's people feel in the face of their gods. The hardware is, maybe, 8th century, CE; but the sense of Fate is more like the 8th century BCE.
Come to think of it, I think Bujold falls into wish-fulfillment characterization not of her angst-hero Miles Vorkosigan but of his parents. So universally perfect, so modestly boastful! so much unquestioning approval from their children, envious approval from their peers! And then Bujold set up a theology for her fantasy novel that's explicitly familial: the gods are a family, mortals are in that family, and the family is fundamentally fair and loving although it's too realistic to make life easy. It's locally benign, as wish-fulfillment goes. I am much more bothered by her using a similar theology in the SF novels, and using it to paper over sins of class.
Micklem's use of language is like experiments that excise all Latinate words from English, though that's not exactly what Micklen's done. She has a skewed wordlist, slightly formal, reliably vulgar, very specific; but few invented words or none.
ISBN: 0743247949
So wrote clew in SF&F.