9780593353325: Chaos & Flame
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0593353323 ISBN 13: 9780593353325
Verlag: Razorbill, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

From New York Times bestselling author Justina Ireland and Tessa Gratton comes the first book in a ferocious YA fantasy duology featuring ancient magic, warring factions, and a romance between the two people in the world with the most cause to hate one another.

Darling Seabreak cannot remember anything before the murder of her family at the hands of House Dragon, but she knows she owes her life to both the power of her Chaos Boon and House Kraken for liberating her from the sewers where she spent her childhood. So when her adoptive Kraken father is captured in battle, Darling vows to save him—even if that means killing each and every last member of House Dragon.
 
Talon Goldhoard has always been a dutiful War Prince for House Dragon, bravely leading the elite troops of his brother, the High Prince Regent. But lately his brother’s erratic rule threatens to undo a hundred years of House Dragon’s hard work, and factions are turning to Talon to unseat him. Talon resists, until he’s ambushed by a fierce girl who looks exactly like the one his brother has painted obsessively, repeatedly, for years, and Talon knows she’s the key to everything.
 
Together, Darling and Talon must navigate the treacherous waters of House politics, caught up in the complicated game the High Prince Regent is playing against everyone. The unlikeliest of allies, they’ll have to stop fighting each other long enough to learn to fight together in order to survive the fiery prophecies and ancient blood magic threatening to devastate their entire world.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Justina Ireland is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen novels and four anthology contributions, including Dread Nation and Deathless Divide. She is a former editor in chief of FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, for which she won a World Fantasy Award, and her work has been shortlisted numerous times for state and literary awards. She holds a BA in History from Georgia Southern University and an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University. Visit her at authorjustinaireland.com or follow her on Twitter @justinaireland.

Tessa Gratton is the author of adult and YA SFF novels and short stories that have been translated into twenty-two languages, long-listed for the Otherwise Award, and several have been Junior Library Guild Selections. Her most recent novels are the dark queer fairy tales Strange Grace and Night Shine, and the queer Shakespeare retelling Lady Hotspur. Her upcoming work includes the YA fantasy Chaos and Flame (2023), and novels of Star Wars: The High Republic. Though she has lived all over the world, she currently resides at the edge of the Kansas prairie with her wife. She/any.

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The first time the scion of House Dragon painted the eyeless girl, he was only six years old. She was nothing but a face shaped with finger smears of brown, a darker crooked line that might've been a sad smile, and huge, swirling black holes where her eyes should be.

"I don't know how to save her," he said to his mother when he presented the art to her.

His mother accepted the soft parchment, doing her best to hide the horror she felt at the red-rimmed, furious eyeholes in her son's painting. Casually, she asked, "Why is she in danger?"

"I don't know."

"What happened to her eyes?"

"Nothing yet." The little boy shrugged.

Though the Dragon consort asked a few more delicate questions, he could give her no answers. But he drew the eyeless girl again and again, and told his nurse about her, and his aunt, and his father eventually. That was a mistake, because he was far too old for imaginary friends, his father growled. The consort promised her husband, the Dragon regent, it was only childish play, and their son would grow out of it.

Better an imaginary friend, she thought, than the truth she suspected deep in her heart: her son had been gifted with a boon, but it was a prophetic one, and prophecy always, always drove the wielder mad.

The people of Pyrlanum would never accept a regent with such a wild boon, and to shield her eldest son, the consort extracted a promise from him to stop talking about the girl, and certainly to stop painting her. He must never paint anything from a dream or vision. It was dangerous. The young scion agreed, thrilled to have such an illicit thing binding him with his mother.

And he kept his promise for two entire years, until his mother was murdered.

The day she died, the consort and the scion were pruning in their private garden. She injured herself on a few reckless roses, and when she gasped, the scion saw a flash of vision, in strokes of vivid paint: a fan of dark blue skirts against the harsh black-and-white checkered floor of his mother's solar, golden sunlight smeared in streaks, and a kiss of crimson splattered at her mouth and in her hair. A spilled cup near her hand, leaking sickly green.

It would have been a beautiful painting, had he been allowed to create it.

But the scion had learned his lesson well. His boon was a curse and he did not say or do anything.

Later, when his mother lay dead on the marble floor, the boy realized this was not a game, not a thrilling secret: it was a matter of life and death. Had he been braver, he might have saved his mother from the poison in that cup.

He wailed and clawed at his hair until his aunt, his mother's sister, gathered him up in her arms. "What happened, little dragon, who did this?"

The scion hugged her neck so tightly. "Don't tell anyone," he begged. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I couldn't save her, I didn't even try! I'm sorry! Please."

"Hush, hush, it's all right."

"I didn't save her," he whispered, sobbing. "I have to save her."

"It's too late, little dragon," his aunt murmured.

"No," he said again and again. He threw himself away from his aunt and ran to his rooms. Found chalk and old cracked paint pots and ripped paper out of books in a tantrum. The scion drew and drew, scrawling images of that eyeless girl. He refused food, he refused his father and his baby brother, he refused everything but paint, and finally locked the door, screaming to be left alone unless anybody was going to help.

When his aunt had the door kicked in, the scion's room was a disaster of paintings and spilled color. Wasted effort, childish, ugly pictures. Blurs and shapes that looked like nothing but the impressions of landscapes or people, castles and gardens and ships and massive, ancient creatures the Houses called their empyreals. A figure of fire, broad winged and gorgeous. The eyeless girl. His aunt recognized the monsters, if not the girl. Dragon, gryphon, barghest, sphinx, cockatrice, kraken. And the First Phoenix.

But the scion tore the phoenix painting down the middle and threw a heavy book at his aunt. "Bring me a master, to show me how it's done," he cried. "I have to find her. It's soon."

"What is soon?" asked his aunt. She put her arm around him. "Who is she?"

"You'll see," the young scion said, pulling away.


***


While the young scion lost himself in painting dreams, Pyrlanum descended into violence. House Dragon accused House Sphinx of murdering their beloved consort. The grief-stricken Dragon regent demanded retribution, forcing all the great Houses to choose sides, and reviving the House Wars after more than twenty years of peace.

Bloodshed consumed the land, and the young scion found he could not save the eyeless girl.

"It's too late," he whispered to the disaster of art surrounding him, the night his father-leagues away-massacred the entire family line of House Sphinx.


***


The new House War raged on for years, and instead of the eyeless girl, the scion painted darkness. Thick black streaks, chunky peaks of gray and angry blue, the underlying red-red-red, heartbeat red, of sunlit memories behind tight-shut eyes. A bruise of purple over green-black, ocean-black, midnight, moonless black.

When his baby brother asked what he painted, the scion only hissed at him, chasing him from the room.

House Dragon took more and more of the country, forcing the other Houses into submission. Finally House Dragon captured Phoenix Crest, the ancient home of the Phoenix, those keepers of peace who had vanished during the first House Wars more than a hundred years ago. The Dragon regent declared himself High Prince Regent over all Pyrlanum.

His family left their northern mountains to occupy the fortress, and there the Dragon scion's aunt was left in charge of the boy and his small brother while their father continued his war. Though House Cockatrice fled Pyrlanum entirely, she managed to hire artists to tutor the scion-Cockatrice had been the house of her birth, after all, and that of her sister. She bought the scion paint and paper, canvas and ink and charcoal. He grew as his skills did, becoming taller and stronger but still very pretty, with a constant flush of fever in his sharp white cheeks, a ghostly gleam in his pale green eyes. He was prone to fits of laughter or staring at nothing, sure signs of madness, the court gossiped. At his aunt's prodding, the Dragon scion learned to be charming, too, and concealed the wildness he felt. He studied language and policy and economics. He flirted and argued and led council meetings during his father's frequent absences. Soon everyone believed his disposition to be merely long-running grief. After all, his mother, the late Dragon consort, had been glorious and special, hadn't she? So her glorious and special son would survive; he would lead them well. Chaos willed it, no matter that his painting boon would be useless in a leader.

But his aunt-she knew the truth of his boon. She whispered to him that she had always had gently prophetic dreams. They ran in their family. Her grandmother had been a brilliant prophet, too. His aunt offered to take the secrets he painted and use them for House Dragon on his behalf. The young scion agreed.

She studied every painting for clues, and when she discovered them, told the High Prince Regent unknowable things: where the last remnants of House Sphinx hid, the location of an ambush, the look of a spy. The High Prince Regent gave her the title of Dragon Seer, and the young scion was glad to have his secret kept so well, as his mother had wished.


***


Time passed. The scion painted. He dreamed of the eyeless girl but kept her to himself. He had not saved her from the darkness, just like he had not saved his...

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Verlag
Razorbill
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593353323
ISBN 13 
9780593353325
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Razorbill
https://www.hersheyland.mx/bubbleyum

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