Soulgazer (Magpie and the Wolf Duology, 1) - Softcover

Buch 1 von 2: The Magpie and the Wolf Duology

Rapier, Maggie

 
9780593819272: Soulgazer (Magpie and the Wolf Duology, 1)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593819276 ISBN 13: 9780593819272
Verlag: Random House, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

With their freedom on the line, a young woman and a rakish pirate take their fate into their own hands as they attempt to find a lost mythical isle with the power to save their entire world.

Every legend has a beginning.

Saoirse yearns to be powerless. Cursed from childhood with a volatile magic, she's managed to imprison it within, living under constant terror that one day it will break free. And it does, changing everything.

Horrified at her loss of control, Saoirse's parents offer her hand to the cold and ruthless Stone King. Knowing she'll never survive such a cruel man, Saoirse realizes there is only one path forward...she must break her curse.

On the eve of her wedding, Saoirse seeks out the legendary Wolf of the Wild--Faolan, a feral, silver-tongued pirate. He swears to help rid her of the deadly magic if she'll use it to locate a lost mythical isle. Crafted by the slaughtered gods, it's the only land that could absorb her power.

But Saoirse knows better than to trust a pirate's word. With the wrath of her disgraced father and scorned betrothed chasing them, Saoirse adds one last condition to protect herself: if Faolan wants her on his ship, he'll have to marry her first.

"A tale rife with longing, extraordinary tenderness and delicious tension. A glorious escape for the heart and imagination."--Roshani Chokshi, New York Times bestselling author of Last Tale of the Flower Bride

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Maggie Rapier

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

I am the lone magpie in a sea of silver-winged swans. Lithe, artless girls who flick their bone-white skirts to the beat of a bodhrán, heedless of the waves lapping at their ankles. As they revel in their costumes, lit like jewels by the fading sun, I shrink deeper into my feathers and pray the light does not seek me out.

There are dark-eyed, starving things waiting onshore.

Sweat beads across my palms, dots my spine, until the gown clings to my skin, as a man stalks the edge of the water, head bent low like he's scenting blood. A bear's pelt cloaks his shoulders, fur lashed to his wrists with strips of tanned hide. Behind him, a woman arches her back so that braids of kelp stretch taut across her stomach, thousands of shells clattering into a single song. They watch us enter the waves without flinching-two beasts among hundreds, waiting to devour us whole.

A touch dramatic, my brothers would say.

I fight the urge to search for their faces, blink until the beasts become human.

Blink until the sting fades to a distant throb.

Aidan and Conal are not here.

I've waited years to attend the Damhsa Babhdóir, our one tradition to outlive the gods. Six clans gather at the birth of every summer, abandoning their old bloodlust for a chance to strike bargains of marriage instead. For three days we live under a truce, dancing among feasts and finery to form fragile bonds that our noble families can pick apart like crows seeking the choicest bits of carrion. It is a challenge to our bloodlines, a feat meant to be undertaken alone.

But my brothers always swore they'd find a way to guide me. Conal would wait onshore to collect me after the first ritual was done-Aidan smothering his laughter as I trembled among the waves. Beneath the eyes of our sovereigns, they told me I would invite the sun to set upon my youth and would emerge from the water fully grown, ready to wed at last. Or, more likely, resembling a half-drowned rat.

I've never felt their absence more keenly than I do now. It is a snarled knot in my stomach, tangled tighter every time I pull at the threads.

Neither of my brothers will ever see me wed.

A girl wearing an otter's pelt brushes against my skirts. I twist my hands into the limp fabric of my dress and shy away before her skin can touch mine.

It took three months to create this gown. Black and white linen straining against my needle until a thousand wee pleats formed into feathers. I pricked my thumb on nettle, crushing woad to stain the bottom layers that same unearthly shade of blue witnessed every time a magpie takes flight. If I were to spread my arms, wings would fall from the delicate bronze cuffs at my wrists and elbows, ready to catch the wind.

Such a foolish notion, wanting the sea or the open sky. A pitiful grasp at hope.

Cursed things belong in cages, after all.

"Children of the Crescent!"

The voice is the snap of a twig in winter's flame, cutting through the wind without effort. It sails across sea-foam and sand to where we stand among the waves, drawing our attention to the eldest queen-a weathered dagger sheathed in silk. "Descendants of the Daonnaí, those six who sculpted our world anew. Who comes to claim their birthright?"

"I!" Hundreds of voices lift at once. Mine is the barest hum.

"And who among you would dare to slaughter a god?"

No one utters a sound.

Wind tears at Ríona Etain's braid, silver strands splitting her wrinkled face like lightning as she rakes her gaze over our forms. Finds them wanting. "Our ancestors were cunning. Strong. Beautiful. Wise. As reckless gods rotted on their gilded thrones, it was they who plotted the destruction of the divine. Together, the Daonnaí drove the gods down from their mountains and dragged them shrieking out of their golden coves. Together, they brought time to its knees."

These are not the stories I grew up with. My mother speaks of the gods with reverence-beseeching them night and day to forgive our ancestors' actions. To rid me of the curse they left behind.

But the Slaughtered Ones never respond.

"Bound by a strange darkness, the sun a solitary ring of gold, our ancestors held the gods at their mercy until one after another, they slit their throats. And what did the Daonnaí discover as the gods bled into our starving lands?"

The answer pricks my neck like the stroke of a blade.

"Magic."

I resist the urge to step back, slipping my fingertips over the pulse rushing at my throat instead. Down the golden chain nestled against it, leading to an amulet and its promise of relief-sickening and sweet. Three slender spirals mark the surface in a chalky white, connected by their middles and all rotating left. I hesitate, my finger poised just above a sharp point directly at the center.

Better to be numb than dangerous. To forget rather than mourn.

I press down in a single firm touch as another person jostles my side until the point breaks skin, flooding my veins with ice.

"Ten years it took to hunt the last of the gods down. Another five for their descendants, three for the bastards and blessed. With each fresh slaughter, our islands drank deep until the divine blood called forth magic the likes of which we'd never seen-power they never permitted us to touch."

Ríona Etain raises one gnarled hand into the air, as though breaking the barrier between this realm and the next. It beckons us forward until the waves are only a whisper at our feet.

"What once we had to beg for, we could now take."

A final drum echoes across the water just as I reach its edge, and Ríona Etain smiles-a slash of red that distorts half her face.

I grip my amulet tighter, swallowing hard.

"And so, descendants of the Daonnaí. I ask you again. Who comes to claim their birthright?"

"I!"

Through a haze of salt spray and smoke, the queen lifts a bronze carnyx to the sky. Said to be sculpted by Odhrán, god of her isle, the stag-shaped trumpet produces a sound like I've never heard-half keening, half cry. It weaves between our bodies like a clever spider's web, coaxing us closer until waves become ripples, then nothing but foam and dry pebbles underfoot.

A final note splits the air, like a breakage of time itself.

And then the Damhsa Babhdóir begins.

Silver coins sewn like scales glitter on the back of one lad as he hooks the waist of a crane, sending her crown of sweet-gale blooms flying. It's caught by a girl masked in raven feathers, inky black silk cut across her bare shoulder blades where true wings would be. She twists into the arms of a fawn with white-speckled shoulders, anointing her with the flowers as I jerk clear of their path.

I do not belong to this menagerie. I never had the chance to.

Heat lashes my skin as I stumble farther onto shore, away from the writhing bodies and wild laughter. They've all done this before, somehow-I'm certain of it. Dancing round the Yule fires, gathering at harvest with the rest of their clans. Three girls wind around one another like a braid, while beyond them, men clatter together like boulders with the strength of their embrace.

My throat runs dry to see how easily they all touch, loose limbs outlined in a hazy golden glow.

"Och, would you look where you're going, lass?"

A weathered hand snatches my skirts just as I stumble back from a fire's edge, one of a dozen scattered across the beach.

"I'm so sorry! I-"

But the woman's already lost interest. She stands among a patchwork of elegant figures with lined faces and silver crowns woven of their own braids. Each of them, from the tallest man to the shortest woman, bears the hands of Clodagh tattooed across their collarbone: the markings of the...

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Verlag
Random House
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593819276
ISBN 13 
9780593819272
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
482
Kontakt zum Hersteller
ACE
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