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The Shadowed Land: A Novel (The Lost Queen) - Softcover

Buch 3 von 3: The Lost Queen

Pike, Signe

 
9781501191497: The Shadowed Land: A Novel (The Lost Queen)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1501191497 ISBN 13: 9781501191497
Verlag: Atria, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

This “can’t-miss historical epic” (Kristin Harmel, New York Times bestselling author) reimagines the legends of King Arthur by resurrecting the real historical figures who inspired these enduring tales.

Scotland, AD 580: A queen has risen. A battle has been won. Loved ones who were lost have been reunited. But in a land of power-hungry kings, peace is precarious and cannot last for long. All too soon, circumstance pulls both Britons and Scots back to their own destinies.

The warrior Artúr receives a mysterious summons from his father in Dalriada. Queen Languoreth and her brother must return to Strathclyde with the dangerous former bishop Mungo in tow, determined to maintain the fragile balance between the Christians and the people of the Old Way. Meanwhile, the young priestess Angharad must travel deep into the shadowed land of the Picts, hoping to become the initiate of Briochan, a druid who practices the secret Celtic art of weather work.

As they rise to meet their fates, they are pushed to impossible new frontiers: each must decide whether they are willing to do what it takes to become the heroes their harrowing days demand.

Set in the sprawling historical landscape of early medieval Scotland, Pike’s critically acclaimed retelling of the Arthurian saga thrusts readers into a world of ambition, loyalty and love, revealing truths that have for too long been buried by legend in this “gorgeous, sweeping saga” (Janet Skeslien Charles, New York Times bestselling author).

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Signe Pike is the author of The Lost Queen series, recently optioned for television, and the travel memoir Faery Tale. She has researched and written about Celtic history and folklore for over a decade. Visit her at SignePike.com.    

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Chapter 1: Languoreth CHAPTER 1 Languoreth
Dùn Meldred, Southern Kingdom of Gododdin

Land of the Britons

2nd of July, AD 580

It began with a dream.

Those were the first words my daughter uttered after eight years missing. Angharad was dead. Or so I’d been told. When I sat at my weaving, eyes touched upon me with pity. Look at the woman who has lost both daughter and son. I met their gaze, unflinching. Yes, I am still here. It is a wonder, is it not, what the heart can survive?

I heard them whisper, Some say she still keeps counsel with their ghosts.

Perhaps they were right. For only yesterday I had watched my lost daughter glide like a specter across a battlefield. Who was this woman who kept company with Pictish warriors, ink marking her body and hair falling down her back in a mass of ruddy coils? She wore a cloak made of feathers, beaded and slick from driving rain.

From a distance, I’d not known her at first, my own child. The relentless churn of time can do such things. After all, how could I have imagined the woman she’d become?

Now she stood beside me high upon the ramparts of a fortress, her gray eyes somber as we looked out across a field of the dead. On the muddy expanse below, warriors prodded the fallen, hoping to finish any enemies who yet lived. Soon, the corpse birds would come.

Lord Meldred’s Hall sat like an eagle’s nest high above the Tweed River Valley, commanding views of the Dreva Hills. Spears of summer sun pierced the blue-black clouds overhead. It was the sort of light that followed a storm, casting the grassy lands of Dùn Meldred in a gilded light that belied the massacre below, where men lay like effigies, eyes unblinking. My body still thrummed from the terrors of war, but I pushed it aside, reaching instead for Angharad’s hand. Along the creamy underside of her wrist, a trail of birds had been pricked in black ink.

“Crows?” I asked. Had she remembered what I’d told her of my old teacher Cathan, or how our hearts were like birds, pricked full of feathers? But the look she gave me was veiled, unyielding.

“We cannot speak of our markings,” she said.

I felt a stab. We cannot speak. My daughter was a stranger, no longer a Briton. Last evening I’d overheard her speaking with the Picts, their tongue rushing from her lips like water. Now, when she spoke Brythonic, it was with the cadence of one who came from the north. I did not want to ask how long she would stay, for I knew she would not. I looked at our joined hands.

“You must forgive me. I cannot help but touch you,” I said. “This morning when I woke, I worried it all was a dream, your returning.”

Angharad looked at me, her gray eyes taking my measure, but said nothing. If she was angry, she had every right: I was her mother, meant to protect her, yet I’d sent her away when she was just a child. My reasoning had been sound. Angharad had a gift. But what did that matter? I had sent her away, and she’d been lost to war. She and her elder brother, Rhys, whose first battle had been his last.

“You must know,” I said, “not a day went by that we did not search for you. I carry the loss of your brother like a boulder. But a child gone missing is worse than any death. The trickery of hope is enough to drive a mother mad. We searched for you in kingdom upon kingdom, our search sputtering out again and again on the shores of either sea. I am shamed to say, the days I woke and wondered if you might be dead, I felt the smallest relief. For at least in death I knew you could not be suffering.”

Angharad looked out over the hills.

“There are those who call the kingdom of the Picts the Shadowed Lands,” she said. “I cannot blame them. One can scarcely imagine its vastness. There are mountains upon mountains, countless rivers and lochs that furrow the land. It is a world unto itself. Deep and hidden. As a child, I feared it. But now I cannot imagine who I might have become had I not known it. Now there is no other place that feels like my home.”

I could not help but marvel at her—this young woman who’d dreamt that an army of Angles was marching to make war upon the Britons. She had returned to us with a band of Pictish warriors who had turned the tide of the battle. I had been headstrong and impetuous at her age. Angharad’s training had wrought her into a woman far wiser than her seventeen winters.

After the Battle of the Caledonian Wood, as our celebration had cooled to embers, I’d listened with a tortured sort of rapture as Angharad described what had become of her as a child all those winters ago, in the Battle of Arderydd. She’d run to my brother’s hut in the woods to find his wife, Eira, waiting. They’d escaped the fighting only to be taken by Gwrgi of Ebrauc. Though he said he meant to deliver Angharad to her father, Eira knew he could not be trusted. Their attempt to escape left Angharad alone in the forest. There she met a monk who promised to deliver her to safety, but their boat was set upon by Picts, and Angharad found herself held captive once more.

Since that day, she’d been hidden away in the shadowed lands of the Cruithni, the first people. Over time, her memories of home grew distant. She began her training as a priestess. She woke one day to find that she no longer wished to escape.

“Angharad…,” I said now. But for some things, there are no words. She turned to me, reading my face.

“It wasn’t your fault, Mother. All that passed was meant to be. I do not blame you for it.”

I reached out with my free hand to smooth her coiled hair. “You are so at ease in the hands of the Gods. They have snatched you up as if you were their treasure, when always you have been mine.” I reluctantly lowered my hand from her hair as if she were a thing forbidden. “I strive to be devoted. I have even felt their touch. But giving you up was one of the most difficult demands they have made of me. And now, knowing all the misfortune you suffered, I do not know if I can ever be at peace.”

Angharad looked at me as if I’d somehow disappointed her. “It was not misfortune, Mother. Can’t you see?” She took a breath as if to say more, but the moment was broken by a shout from the battlefield. She lifted her hand to block the sun, squinting into the distance.

She pointed. “There.”

Far across the fields, where the river Tweed snaked beneath the Dreva Hills, a cluster of warriors was racing to surround a wounded man. They’d discovered him as they were rooting through the nearby heap of dead warriors, no doubt. But from the way he loped, half crouched as he attempted to run, he appeared close to death himself.

“He must have hidden beneath that pile of the dead,” Angharad said.

“Yes,” I agreed. “And that standing stone will be Drumelzier Haugh.” I nodded at the specked stone in the distance. Our warriors closed on him like a pack of hunting dogs, but not before he’d reached the tall gray stone beside the river, falling against it as one embraces a mother.

The man was claiming sanctuary.

The warriors stepped aside as Torin, captain of my guard, pushed through. I did not know much of the ancestral stones here; these were the lands of our neighbors, the Britons of Gododdin. But sanctuary was a right by law, and—enemy or no—our warriors would not risk dishonoring the dead.

Torin turned and looked up, searching out the place where I stood, and I motioned...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1501191497
ISBN 13 
9781501191497
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales
sales@vanditmar.nl

Hondiuslaan 44
Utrecht
3528 AB
Niederlande