A Sleight of Shadows (Volume 2) (Unseen World, The, Band 2) - Hardcover

Buch 2 von 2: The Unseen World

Howard, Kat

 
9781534426818: A Sleight of Shadows (Volume 2) (Unseen World, The, Band 2)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1534426817 ISBN 13: 9781534426818
Verlag: S&S/Saga Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Return to Kat Howard’s Alex Award–winning world begun in An Unkindness of Magicians, a secret society of power-hungry magicians in New York City.

After taking down the source of the corruption of the Unseen World, Sydney is left with almost no magical ability. Feeling estranged from herself, she is determined to find a way back to her status as one of the world’s most dangerous magicians. Unfortunately, she needs to do this quickly: the House of Shadows, the hell on earth that shaped her into who she was, the place she sacrificed everything to destroy, is rebuilding itself.

“The House of Shadows sits on bones. All of the sacrifices, all of the magicians who died in Shadows, they’re buried beneath the foundations. Bones hold magic.”

The magic of the Unseen World is acting strangely, faltering, bleeding out from the edges. Determined to keep the House of Shadows from returning to power and to defeat the magicians who want nothing more than to have it back, Sydney turns to extremes in a desperate attempt to regain her sacrificed magic. She is forced to decide what she will give up and what she will lose and whether what must be destroyed is not only the House of Shadows, but the Unseen World itself.

World Fantasy Award finalist Kat Howard has written a sequel that asks how you have a happily ever in a world that doesn’t want it, where the cost of that happiness may be too much to bear.

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

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kat Howard’s short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, anthologized in best of and annual best of collections, and performed on NPR. You can find it in her collection, A Cathedral of Myth and Bone. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Roses and Rot and the Alex Award–winning An Unkindness of Magicians. She is also one of the writers of the Books of Magic series, set in the Sandman Universe. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, and you can find her on twitter at @KatWithSword.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
The woman sitting at the table cast no shadow.

She should have. The light in the apartment drew grey veils from the coffee cup, empty, on the counter, the chair in which the woman sat, the small white candle in front of her.

It had been just over seven weeks—fifty-three days, exactly—since Sydney had given up her shadow in the final challenge of the Turning. Since she had asked Verenice Tenebrae to cut it from her body so she could sacrifice it to keep magic in the world.

In that time, she had grown accustomed to the lack of her shadow. It had been strange, at first, the absence. The first few days there had been a constant sense that something was missing. The half breath before she put a name, again, to what wasn’t there had felt—each time—stretched and strained.

But her shadow wasn’t her only loss. It wasn’t even the most important one, merely the symbol of what had been given up. When Sydney sacrificed her shadow, she sacrificed her magic. And even now, even now when she no longer reached for a spell in the same way that she used to—the automatic way that blood moved through her veins and breath moved in her lungs—she didn’t need to be reminded that that ability was gone. That absence was a constant ache. It lingered in her scars and in her bones, in the places where magic had been cut out of her. The loss was a reminder of what she had been.

Magic had been her entire life. It was her earliest memory, her first, her primary purpose. It was what she had been shaped for. It became the edge against which she honed herself, the means to all her ends. It had been hers—solely hers, not a weapon for the House of Shadows to use as it pleased—for so little time before it was gone.

She wanted it back.

She had a starting point. One remaining scrap. Not enough to do anything that she couldn’t more easily accomplish by flipping a switch. Not enough to distinguish her from a mundane person who’d been lucky enough to wander into one of the kinder corners of the Unseen World, and who had enough determination to remain there.

She could still light a candle. She had just enough magic to give her hope.

It was a cruel hope, one as sharp as the knife that had cut away her shadow and her magic. An ache to match the absence. But leaning into the sharp edge of the impossible was what she knew.

Sydney shook off her thoughts and focused on the candle in front of her. A small white tea light in a battered tin, the kind that was sold in bags of one hundred and smelled vaguely of vanilla and plastic. Simple. Basic.

Her first bag was nearly empty. She had others.

Sydney spoke the word that kindled the spell, and the candle lit, just as it always did. Even the first time after the loss of her shadow, and her magic with it. In that flickering moment, she had burned, too. Burned with the hope that she had been wrong, that her magic wasn’t gone, that everything would go back to normal. It hadn’t. Not that day, and not any of the days since.

An ache throbbed behind her eyes, and the taste of smoke coated her throat—the aftereffects of using magic making themselves known. They came on quicker now, one more reminder that things had changed.

Sydney focused again. Magic required preparation in a way that it never used to. Breathing in, she twisted her left hand, bent two fingers sharply. This was the second spell she tried every day. The spell that would extinguish the candle she had just lit.

Pain like fire licked along the frayed edges where her shadow had been cut away from her body. A phantom blade sliced its way across her bones, tracing over the places where her magic had once been carved out of her.

The candle flickered, dimmed.

Sydney gritted her teeth against the pain and waited, watched. Held her focus. Blood dripped from her nose. The candle guttered.

And went out.

Sydney scrubbed her blood from the kitchen table and threw the extinguished candle in the trash. Once was nothing. Coincidence. A draft in her apartment, an errant exhale. The pain where her shadow had been merely the itch of an amputated limb, the timing coincidence. Nothing more. She couldn’t let it be more, not without proof.

She took another candle from the bag, set it on the table.

She breathed in, spreading her awareness throughout her body, searching for anything that felt like magic, for anything that felt like change. For anything different at all. But there was nothing new, nothing beyond what she felt every time she cast this spell: her self, and the absence where her magic had been.

She spoke the word to light the candle.

It flared. A column of fire stretching almost to her ceiling, melting the wax in the tin into immediate nothingness, then extinguishing. The edges of her shadow white hot, as if they were being carved away by a thin knife.

Sydney placed her hands flat on her table, fingers starfished around the burnt-out—consumed—candle. She breathed out.

Her phone rang. One of the few numbers she had promised, always, to answer. “Grace? It’s not really a good—”

Grace’s voice thin and tight. “Sydney, something weird is happening. I’m in a car outside. You need to come now.”

The end of the Turning had seen House Prospero elevated to the head of the Unseen World. Which meant that—as well as the responsibility for House Prospero itself—would have been Sydney’s, had she not sacrificed her magic. She had been prepared to die in the course of the Turning, and her fight against the abomination that was the House of Shadows, and so Sydney had named Grace Valentine her heir. For the Unseen World, the loss of magic was equivalent to death.

She had not anticipated the circumstances of Grace’s inheritance but remained confident in her choice, especially now that she had seen Grace in her role. She felt more sorrow than she had expected to over the loss of House Prospero. Not for herself so much as for the House, which had genuinely tried, in the short time it had been hers, to be a place of welcome and refuge. But the House loved Grace as well.

She had no regret at all over not being forced to be in charge of the snarl of egos and entitlement that was the Unseen World. If that had been left up to her, she would have undone the entire thing.

She had thought about leaving after the dust of the Turning had settled—getting out of New York, away from the Unseen World. It might have been better, easier, had she gone away and not looked back. But she hadn’t even lived outside the House of Shadows for a full year. Everything, everyone she knew was here. Every time her finger hovered over the button to buy plane tickets, leaving had felt like one loss too many.

And so here she was, sitting in the back of a cab with Grace, on her way to something weird.

Windshield wipers thunked against the glass as tires whirred over rain-slick streets. The car’s defrost, the driver had assured them, only worked when the air conditioner was on, as it was now, at full blast. The cold air settled into Sydney’s joints, and she wished she had grabbed a warmer coat.

“So when you say weird,” she began, suspecting already what the answer would involve. Magic of some sort, doing something that skewed beyond unexpected and into alarming. She wasn’t quite sure why that meant she was needed, but Grace wasn’t prone to drama,...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
S&S/Saga Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1534426817
ISBN 13 
9781534426818
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV, GPSR Europäische Union
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
AA Utrecht
3584
Niederlande

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9781534426825: A Sleight of Shadows (Unseen World, The, Band 2)

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  1534426825 ISBN 13:  9781534426825
Verlag: Saga Press, 2024
Softcover