Verwandte Artikel zu Scorpica (Volume 1) (Five Queendoms, The)

Scorpica (Volume 1) (Five Queendoms, The) - Hardcover

Buch 1 von 3: Five Queendoms, The

Macallister, G.R.

 
9781982167899: Scorpica (Volume 1) (Five Queendoms, The)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1982167890 ISBN 13: 9781982167899
Verlag: S&S/Saga Press, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

A centuries-long peace is shattered in a matriarchal society of five queendoms when a decade passes without a single girl being born in this sweeping epic fantasy filled with dark magic and political intrigue that’s perfect for fans of Robin Hobb and Circe.

Five hundred years of peace between queendoms shatters when girls inexplicably stop being born. As the Drought of Girls stretches across a generation, it sets off a cascade of political and personal consequences across all five queendoms of the known world, throwing long-standing alliances into disarray as each queendom begins to turn on each other—and new threats to each nation rise from within.

Uniting the stories of women from across the queendoms, this propulsive, gripping epic fantasy follows a warrior queen who must rise from childbirth bed to fight for her life and her throne, a healer in hiding desperate to protect the secret of her daughter’s explosive power, a queen whose desperation to retain control leads her to risk using the darkest magic, a near-immortal sorcerer demigod powerful enough to remake the world for her own ends—and the generation of lastborn girls, the ones born just before the Drought, who must bear the hopes and traditions of their nations if the queendoms are to survive.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

G.R. Macallister, author of the Five Queendoms series, beginning with Scorpica, and also writes bestselling historical fiction under the name Greer Macallister. Her novels have been optioned for film and television. A regular contributor to Writer Unboxed and the Chicago Review of Books, she lives with her family in Washington, DC. 

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1: The Barren Queen CHAPTER 1 THE BARREN QUEEN
Midsummer, the All-Mother’s Year 501 In the Holy City, Sestia Khara

On the eve of the Sun Rites, Khara dha Ellimi awoke alone in the jet-black dark.

Despite the too-soft, too-large beds their Sestian hosts had set aside for her delegation, she’d fallen asleep quickly enough, soothed by the nearness of her fellow Scorpicae. The steady, measured breathing of a dozen warrior women at rest had been her lullaby. Yet she awoke to find silence her only companion. Soft, rumpled beds all around her lay abandoned.

Khara knew, of course, what her warriors had gone to do. She’d done it herself nine years running, in this very city, years ago. At ten-and-five she’d made her first journey to Sestia to celebrate rites. She’d returned to Scorpica with a belly set to swell, as did so many warrior sisters, their seed watered with a man’s rain. The annual Moon Rites or rarer Sun Rites, in this sense they differed little: the Sestian priests, the Xaras, encouraged pleasures for all. Pleasures honored the God of Plenty and Her consort, they said. The warriors of Scorpica, hard-edged and lean with muscle, their dark hair shorn nearly to their scalps, laughed behind their hands at the long-haired priests’ solemn piety. Some warriors believed in the God of Plenty and some did not. They pursued pleasure for pleasure’s sake, not for Hers.

Khara felt as if the thick mattress were trying to swallow her slowly, like a fangless snake. She struggled upward and almost fell from the raised bed, not used to a perch so high. Scorpion mokh these pilgrimages, she thought. Next time I’ll stay home.

But by the next Sun Rites, five years from now, would she still be queen? By then she’d be nearing her fortieth year. It would be foolhardy not to consider passing the crown, though she had no daughter to receive it. So she had surveyed all her subjects, analyzed their strengths and weaknesses, planned for succession as she would for any campaign, and chosen as her protégée Mada dha Shodrei. Who had, like the others, vanished into the Sestian night.

Once steadied, Khara paced the dark room, her bare feet landing soundlessly on the cool stone floor. During the Sun Rites, the enormous, gleaming-white central building of the Holy City—both palace and temple—housed dozens, even hundreds, of visitors. Warriors could have their pick. Khara knew that some Scorpicae were strategic in their pleasures, choosing to bed particular men for their strength or intelligence, for traits they wanted in the next generation of warriors. She herself had never been so deliberate. But she suspected Mada would be. Her keen strategic mind was one of the chief reasons Khara had chosen her.

The other reason she’d chosen Mada was her daughter.

Tamura dha Mada was ten years old and already deadly with a bow, toting a swaying brace of red squirrels or plump rabbits home from the hunt even when far older hunters returned empty-handed. If Khara made her choice of Mada official—naming a woman who already had a daughter, and one clearly fated to grow into a talented warrior—the next succession, unlike this one, would never be in question.

The door opened with the faintest of creaks to admit a shadowed figure outlined by the lamp she bore, and Khara had the odd feeling she’d summoned Mada just by thinking of her. Instead it was Gretti, the youngest of their delegation at a mere ten-and-five, the keeper of the ceremonial blade. Even in the faint light Khara could identify her easily: slender in shape, her full lips pursed in concentration, her step tentative. Her sister Hana had been bladebearer five years before, an unusually capable one, but Gretti had none of her sister’s easy confidence. She held both of her discarded sandals in one hand, strings dangling. Her leather vest had been tied in haste. Without looking at Khara she crept to her own bed, lifted the soft mattress. When she saw the muted glint of the metal underneath, she breathed an audible sigh.

“It was safe here,” Khara said.

The girl wheeled, clearly surprised. She would need to learn awareness of her surroundings. “I was worried. So I returned.”

With a wry look at the slapdash ties of her vest, Khara said gently, “If you’d told me you were going, I would have reassured you. Then you could have taken your time.”

Before Gretti could respond, movement in the doorway caught Khara’s eye.

Stepping into the room, sure and silent, was Mada herself. Even with cattle-hide sandals on her feet, her footfalls made no noise. A bit shorter than her queen and broader in the shoulders, with the long, ropy muscles of a born runner, she stretched luxuriantly as she came.

“My queen,” she said. “It is time we were all abed.”

“We all were, I suspect,” said Khara. “Just not here.”

Mada smiled with obvious satisfaction. “Just doing our part to serve the Holy One.”

“Did you bed a Sestian, then?” asked Khara, an impolite question. She could see Gretti’s jaw slacken in surprise out of the corner of her eye, but she kept her gaze on Mada, testing her temper. If she was too hotheaded to rule, it wasn’t too late to choose a different successor. Nothing had yet been announced. “Did he call out Her name?”

Unruffled, Mada said, “I’ve more of a taste for Arcans, when I can find them. Do you remember what you used to choose, or has it been too long?”

She was saved from needing to answer—Mada seemed to want an answer, her eyes bright and expectant like a bird’s—by the return of two more warriors, their lips swollen and limbs loose. There was no light yet from the single high window, but Khara knew that morning was growing closer. No more sleep for her tonight, then.

The returning warriors did not seem interested in sleep either, conversing in the low hum of bees drunk on sunlight, running a wet cloth from the basin across their shoulders or elsewhere, unpacking and repacking the bags they had carried with them from Scorpica in preparation for the long journey home.

Khara listened to their conversations while pretending not to and donned the ceremonial robe she would wear for the Sun Rites. The other queens would wear their hair loose, per tradition; hers was too short to wear any other way. Gretti polished the blade over and over and Khara had to force herself to look away. The blade was sharp and deadly. It did not need to shine to do its grim work.

In what seemed like minutes, a soft but distinct chime sounded through the thick wood of the door to their chamber. Every warrior’s head rose.

“All ready,” said their queen, a statement, not a question, and opened the door to admit the Queensguard.

Four warrior women, two closer to Khara’s age and two to Mada’s, stood arrow-straight in the hallway. The warriors of the Queensguard wore long cloaks of pale wool to show their current allegiance to Sestia, the swirl of a ram’s horn stamped into the center of their leather shields. They were armored underneath.

“Queen,” said the tallest. “It is time. You have the blade?”

Khara turned to the girl. It was her moment. “Gretti,” she said.

In a flash the girl had sheathed the knife and brought it to her, turning the handle and presenting it, reverently, by the gleaming bone hilt.

Khara took the knife in her hands, then opened her palms with the sheathed blade flat on top, ready to bear it in front of her like an offering. Ever so slightly,...

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Verlag
S&S/Saga Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1982167890
ISBN 13 
9781982167899
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande