The Prince of Bones: A Shadow in the Sun Court (Indian Mythology Retold) - Softcover

The Prince of Bones : A Shadow in the Sun Court

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - He was eleven years old the first time they used him.A blood relative had to hold the goat. His elder brothers refused, on superstition. Three cuts failed. The fourth worked. He remembers the smell and not the animal.Shakuni is the ninety-eighth of a hundred sons - clever, unloved, and useful, which in the house of Subala is worse. When his sister is married north to the blind prince of Hastinapura, he goes with her: a small man in a large court, counting grain, pricing men, and guarding a family secret that could ruin them all.For three years he lies, forges, bribes and kills to keep it buried.The secret was never a secret.His sister told them herself, before the wedding night, because she would not begin a marriage in a lie. The old men of Hastinapura have known the whole time. They held it the way an administrator holds anything - as inventory, worth more intact - and released it on the morning it stopped paying.By then a hundred and one men of his house are standing on a stair, and there is one door, and it is new.They are given one portion of food a day. His father does the arithmetic and proposes the only answer: all of it goes to one man, so that one man comes out of that room sharpened into a weapon. The choosing takes an afternoon. Shakuni argues for himself, on merit, and every man in the dark knows he is right.He is in the cell for four hundred and thirty days. He is alone for two hundred and eighty-eight of them.He comes out lame, weeping, and thanking them for their mercy. He is not faking the weeping. In his hand is a set of dice he made himself, over nine months, in the dark, with the edge of a spoon, out of the small bones of his father's right wrist.The Prince of Bones is the first book of a cycle that ends at the dice game - the throw that breaks a dynasty and starts the war. This is not the story of how a good man was wronged. It is the story of how an ordinary, competent, affectionate man was spent, one piece at a time, by people who were mostly being reasonable.For readers of Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence, and Anand Neelakantan's Ajaya - and for anyone who has wondered what it costs to become the villain of somebody else's epic.Book One of The Sun Court. A dark retelling from the Mahabharata. Artikel-Nr. 9798172039294

Verkäufer kontaktieren