Arca (Volume 2) (Five Queendoms, The) - Hardcover

Macallister, G.R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1982167920 ISBN 13: 9781982167929

Verlag: S&S/Saga Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

Return to the Five Queendoms in the sequel to Scorpica, a sweeping epic fantasy that Rebecca Roanhorse called “ambitious and engaging,” in which a centuries-long peace is shattered in a matriarchal society when a decade passes without a single girl being born.

The Drought of Girls has ended, but the rift it broke open between the Queendoms is not so easily healed. Political tensions roil the senate of Paxim, where Queen Heliane vows to make her son Paulus the nation’s first ruling King or die trying. Scorpican troops amass on the border of Arca, ready to attack. And within Arca itself, its young, unready queen finds her court a nest of vipers and her dreams besieged by a mysterious figure with unknown intentions.

As iron and magic clash on the battlefield and powerful women scheme behind the scenes, danger and violence abound. Can anyone stop chaos from ripping the Queendoms apart?

Über diesen Titel

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. 

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Chapter 1: The Senator CHAPTER 1 THE SENATOR
The fourth day of the fourth month of the All-Mother’s Year 502

Ursu, capital of Paxim

Stellari

There was nothing Stellari of Calladocia could not imagine, and once she had imagined something, achieving it was just a matter of time.

Politically, this nimble imagination was her greatest gift. From a single choice, Stellari could visualize dozens, even hundreds, of possible consequences, all of which she held arrayed in her mind’s eye like the stars. Then she’d choose. If she wanted a law passed, she’d quickly puzzle out who was most likely to support it, then unspool a complex chain of favors wherein she’d persuade three or four fellow senators, no more than five, who would go on to persuade all the rest for her. She never planted a seed without envisioning the eventual tree.

Her imagination hadn’t served her nearly as well outside the Senate, she supposed. Potential friends quickly tired of hearing her test out unending scenarios, breathlessly recount her victories, torture herself over the rare losses. Lovers bristled at being treated like tally marks. But for Stellari, the difference between the personal and the political grew more faint until it vanished entirely. Let strangers stay strangers, let lovers turn their backs and go. She was extremely happy with what her imagination had done for her, all told.

She was, after all, the unlikeliest of senators. First off, she was not a landholder, or at least she hadn’t been. She’d come up through the Assembly. All the best families of Paxim were represented in the Senate, their wisest and strongest women handing down laws from the comfort of the capital. It had been that way as long as there had been a Paxim. The Assembly was a newer experiment, two centuries old, including members of the poorer classes. Stellari had made a name for herself initially as the Assembly’s representative from Calladocia, a remote southwestern district, a position she’d gotten mostly because no one else wanted it.

But that put her on the pathway to power. When Calladocia’s most important landholders fell on hard times, their female line dying out and the senatorship under threat of dissolution, the head of their household summoned Assemblywoman Stellari. The matron Panagiota offered Stellari the chance to marry her last remaining son, lay claim to their family lands, and take on the vacant senatorship. Immediately seeing the ways in which it would put greater strength in her hands, Stellari had readily agreed. She’d met Evander of Calladocia twice and he’d seemed perfectly lovely, if a bit timid. At their second meeting, the marriage contracts were signed. There-after, Evander remained at home in their district, leaving Stellari free to live as she chose in the capital.

And Stellari’s climb had not stopped there. In only a few short years in the Senate, she’d already ascended to the role of magistrate. She was not yet even thirty years old. Gossips whispered that she seemed likely, if Decima stepped down, to rise to the position of consul. Once Stellari overheard a fellow senator call her consulship inevitable. She liked that whisper best of all.

But today Stellari was just another citizen of Paxim, kept in the dark. She hated the dark. All her cleverness and vision couldn’t get her the one bit of knowledge she most needed: Would the widowed queen’s coming child, almost certainly her last, be a girl or a boy? Stellari had already determined what action to take in either case, but the wait was interminable. She was better off than most, knowing what only a handful of high-ranking officials now knew: the queen’s labor had begun. The rest of the truth would come when the child did. The augury had been unclear, and besides, thought Stellari, practical women did not trust auguries. Predictions were half shams and wishful thinking. Only facts were facts.

This queen had birthed two girls and two boys over the years—a stillborn boy, then a living girl, then a set of girl-boy twins—but only the youngest girl remained. A single child was bleak ground on which to stake the country’s entire future, especially when misfortune seemed to covet the queen’s company. The stillborn boy had been a bad omen in the early years of Heliane’s rule. The arrival of a girl the next year was heralded as a sign of better things to come. As for the twins, the boy had always been sickly, quick to bruise at the slightest touch. The world proved too much for him before his first year was out. His sister Zofi was stronger, with no sign of her brother’s ills; in fact, she was a daredevil of a child, willful and mischievous. Then fever flooded Ursu, a whimsical pox that carried off the healthy young—including the queen’s eldest daughter—and left the elderly and lame untouched in their beds. Then, only months ago, one more misfortune struck: King Cyrus, too, sped to the Underlands, wasting with a disease not even the medical experts of the Bastion or the gifted healers of Arca could cure. Now only Queen Heliane and Queenling Zofi remained. A second heir would secure the nation’s confidence. This child would determine the future.

Stellari would have to wait for the signal smoke—black for a boy, white for a girl—just like everyone else.

Being like everyone else was perhaps the thing Stellari hated most in the world.

She lifted her head from the pillow and stared out the high, square window toward the triple spire of the palace. The sky above the central spire remained stubbornly blue. No smoke. No way of knowing how long it would be before smoke appeared.

“Do I need to yank the child out of her wrinkled muoni with my own two hands? Time is wasting,” she complained to Rahul, who was sprawled out on the bedclothes next to her, his back still sweat-slicked and gleaming.

“You think this afternoon was a waste?” he answered.

She turned over with a lazy smile. He was inviting a compliment and she knew it. It was one of the ways in which they were so well-matched: both delighted equally in giving and receiving flattery. Looking at his long body stretching out, tawny and beautiful against the pale sheets, she was reminded of other ways in which their match was excellent.

“Time is never wasted with you,” she said. “And your dedication to distracting me was delightfully… thorough.”

“I aim to please.”

“You strike your aim.” She offered her neck and he leaned over to kiss it, running his lips up its curve until he reached her jawline, then flicking out his tongue to take a light lick of salt from her skin.

He relaxed back onto one elbow, letting her take a good look at the full length of his body, and she happily indulged. He was all sinew and grace, his jaw broad and square, his thick brows low over deep brown eyes. His face was too rough-hewn to be attractive, but there was a magnetism to him she found more compelling than beauty. Any Arcan man could look good through the use of their inborn enchantments. Rahul was different. His magical talents lay elsewhere. Not one Arcan man in a thousand had his particular manifestation of magic, which was why he was the first Arcan man she’d ever chosen to share pleasures with, and she strongly suspected he would be the last. Not, of course, that she would tell him so. Complacency was a risk she didn’t care to run.

Rahul raised a hand, and she thought he might use it to reach for her, but he ran it over his own head instead, exposing for just a moment the white scar dividing his black hair at the scalp.

She was the one who...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: S&S/Saga Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1982167920
• ISBN 13: 9781982167929
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 544
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland