Dragon's Child

Zusatztext "A diverting read for fans of the Arthurian legends". Informationen zum Autor M. K. Hume is a retired academic. She received her MA and PhD in Arthurian literature and is the author of The Merlin Prophecy, a historical trilogy about the legend of Merlin. She lives in Australia with her husband and two sons. Klappentext Originally published: Great Britain: Headline Review, 2009. Leseprobe King Arthur Trilogy Book One: Dragon’s Child Chapter I THE EDGES OF MEMORY For a certain order embraces all things, and anything which departs from the order planned and assigned to it, only falls back into order, albeit a different order so as not to allow anything to chance in the realms of Providence. —BOETHIUS The forest embraced the boy like an ancient cloak, ragged at the hems, but still serviceable and strong in the weave. The roots of the oak trees twisted out of the deep, moldering earth, and their branches were so thick and tangled that the boy felt as if he had plunged into cool, green water after the humid brilliance of the fallow fields. The threat that this adventure would lead to stern punishment meant little to him, for he would be punished anyway. If not for these hours of sensual pleasure, then some half-forgotten sin would stir his foster father to wrath. In a dense canopy of alder and oak, the trees starved all grass of the necessities of life. The boy walked through a perilous coverlet of leaf drifts, fallen branches embroidered with the verdigris of moss, and strange, fleshy flowers that covered hidden badger setts. The eerie beauty of this half-lit world fascinated the boy and set his heart racing with the promise of danger. Anything could dwell in these sudden hollows of almost midnight blue. Within the shadows, anyone could be close enough to touch him in this half-imagined landscape where his foster father’s power was reduced to less than dust. He himself could be anyone, and he could dream whatever he chose without hindrance. Here, he was neither safe nor unsafe, but most truly himself. Myrddion’s Map of Pre-Arthurian Southern Britain The boy found a favored natural glade, some ten spear shafts across, where tree trunks mimicked pillars and a slender blade of light reached to the forest floor. A great rock, covered in white lacy lichen, squatted off center in the glade, and the boy ran his narrow hands over its surface until he felt the worn whorls and lines roughly hacked into its flank. For some half-instinctive reason, he chose to seat himself as far from those barely visible patterns as he could while he stared hard at a hollow, barely the length of his hand, which had been chipped out of the rock at its center. It was tilted strangely, for the boy had once sacrificed a little liquid from his goatskin water carrier to fill that shallow, manmade cup. He had watched transfixed as some of the water drained away, following the spirals and whorls until the rivulet fell onto the forest floor. Something dark always flexed its wings in the boy’s mind when he touched that hollow. He could imagine a sticky, viscous thread of blood snaking away from his fingers into the pattern and filling his nostrils with the unsettling scent of iron. “Things have died here,” he whispered to break the sepulchral silence of the glade. “But they are so old . . . perhaps as ancient as the trees themselves.” The boy rarely thought beyond the wonders of the present, but this small green space had always stirred some atavistic part of his brain. The bright green grasses, heavy...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: M K Hume, M. K. Hume
• Verlag: Pocket Books USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 12.11.2013
• EAN: 9781476715186
• ISBN: 978-1-4767-1518-6
• Seiten: 464
• Serien: The King Arthur Trilogy; The King Arthur Trilogy
• Thema: Belletristik > Erzählende Literatur