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Zusatztext "This is an enticing medieval fantasy with a headstrong heroine that will pique the interest of girls who like strong female characters... The book is well–written and the ending fast-paced. The best news is that there is plenty of material for a sequel." Informationen zum Autor Amy Butler Greenfield made her YA debut with Chantress , followed by Chantress Alchemy and Chantress Fury . Originally from the Adirondacks, Amy lives with her husband and daughter in England. Visit her at AmyButlerGreenfield.com. Klappentext In 1667 England! 15-year-old Lucy discovers that she is a chantress who can perform magic by singing! and the only one who can save her country from the control of the dangerous Lord Protector. CHAPTER ONE THE SINGING I was digging in the garden when I heard it: a strange, wild singing on the wind. I sat back on my heels, a carrot dropping from my mud-splattered hands. No one sang here. Not on this island. Perhaps I’d misheard— No, there it was again: a lilting line, distant but clear. It lasted hardly longer than a heartbeat, but it left me certain of one thing: It was more than a gull’s cry I’d heard. It was a song. But who was singing it? I glanced over my shoulder at Norrie, hunched over a cabbage bed, a gray frizzle poking out from under her linen cap. As far as I knew, she was the only other inhabitant of this lonely Atlantic island, but it couldn’t have been Norrie I had heard. For if there was one rule that my guardian set above all others, it was this one: There must be no singing. Ever. Sing and the darkness will find you. We were still dripping from the shipwreck when Norrie first told me this. She had repeated it often since then, but there was no need. The terror in her eyes that first time had silenced me immediately—that and my own grief, so deep I was drowning in it. The sea had taken my mother and had almost taken me. That was enough darkness to last me a lifetime; I had no desire to court more. Not that I could recall very much about the shipwreck itself. Even the ship that had carried us off from England seven years ago had left no impression on me. Was it stout or shaky, that vessel? Had it foundered on rocks? Had storms broken its masts? I did not know. We had boarded that ship in 1660, when I had been eight years of age. Surely eight was old enough to remember? Yet my only recollections of that night came in broken fragments, slivers that were more sensation than sense. The sopping scratchiness of wet wool against my cheeks. The bitter sea wind snarling my hair into salty whips. The chill of the dark water as I slipped through it. “Hush, child,” Norrie would say whenever I dared mention any of this. “It was a long time ago, and a terrible night, and you were very young. The least said about it, the better.” “But my mother—” “She’s lost to us, lamb, lost to the wind and the waves.” Norrie’s face would always pucker in sadness as she said this, before her voice grew brisk. “It’s just the two of us now, and we must make the best of it.” When Norrie took that tone, there was no refusing her. So make the best of it we did, and if life on our island was not easy, it was far from desolate. But we never sang. We never even whistled or hummed. We had no music of any kind. And if anyone had asked me, I would have said I did not miss it at all . . . . Until now. It was as if the singing had pierced a hole in me, a hole only it could fill. I sat silent, listening hard. Withered stalks rustled in the warm October sunlight. Gulls shrilled as they swooped toward the bluffs. And then, on the wind, I heard it again, the barest edge of a tune, almost as if the sea itself were singing— “Lucy!” I jumped. From two rows away, Norrie waved her ...
