The Tale of Birle

Informationen zum Autor Cynthia Voigt won the Newbery Medal for Dicey's Song, the Newbery Honor Award for A Solitary Blue, and the National Book Award Honor for Homecoming, all part of the beloved Tillerman Cycle. She is also the author of many other celebrated books for middle grade and teen readers, including Izzy, Willy-Nilly, and Jackaroo. She was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 1995 for her work in literature, and the Katahdin Award in 2004. She lives in Maine. Klappentext Originally published as On fortune's wheel. New York: Atheneum, 1990.The Tale of Birle Chapter 1 WHAT SHE SAW FIRST WAS a moving shadow. In the trees that bordered the meadow, among their dark trunks, something moved. She heard nothing to alarm—not over the rush of water and the sweep of wind—but she saw a dark, crouched shape, moving. The shadow, no more than a darker darkness in the night, crept out from the mass of trees, crept low across the long grass toward the docking place. No man of the village would move so. A man of the village, come out to check a hastily secured boat, would carry a light. He would come along the path that ran from the village through the Innyard, the path she stood on. No fisherman would be setting off, not at this hour, not on a moonless night when all the stars shining together couldn’t penetrate the dark, windy air. Birle stood motionless, watching. She herself ought not to be out in the night. Da and Nan would not be pleased to know how she had left her small sisters asleep in the bed they shared, pulled on her skirt and overshirt, and latched the door steathily behind her to tiptoe past the room where her brothers slept, past the room where Da and Nan slept, down the broad staircase, and across the empty public room. In the kitchen, where the banked fire glowed in its ashes, she had put on her boots and taken her cloak from its hook. The dogs, if they heard anything, knew her steps and took no alarm. Da and Nan, if they knew, would be mightily displeased, and they would lay angry words across her shoulders. Aye, they were counting the days left to the spring fair, when they would have her married and gone from their care. Aye, and Birle was counting them, too. The shadow was human, she had no doubt of that. Only a man or woman would move so, hunched over, gliding along the edge of the river like a beast on the hunt among the long grasses. Watching, Birle let the wind urge her down the path to the docking place. Whatever else, the shadow was up to nothing lawful. Soaking spring rains had turned the path to mud. Her boots made squishing sounds, so she stepped off the path into the grass. As soundlessly as the shadow before her, but more swiftly, she approached the river. She should return to the sleeping Inn, she knew that, and rouse her brothers. At the least, she should turn and call out an alarm, to set the dogs barking. But the mystery of the intruder, like the mystery of the night, which had called her from sleep, kept her from doing what she ought. It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard the tales. There was no child who hadn’t been warned. Some of the warnings spoke of robbers, dangerous especially to a woman, murderous to all; others told of servants so hard used, or so proud-spirited, that they fled their masters, fled even knowing that if the law caught up with them—man or woman—they might be hanged, or have branded on their right palm the mark of the renegade servant. This shadow, she thought, wasn’t a robber. Robbers moved in bands, like wolves. Anyway, robbers were few, here in the remote southern lands of the Kingdom, where the cleared land was rich to farm and the goats and pigs fed to fatness; where even in the sharpest days of winter fish might be taken from beneath the ice of the river; where the forests were filled with game, and...

Product details

• Authors: Alejandro Colucci, Cynthia Voigt
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster USA
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: ages 12 to 17
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 26.05.2015
• EAN: 9781481422048
• ISBN: 978-1-4814-2204-8
• No. of pages: 432
• Series: Tales of the Kingdom; Tales of the Kingdom
• Subject: Children's and young people's books