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Informationen zum Autor Beloved author Tamora Pierce has written a great number of books, including the Song of the Lioness quartet, The Immortals quartet, the Circle of Magic quartet, the Protector of the Small quartet, The Circle Opens quartet, the Trickster series, The Will of the Empress, Melting Stones, the Beka Cooper series, and The Numair Chronicles. She lives in upstate New York with various cats, other four-legged animals, and birds who feed in her yard, and can be e-visited at Tamora-Pierce.net. Klappentext Originally published by Atheneum in 1996.Realms of the Gods ONE SKINNERS The Stormwing sat on a low wooden perch like a king on his throne. All around him torches flickered; men spoke quietly as they prepared the evening meal. He was a creature of bad dreams, a giant bird with the head and chest of a man. As he moved, his steel feathers and claws clicked softly. For one of his kind, he was unusually clean. His reddish brown hair had once been dressed in thin braids, but many had unraveled. His face, with its firm mouth and large, amber eyes, had once been attractive, but hate deepened the lines at mouth and eyes. Dangling around his neck was a twisted, glassy lump of rock that shimmered in the torchlight. Now he stared intently at a puddle of darkness on the ground before him. An image grew in the inky depths. In it, a tall, swarthy man turned the reins of his black-and-white spotted gelding over to a young hostler. Beside him, a girl—a young woman, really—lifted saddlebags from the back of a sturdy gray pony. When the hostler reached for her reins, the mare’s ears went flat; lips curled away from teeth. “Cloud, leave be,” ordered the girl. She spoke Common, the main language of the Eastern and Southern lands, with only a faint accent, the last trace of her origins in the mountains of Galla. “It’s too late for you to be at your tricks.” The mare sighed audibly, as if she agreed. The hostler took her reins carefully, and led mare and gelding away. Grinning, the girl slung the bags over her shoulder. She is lovely, thought the Stormwing who had once been Emperor Ozorne of Carthak. The boys must swarm around her now, seeing the promise of that soft mouth, and ignoring the stubborn chin. Or at least, he amended his own thought, the ones with the courage to approach a girl so different from others. Boys who don’t mind that she converses with passing animals, not caring that only half the conversation can be heard by two-leggers. Such a brave boy—or man—would try to drown himself in those blue-gray eyes, with their extravagant eyelashes. Ozorne the Stormwing smiled. It was a pity that, unlike most girls of sixteen, she would not make a charm this Midsummer’s Day to attract her true love. On the holiday, two days hence, she—and her lanky companion—would be dead. There would be no lovers, no future husband, for Veralidaine Sarrasri, just as there would be no more arcane discoveries for Numair Salmalín, Ozorne’s one-time friend. “I want the box,” he said, never looking away from the dark pool. Two new arrivals entered the image in the pool. One was an immortal, a basilisk. Over seven feet tall, thin and fragile-looking, he resembled a giant lizard who had decided to walk on his hind legs. His eyes were calm and gray, set in beaded skin the color of a thundercloud. In one paw he bore his long tail as a lady might carry the train to her gown. The other newcomer rode in a pouch made of a fold of skin on the basilisk’s stomach. Alert, she surveyed everything around her, fascination in her large eyes with their slit pupils. A young dragon, sh...
