Range of Ghosts by Elizabeth Bear
A darkly beautiful story, first in a trilogy by an author I hadn't yet read.
We seem to be in a world that roughly resembles Asia centered on Khazakhstan. To the northwest, the city of Kyiv. To the southeast, the nation of Song. But the skies are different in every country.
Temur is a young heir to the great Khan. In the steppes you can look up and see moons representing heirs of the Khagan. Temur watches every moonrise and sees fewer moons in the sky, as his cousins and uncles are killed. He travels south not to claim a title, but to find his lover who was taken by ghosts.
His family is dead, she realized. When he dies, there is no one to tell the birds his name.
Samarkar sacrifices the ability to give birth so she can be a wizard, rather than be married off to another prince. She's given a rather enormous task for someone so new to power, but she has both strength and kindness enough to face all those different skies.
She was what she was and what she would be. She was imperfect and full of striving. And that would be all right.
It seems a simple story when I step back after finishing, but while reading, I was immersed in it. They travel with a Cho-tse (a sort of tiger person), a pregnant princess, a mare who sometimes seems to speak (but I'm not sure), and a silent monk. They face ghosts, assassins, a horribly dead city, and their own kin grasping at power. Temur has strange prophetic dreams.
At times the language of this book found that place in me that loves reading Patricia McKillip, that twist of words that carries me into a scene somehow both dreamlike and comfortably grounded.
The sequel, Shattered Pillars, just came out recently.
When they stopped for the evening, the pale disks of datura blossoms shone through the dusk like small moons, nodding on vines that bound and bowed the long grasses.
We seem to be in a world that roughly resembles Asia centered on Khazakhstan. To the northwest, the city of Kyiv. To the southeast, the nation of Song. But the skies are different in every country.
Temur is a young heir to the great Khan. In the steppes you can look up and see moons representing heirs of the Khagan. Temur watches every moonrise and sees fewer moons in the sky, as his cousins and uncles are killed. He travels south not to claim a title, but to find his lover who was taken by ghosts.
His family is dead, she realized. When he dies, there is no one to tell the birds his name.
Samarkar sacrifices the ability to give birth so she can be a wizard, rather than be married off to another prince. She's given a rather enormous task for someone so new to power, but she has both strength and kindness enough to face all those different skies.
She was what she was and what she would be. She was imperfect and full of striving. And that would be all right.
It seems a simple story when I step back after finishing, but while reading, I was immersed in it. They travel with a Cho-tse (a sort of tiger person), a pregnant princess, a mare who sometimes seems to speak (but I'm not sure), and a silent monk. They face ghosts, assassins, a horribly dead city, and their own kin grasping at power. Temur has strange prophetic dreams.
At times the language of this book found that place in me that loves reading Patricia McKillip, that twist of words that carries me into a scene somehow both dreamlike and comfortably grounded.
The sequel, Shattered Pillars, just came out recently.
When they stopped for the evening, the pale disks of datura blossoms shone through the dusk like small moons, nodding on vines that bound and bowed the long grasses.