Pinquickle's Folly

Auteur

As one of the fantasy genre’s most successful authors, R. A. Salvatore enjoys an ever-expanding and tremendously loyal following. His books regularly appear on The New York Times bestseller lists and have sold more than 30 million copies. Salvatore’s most recent original hardcover, The Two Swords, book three of The Hunter’s Blade Trilogy debuted at #1 on The Wall Street Journal bestseller list and at #4 on The New York Times bestseller list. His books have been translated into numerous foreign languages, including German, Italian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Turkish, Croatian, Bulgarian, Yiddish, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Czech, and French.

Texte du rabat

The invasion by the Xoconai of the eastern realms was quick and insidious, but you can’t conquer a free mind. A return to the world of Corona first begun in the DemonWars Saga, in the beginning of a new trilogy by #1 New York Times bestselling master of fantasy R. A. Salvatore.

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter 1: The Whispering Swells

*CHAPTER 1*THE WHISPERING SWELLS

The two figures moved slowly along the uneven and rough stone stairway that ran up the side of the high hill. Although winter was on in full, the vernal equinox still several weeks away, the sky was cloudless and the air comfortably warm. The smaller of the pair, a young woman named Quauh, her Xoconai face coloring beaming in the brilliant sunlight, hopped lightly from stone to stone, moving as if she had too much energy within her lithe frame to maintain such a casual pace.

The other, an old man, kept moving slowly and steadily. He had seen nine full decades of life, and making this climb at all for one of his age was quite a remarkable feat. But he kept going, his breathing steady, calmly lifting one foot before the other, using the rope line strung down on the side of the eight-foot-wide trail for support.

The Basin Overlook was quite deserted this day, with most of the people in prayer in the many golden-domed temples through the Tonoloya Basin.

“Come, Lahtli Ayot,” Quauh said when she went over the last step, only a short rising path before her to the highest point of the Basin Overlook. She glanced back to make sure her old uncle, or lahtli, was moving well, then verily ran up the last expanse to the circular clearing, which offered a full view of the great homeland of the Xoconai. She closed her amber-colored eyes and took a deep breath when she entered that circle, basking in the smells of the desert flowers carried on a strong and warm wind from the northeast this day. She was only a few hundred feet above sea level, she knew, but still, in this low basin, the view… ah, the view.

To the west, she saw the distant sea, some eight miles away, the far horizon indistinct and hazy from the ocean mist layer that was so common this time of the year, as winter surrendered to spring. She let her gaze linger there, for always and ever was Quauh called to the great ocean. Eventually, she turned a slow circuit to the right, to the hills in the northwest that formed the northern barrier of the basin, a similar distance from her as the sea. She turned her gaze to the greater mountains lining the east, smaller ones nearby, but moving back more than a hundred miles to high peaks that were still capped in snow. She finished her circuit, turning to the southwest and the haze, and a line of hills that completed the basin wall.

Every view proved beautiful and distinct, showing several large cities within these mountain barriers, clusters of shining golden domes and decorated minarets, and thicker bell or horn towers.

This was Tonoloya, the land of the Xoconai, some thirty thousand square miles of oceanfront, deserts high and low, with a palisade of mountain peaks protecting it on every side that was not the sea—and on the sea, the Xoconai feared no enemy.

When she completed her panorama view, Quauh turned back to the rise, smiling widely to see her uncle plodding along. He wasn’t even breathing heavily—the man had mastered the art of pacing himself. Quauh had seen many people much younger than Ayot grab at their sides and gasp for breath as they tried to climb the stairs, or the S-shaped trails that intersected them several times for those who preferred a more leisurely climb.

For the first time, it seemed, since they had begun the climb, old Ayot looked up at her.

Even with the cloudless sky, the sun beaming upon him, his facial colors seemed so dim to Quauh, reminding her that he was so very old and likely had so little time left. She remembered when his nose was brilliantly red, given to blue at its base, and with white wings spreading out to his cheeks. Colors that shone with the inner life and light of a mundunugu warrior. But now that nose was dull, more ruddy than red, and the other colorings might have been gray mud on the face of a sidhe goblin instead of the brilliant facial colorings of a proud Xoconai.

“Ah, Quauh,” he said as he approached, and he drew out her name distinctly with each syllable: Coo-wow.

He always did that. That was the old and formal way to speak her name, instead of the fast Coo-ah she heard more often from her peers.

“This may be my last climb to this place of the spirit,” Ayot said.

He always said that, Quauh told herself, but she did wince at his tone, for this time, she found that she believed him, and that made her sad.

He walked up beside her, closed his eyes, and inhaled deeply. “All of Tonoloya in one breath,” he said, keeping his eyes closed and seeming very much at peace.

“There is no better place in the world,” she replied.

“Where else has Quauh been in the world?”

“South,” she protested.

Ayot opened his eyes and chortled. “Barely out of Tonoloya proper. Barely beyond the basin wall.”

“Why would one ever wish to leave?”

Now Ayot openly laughed, though it was more of a wheeze, and one that led to some phlegmy coughing.

“You have changed your mind, then?” he asked eventually.

“I know not, Lahtli.”

“Because you are scared.”

“I am not scared.”

“Terrified,” he taunted. “And why wouldn’t you be? It is a choice that will forever change your life, of course.”

She wanted to deny his observations, but she knew that he was seeing right through her. She had been offered a great compliment and a commission—a full commission!—in the Tonoloya Armada. She would be assigned as first mate on a ship for a bit, but within a couple of years would almost certainly be given her own ship to captain!

“It is three thousand miles to the other ocean,” Ayot said. “The sidhe call it the Mirianic, I am told, but you will know it as Tauilueyatl. Do you think it will be as pretty as Laktliueyatl?” He nodded to the west as he asked, to Laktliueyatl, the Sunset Sea.

He had used those names of the oceans purposely, she knew, to emphasize the great distance between them. Sunrise Sea and Sunset Sea, the seas that bordered the fledgling Xoconai empire of Mayorqua Tonoloya after their glorious conquests of the sidhe goblins in the east. The prophecy had been fulfilled, for now the sun rose over one ocean to shine on the empire, and set beyond a different ocean, shining still, unto the last, onto Tonoloya.

“I have heard that the waters are darker in the east,” Ayot said after a long silence, he and his grandniece simply taking in the views and the wonderful aromas of the desert flowers. “And colder.”

“Are you trying to talk me out of leaving?”

“Hardly!” the old man said, coughing and wheezing with laughter again. …