Category:
Fantasy
ISBN-10: 1944492070
Type: Fiction
ISBN-13: 9781944492076
Nagaro Chronicle book 2 (Sequel to Gift of Chance). Adrift with his friends on Pakoa Island, Nagaro finds his calling: freeing galley slaves.
Newly freed from servitude to a warlord of the Mahuk Baar, Nagaro and his friends Taru and Pavo face a winter on the remote Edroviran island of Pakoa. For most of the former galley slaves whom Nagaro led to freedom, spring will bring opportunities to return to the lives from which they were taken, as sailors, fishermen, shopkeepers, and the like, but Nagaro has no such life he can return to. He is confronted with the mundane need to find a way to make a living in order to secure his future, while still tormented by unanswered questions about a past he feels he must conceal. What happened in the princess’ bedchamber on that final night in Lankura? How did he escape from the palace and the deadly grip of the will-controlling drug heskial? Though he should be grateful for his life and his freedom, he seems beset by a host of minor woes. Taru has discovered the existence of tavern women, and Pavo is courting a local girl, but Nagaro feels out of place, an educated man in a cultural back-water. Everything from the way he dresses to the beard and kuma stain he wears as his disguise seem to set him apart from the local populace. The tale of his heroism has spread up and down the island, but this fame only embarrasses and further isolates him. The elegant Mahuk sword under his bed and the captured Mahuk war galley floating in Pakoa Harbor seem unlikely to do him any good. He cannot join the Royal Fleet, cannot return to the capital city of Lankura where he was known as Leyel Virden, a name that has become synonymous with “idiot.” As the story opens, his troubles are added to by an incident at the Bay Tree Inn involving the young “crossed man,” Simeon, that causes even Nagaro’s fellow slaves to look askance at him. When Taru hatches a plot to simultaneously demonstrate that Nagaro isn’t crossed while also probing his lingering questions about his escape from the royal palace, things go rapidly from bad to worse…
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