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Category:
Fantasy
Publisher: Double Dragon
ISBN-10: 177150459
Type: Fiction
Pages: 274
Copyright: Nov. 21, 2012
ISBN-13: 9781771158453
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
This fantasy novel is the story of Kyla Cren, a windspeaker, whose search for revenge against the mindstealers responsible for her parents' deaths encounters a haughty but attractive mage with his own deadly scheme for destroying the mindstealers.
Windspeaker Kyla Cren gathers news from the wind and passes on to her village its warnings about mindstealers, creatures that rob human minds, leaving their victims insensible and helpless. Because Kyla's parents were victims of mindstealers, the need for revenge consumes her. But when her attack on two mindstealers results in the rescue of their victim, a powerful mage, that mage thrusts upon her the care of Claid, who appears to be an appealing young child. He's not a child, the Mage Alair declares, and challenges her to discover what Claid really is. That challenge sends her from her native village on a journey into the wider world beyond her isolated valley, a world in which machines have replaced magic. Harrowing experiences teach her more about herself than about Claid and eventually bring her back to Mage Alair, whom she joins in a scheme to destroy the mindstealers, a plan which can result in tragedy but may also lead Kyla to the full truth about Claid's nature and her own.
Excerpt
Late! Kyla raced up the steep path. She should have been at the trysting place at dawn. Hampered by her cotton shift, she had to stop to catch her breath before hurrying on.
Just below the crest of Rial Hill, where the path narrowed and the incline sharpened, Kyla stumbled. A raging red wind rushed around her, pushing her up the last difficult steps onto the flat, bare summit. Raising eddies of dust and pebbles, it tore about, and whipped her long hair around her face, twisting it into a brown blindfold across her eyes.
"No, stop!" she gasped, sinking to her knees. "I'm sorry. I slept right through all the racket Turley Beal's roosters always make."
That meant nothing to the wind. She shouldn't attribute human feelings to it, though she frequently caught herself doing so. As an apprentice, Kyla had argued against the belief of her teacher, Mistress Forythe, that a windspeaker was not only an interpreter of the wind but a lover and confidante as well.
When the wind did not lift her off the ground in a joyous burst of power as it often did, it was hard not to believe that it was angry. When she tried to calm it by singing, it ripped her breath away, and she could only wait until its rage abated.
Her hair fell away from her eyes and drifted back across her shoulders, letting her see that the wind's color was softening. It was safe to stand and sing.
She lifted her voice in a wordless croon that mimicked the wind's own sounds. Now a deep rose, the wind joined its song to hers, and the windspeaking began.
The wind's airy fingers drew on her body pictures of scenes it had passed on its sweep down from the Starmist Mountains and through Noster Valley. It whispered of whipping through trees, scattering leaves, spreading seeds, stirring waters, rippling grassy fields. The scents it had gathered filled her nostrils.
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