The Waking Land
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3.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
'Jump on the wagon now, because I think Bates is an author well worth watching' Robin Hobb
~*~*~Wildegarde came bearing a flame in her heart...~*~*~
It's been fourteen years since Elanna was taken hostage. Fourteen years spent being raised by the King who defeated her traitorous father. A man she's come to love like family.
But when the King is killed and Elanna framed for his murder, she must flee for her life.
Her only hope is to reach her homeland, but her father wants to reignite his rebellion and use Elanna as a figurehead. He will tell his followers she is the goddess Wildegarde reborn, a warrior of legend who could make the very earth tremble.
But what no one knows is that magic really does flow through Elanna's veins. And now she must decide whether she'll use her powers to create peace... or to enact revenge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This superior novel blends passionate romance and sweeping magic in the first-person, present-tense narrative of a young woman struggling with her destiny in a magical analogue of 13th-century Britain. Elanna was only five when King Antoine seized her as a hostage to stop her father from plotting revolt. She's 19 now, saturated with the attitudes of the royal court but still drawn to the ancient stone circles where the forbidden magic of her northern homeland lurks. Elanna has been taught to deny everything she is, or could be; she knows that she has a special kinship with plants and has the power to control them, but she has subsumed that into planning a career in botany. All this must change when the king is poisoned, she is accused of the murder, and she flees from smothering safety to the wild, free danger of her potential role as "steward of the land." Throughout, she is aided, tempted, and intoxicated by Lord Jahan, a conflicted sorcerer himself. Watching Elanna's gentle desires merge with the angry needs of her oppressed people is fascinating, and Bates has a delicate, precise touch with human and superhuman relationships.
