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Siegel, Jan The Dragon Charmer ISBN 13: 9780345439024

The Dragon Charmer - Hardcover

 
9780345439024: The Dragon Charmer
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In the enchanting novel Prospero's Children, Jan Siegel introduced an extraordinary heroine and the lushly evocative world of wonders and terrors that quickly enveloped her normal adolescent life. Now Siegel summons us back to the magic with the continuing story of Fern Capel--and the remarkable power of her extraordinary Gift . . .

After surviving an amazing, terrifying summer twelve years ago, Fern makes a fateful decision: to deny the mystical powers that pulse through her family's past. Yearning for a simple, quiet life, she decides to marry a man twenty years her senior, a man who insists they wed at the Capels' summer house in Yarrowdale, a place swelling with mood, marvel, and magic. For when Fern returns there with her best friend, Gaynor, ancient, sinister forces reawaken.

Yet Fern has had enough: Enough of running from her fate, enough of hiding from her Gift. As she turns to face her destiny, the real world falls away, and Fern is once again swept into another land, removed from Time, void of comfort. It will take all her skill and daring to fight her way back to the present and save the people she loves from the ever-growing danger that threatens to destroy them. And to her utmost surprise, the key to survival is a dragon with the capacity to rule the world . . . but who will relinquish it all to one man.

Jan Siegel has created an intense, fascinating world. To surrender yourself under her captivating spell is to remember how remarkably powerful a literary voyage can be.

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About the Author:
Jan Siegel is also the author of Prospero's Children. She has already lived through one lifetime--during which she traveled the world and supported herself through a variety of professions, including that of actress, barmaid, garage hand, laboratory assistant, journalist, and model. Her new life is devoted to her writing, but she also finds time to ride, ski, and attend the opera.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
FIF have known many battles, many defeats. I have been a fugitive, hiding in the hollow hills, spinning the blood-magic only in the dark. The children of the north ruled my kingdom, and the Oldest Spirit hunted me with the Hounds of Arawn, and I fled from them riding on a giant owl, over the edge of being, out of the world, out of Time, to this place that was in the very beginning. Only the great birds come here, and a few other strays who crossed the boundary in the days when the barrier between worlds was thinner, and have never returned. But the witchkind may find the way, in desperation or need, and then there is no going back, and no going forward. So I dwell here, in the cave beneath the Tree, I and another who eluded persecution or senility, beyond the reach of the past. Awaiting a new future.

This is the Ancient of Trees, older than history, older than memory—the Tree of Life, whose branches uphold Middle-Earth and whose roots reach down into the deeps of the Underworld. And maybe once it grew in an orchard behind a high wall, and the apples of Good and Evil hung from its bough. No apples hang there now, but in due season it bears other fruit. The heads of the dead, which swell and ripen on their stems until the eyes open and the lips writhe, and sap drips from each truncated gorge. We can hear them muttering sometimes, louder than the wind. And then a storm will come and shake the Tree until they fall, pounding the earth like hail, and the wild hog will follow, rooting in the heaps with its tusks, glutting itself on windfalls, and the sound of its crunching carries even to the cave below. Perhaps apples fell there, once upon a time, but the wild hog does not notice the difference, or care. All who have done evil in their lives must hang a season on that Tree, or so they say; yet who among us has not done evil, some time or other? Tell me that!

You may think this is all mere fancy, the delusions of a mind warped with age and power. Come walk with me then, under the Tree, and you will see the uneaten heads rotting on the ground, and the white grubs that crawl into each open ear and lay their eggs in the shelter of the skull, and the mouths that twitch and gape until the last of the brain has been nibbled away. I saw my sister once, hanging on a low branch. Oh, not my sister Sysselore—my sister in power, my sister in kind—I mean my blood-sister, my rival, my twin. Morgun. She ripened into beauty like a pale fruit, milky skinned, raven haired, but when her eyes opened they were cold, and bitterness dragged at her features. “You will hang here, too,” she said to me, “one day.” The heads often talk to you, whether they know you or not. I suppose talk is all they can manage. I saw another that I recognized, not so long ago. We had had great hopes of her once, but she would not listen. A famine devoured her from within. I remember she had bewitched her hair so that it grew unnaturally long, and it brushed against my brow like some clinging creeper. It was wet not with sap but with water, though we had had no rain, and her budding face, still only half-formed, had a waxy gleam like the faces of the drowned. I meant to pass by again when her eyes had opened, but I was watching the smoke to see what went on in the world, and it slipped my mind.

Time is not, where we are. I may have spent centuries staring into the spellfire, seeing the tide of life sweeping by, but there are no years to measure here: only the slow unrelenting heartbeat of the Tree. Sysselore and I grate one another with words, recycling old arguments, great debates that have long degenerated into pettiness, sharp exchanges whose edges are blunted with use. We know the pattern of every dispute. She has grown thin with wear, a skeleton scantily clad in flesh; the skin that was formerly peach-golden is pallid and threaded with visible veins, a blue webbing over her arms and throat. When she sulks, as she often does, you can see the grinning lines of her skull mocking her tight mouth. She has come a long way from that enchanted island set in the sapphire seas of her youth. Syrcé they named her then, Seersay the Wise, since Wise is an epithet more courteous than others they might have chosen, and it is always prudent to flatter the Gifted. She used to turn men into pigs, by way of amusement.

“Why pigs?” I asked her, listening to the wild hog grunting and snorting around the bole of the Tree.

“Laziness,” she said. “That was their true nature, so it took very little effort.”

She is worn thin while I have swollen with my stored-up powers like the queen of a termite mound. I save my Gift, hoarding it like misers’ gold, watching in the smoke for my time to come round again. We are two who must be three, the magic number, the coven number. Someday she will be there, the she for whom we wait, and we will steal her soul away and bind her to us, versing her in our ways, casting her in our mold, and then we will return, over the borderland into reality, and the long-lost kingdom of Logrèz will be mine at last.

She felt it only for an instant, like a cold prickling on the back of her neck: the awareness that she was being watched. Not watched in the ordinary sense or even spied on, but surveyed through occult eyes, her image dancing in a flame or refracted through a crystal prism. She didn’t know how she knew, only that it was one of many instincts lurking in the substratum of her mind, waiting their moment to nudge at her thought. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. The sensation was gone so quickly she almost believed she might have imagined it, but her pleasure in the drive was over. For her, Yorkshire would always be haunted. “Fern—” her companion was talking to her, but she had not registered a word “—Fern, are you listening to me?”

“Yes. Sorry. What did you say?”

“If you’d been listening, you wouldn’t have to ask. I never saw you so abstracted. I was just wondering why you should want to do the deed in Yarrowdale, when you don’t even like the place.”

“I don’t dislike it: it isn’t that. It’s a tiny village miles from anywhere: short stroll to a windswept beach, short scramble to a windswept moor. You can freeze your bum off in the North Sea or go for bracing walks in frightful weather. The countryside is scenic—if you like the countryside. I’m a city girl.”

“I know. So why—?”

“Marcus, of course. He thinks Yarrowdale is quaint. Characterful village church, friendly local vicar. Anyway, it’s a good excuse not to have so many guests. You tell people you’re doing it quietly, in the country, and they aren’t offended not to be invited. And of those you do invite, lots of them won’t come. It’s too far to trek just to stay in a drafty pub and drink champagne in the rain.”

“Sounds like a song,” said Gaynor Mobberley. “Champagne in the rain.” And: “Why do you always do what Marcus wants?”

“I’m going to marry him,” Fern retorted. “I want to please him. Naturally.”

“If you were in love with him,” said Gaynor, “you wouldn’t be half so conscientious about pleasing him all the time.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say.”

“Maybe. Best friends have a special license to say horrible things, if it’s really necessary.”

“I like him,” Fern said after a long pause. “That’s much more important than love.”

“I like him, too. He’s clever and witty and very good company and quite attractive considering he’s going a bit thin on top. That doesn’t mean I want to marry him. Besides, he’s twenty years older than you.”

“Eighteen. I prefer older men. With the young ones you don’t know what they’ll look like when they hit forty. It could be a nasty shock. The older men have passed the danger point so you know the worst already.”

“Now you’re being frivolous. I just don’t understand why you can’t wait until you fall in love with someone.”

Fern gave a shivery laugh. “That’s like . . . oh, waiting for a shooting star to fall in your lap, or looking for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.”

“Cynic.”

“No. I’m not a cynic. It’s simply that I accept the impossibility of romantic idealism.”

“Do you remember that time in Wales?” said her friend, harking back unfairly to college days. “Morwenna Rhys gave that party at her parents house on the bay, and we all got totally drunk, and you rushed down the beach in your best dress straight into the sea. I can still see you running through the waves, and the moonlight on the foam, and your skirt flying. You looked so wild, almost eldritch. Not my cool, sophisticated Fern.”

“Everyone has to act out of character sometimes. It’s like taking your clothes off: you feel free without your character but very naked, unprotected. Unfinished. So you get dressed again—you put on yourself—and then you know who you are.”

Gaynor appeared unconvinced, but an approaching road junction caused a diversion. Fern had forgotten the way, and they stopped to consult a map. “Who’ll be there?” Gaynor enquired when they resumed their route. “When we arrive, I mean.”

“Only my brother. I asked Abby to keep Dad in London until the day before the wedding. He’d only worry about details and get fussed, and I don’t think I could take it. I can deal with any last minute hitches. Will never fusses.”

“What’s he doing now? I haven’t seen him for years.”

“Postgrad at York. Some aspect of art history. He sp...

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  • PublisherDel Rey
  • Publication date2001
  • ISBN 10 0345439023
  • ISBN 13 9780345439024
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages384
  • Rating

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