Skirmish
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
SKIRMISH
The Terafin lies dead.
No head of a House expects to die peacefully in bed. But the Terafin’s death was at the hands of a demon, in the presence of the Twin Kings, the magi, and the House Council. The Terafin’s assassination is therefore of concern to the whole of the Empire.
House Terafin is without a ruler for the first time since Jewel Markess crossed its threshold. No one intends that it should remain that way, and four members of the House Council have been planning their own ascendance for months—or years.
But the Terafin chose her heir. Jewel Markess swore, in secret, that she would take and hold the House upon the Terafin’s death; it was the only condition upon which the Terafin would allow her to head to the South in the wake of the Kings’ armies.
Summoned home—at great cost—Jewel has left the war in the Dominion, with its multiple armies and demonic enemies, behind. But she now faces a house divided, and a far more personal war.
The battlefield is House Terafin itself.
The stakes are everything she has ever loved.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jewel ATerafin returns home too late to see her mentor alive, but not too late to follow her as ruler of House Terafin. She collects magical allies and servitors: immortals Celleriant and Avandar, the white stag called the Winter King, and three giant, infuriating, talking winged cats. With the help of her den-siblings and a few other friends, Jewel battles threats to her House and city while negotiating hazardous political waters. The magic feels truly magical, luminous and confusing. Unfortunately Jewel's lack of conscious control over her powers often makes her more deus ex machina than active heroine, and the magical creatures upstage the human interactions that were at the heart of earlier books. West capably handles the shift, which almost feels like a change in genre, but for fans who liked the House War series as "mannerpunk" more than epic fantasy, that may not be enough.
