The Prize in the Game
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
On the island of Tir Isarnagiri, Gods stalk the land, laying subtle but inescapable dooms upon the feuding kingdoms there.
The lives of four young friends - Conal, Emer, Darag, and Ferdia - have been intertwined since their births. Each is destined for kingship in his own land. But when they unwittingly incur the wrath of the Horse Goddess, they find that ties of friendship - and even love - may not be enough to prevent their countries from attacking each other in a war that will devastate the island - and alter their fates are forever.
Praise for the Trilogy
'Walton writes with an authenticity that never loses heart, a rare combination . . . She can dig down to a true vein of legend and hammer out gold.' Robin Hobb
'The people, the politics, the details of warfare and daily life, all ring as true as the steel sword the heroine wields so doughtily. This is much more than a retooling of the Matter of Britain: it is a fully imagined, living, magical world.' Delia Sherman
'Beautiful and thought-provoking. Walton tells a story set in a world and a history almost like ours, but different enough to be in itself a kind of elvenland.' Poul Anderson
'Head and shoulders and sword-arm above most fantasy. Like a lost memoir from the Dark Age of a subtly different history, tough and unsentimental and all the more touching for that.' Ken MacLeod
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Out of the Celtic twilight, that gold mine of romance lore for contemporary fantasists, comes Walton's retelling of the wooing of Emer, set in the same world as her first two novels, The King's Peaceand The King's Name.This story, an expansion of a passage in The King's Peace, follows a group of noble-born youngsters on the cusp of adult warriorhood, their relationships as intertwined as a Celtic knot, in a brawling, bloodthirsty culture where gods stoop to speak with men. Just as one form shifts to another in Celtic art, Walton constantly shifts the point of view as she traces the early careers of beautiful Elenn and Emer, her younger charioteer sister, princesses of Connat being fostered in Oriel for a year; sardonic Conal; the wild dream-ridden Darag; and gentle Ferdia of Lagin, who loves Darag to his own destruction. When a horrible accident causes the death of a warhorse and in revenge the Beastmother goddess Rhiannon curses Oriel, political alliances shatter and reform among these distrustful kingdoms. It seems that Celts, male and female alike, would rather fight than eat. Walton sure-handedly evokes a primitive realm where the Otherworld seamlessly impinges upon reality, bringing sounds, smells, sorrow, hatred and burning love to life as powerfully as the thrust of a barbed spear. She also captures the terrible beauty of a warrior race in an outworn time, struggling, in Yeats's phrase, to come clear of the eternal nets of wrong and right.
