The Mountain Crown
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Méka must capture a king dragon, or die trying.
War between the island states of Kattaka and Mazemoor has left no one unscathed. Méka’s nomadic people, the Ba’Suon, were driven from their homeland by the Kattakans. Those who remained were forced to live under the Kattakan yoke, to serve their greed for gold alongside the dragons with whom the Ba’Suon share an empathic connection.
A decade later and under a fragile truce, Méka returns home from her exile for an ancient, necessary rite: gathering a king dragon of the Crown Mountains to maintain balance in the wild country. But Méka’s act of compassion toward an imprisoned dragon and Lilley, a Kattakan veteran of the war, soon draws the ire of the imperialistic authorities. They order the unwelcome addition of an enigmatic Ba’Suon traitor named Raka to accompany Méka and Lilley to the mountains.
The journey is filled with dangers both within and without. As conflict threatens to reignite, the survival of the Ba’Suon people, their dragons, and the land itself will depend on the decisions – defiant or compliant – that Méka and her companions choose to make. But not even Méka, kin to the great dragons of the North, can anticipate the depth of the consequences to her world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lowachee's fun if fussy latest (after Under the Silence) follows a dragoneer forced to serve under her people's conquerors. Méka is a Ba'Suon, one who is in tune with the land and its suon, or dragons. The people of the islands of Ishia, once her home, lived at peace with the suon until the Kattakans invaded in search of gold, and sent the Ba'Suon into exile. After 10 years, Méka returns to her place of birth to gather a king suon to prevent the destruction that comes when too many kings occupy the same region. The head of Ishia's Fortune City, Lord Shearoji, allows this but orders Méka and Lilley, the bond servant she freed, to bring the king suon back to him for financial gain. Shearoji sends Raka, one of his men and a Ba'Suon traitor, to go with them to ensure his will is enforced. But the suppressed rage of so many years has taken its toll on Ba'Suon and dragons both. The choices Méka, Lilley, and Raka make will determine the survival of the land and its inhabitants. There's plenty of enjoyment to be had here, but the plot occasionally becomes difficult to follow thanks to Lowachee's verbose prose and overreliance on metaphor. Still, for die-hard fans of dragon-riding books, this is sure to satisfy.
