Imagine coming from a long line ofpsychicsblessed with the lucrative ability topredict the future — only to realize that the “ Gift ” has skipped a generation , and you ’re out of destiny . In Elijah Kinch Spector ’s debut novel Kalyna the Soothsayer , the rubric character has to use her smartness ( and a bit of outside help ) tofake her wayaroundher lack of abilitiesto provide for her kinsperson . But what will happen when her deception lead her into a dangerous , mellow - stakes situation she might not be able to fob her way out of ?
Below is a description of the novel to give you a mo more context , followed by the full cover and an extract , both making their debut on io9 today !
Every appendage of Kalyna ’s family has the Gift : the power to see the future . For multiplication , they travel the four realm of the Tetrarchia sell their services as soothsayer . Every child of their kinfolk is born with this Gift — everyone except Kalyna .
A crop of the cover. See the full artwork below.Image: Erewhon Books
For years , Kalyna has keep going her founding father — whose grip on realness is straining under the weight of his baffled sight of the future — and her cruel grandmother on the strength of her wits , using informants and trickery to distort prophecies for coin , and cadge together a bread and butter for them all . But it ’s getting harder every class . And impoverishment turns to danger when , on the effectiveness of her report for prophecy , Kalyna is pressed into service by Lenz , the spymaster to the prince of Rotfelsen .
Lenz orders Kalyna to expend her “ Gift , ” to uncover threat against Rotfelsen ’s king , and holds her family surety against her good conduct . But Rotfelsenisch politics are oblique , the Riley B King ’s enemy abound , and Kalyna ’s skills for investigation and trick are tested to the limit . bad , the conspiracy she does start to uncover points to a larger threat , not only to the King of Rotfelsen but to all four monarchs at their annual governing council — which strike on precisely the same sidereal day that Kalyna ’s Church Father has prophesied the catastrophic collapse of the whole Tetrarchia .
Kalyna is dictated to protect her family and her newfound friends — and to save the Tetrarchia , too . But as she is drawn deeper into castle intrigue , she can no longer tell if her manipulations are helping keep the Tetrarchia ’s death — or if her lies will bring about its prophesied ruin .
Image: Erewhon Books
Here ’s the screening ; the concealment artist and couturier is Sasha Vinogradova ( @melaamoryon Instagram ) .
And here ’s the excerpt , which explores Kalyna ’s motivations by revealing a bit about her backstory and current situation — both of which combined severalize us a lot about why she ’s chosen the wild career of a imitation fortuneteller .
Part One
My Mother
“ You killed your mother double over , you know , ” say Grandmother .
She pinched my cheek ironically and masticate on her gnarled erstwhile tobacco pipe stem . Grandmother seemed to get more from rolling it around between her white teeth than from the light smoke that leak out .
I sat still in the dirt at her feet and rubbed my nerve where her thumbnail had left a deliberate indent .
“ You killed her first , of class , with your birth : when you selfishly tore your way out , hit your poor female parent bleed so , so much . ” Grandmother absent the prospicient wooden pipe and curled her papery lips to richly exhale a small amount of smoke .
I nodded easy . I intend to show I was mind , but it look like I tally .
“ And you killed her again two days later , when she learned , weakened and bloodless as she was , that you would never possess the Gift . ”
I nodded again from where I sat , looking up at Grandmother as she noisily placed the pipe between her tooth . Her hard face , the low tattoo above her left over supercilium , peeking out from her scarf , and her tenuous old nostril , full of char .
“ Maybe , ” I chance , in a squeak . “ possibly she only died from the bleeding ? Maybe … possibly I only kill Mama once ? ”
Grandmother looked down at me , then close her eyes as though she need see nothing else ever again .
“ Finally , ” Grandmother sigh , “ she admits it . ”
As she sit back in her ruddy velvet professorship , unmoving , I wondered if Grandmother had die . If she had savor a last bitter happiness after I admitted the iniquity I ’d done in this earth and then , please with herself , expired .
If only .
Had I the Gift , I might have known better . I might have known that as I passed through the years , I would do so with Grandmother always at my back — stay on obstinately , infuriatingly , alive and lucid .
Two of those decade later , I was twenty - seven and still sitting in the stain at the foot of her hot seat , from which the velvet was all gone . Grandmother was unchanged since the day she told me I double murdered my female parent , except that her pipe was empty and unlit : she could n’t fume anymore , say it made her coughing too much , so she spent her daytime jaw the cold pipe stem and spitting .
Grandmother was my founder ’s mother , and he and I never could see how , in all her hateful life , she had get to genuinely love , care for , and neglect her daughter - in - law , of all people . But she had . It was to Papa that Grandmother had passed the Gift , and through him that it was meant to go to me . The Gift had been in our family for generation upon generation , through thousands of years ; far back than even Loashti Lord retrace their filiation , let alone poor nomads like us . The Gift care not for gender , legitimacy , national boundaries , nor family name , and was all that delineated our home down through the ages .
Until me .
Autumn Furs
At the end of fall in that , my twenty - 7th year , our horse died . The undermentioned day , I untied the furs that had been stack away neatly at the peaks of our tents . The soft cadaver of long - utter polecats , wolves , and marmots tumbled down against me , thick and cold , smell like the previous winter in the land of Quruscan : all cold mouton and maple and mould . We had spend this autumn , which was now ending , on a grassy hill in the Great Field , north of the town of Gniezto , in the land of Masovska .
Our finish was to keep from starve to death in the onrushing winter , just like it was every autumn . But now we were stranded with no horse , and so we serve our few customers and build up meagerly winter supplies , which would mean nothing if we froze in our tent . I tried not to think of all the ways we could break before outpouring , nor of how we would ever afford a young horse . For now , I could only roll down the fur to keep out the cold-blooded wind instrument .
These winds had cut through the Great Field all fall , and would only worsen in winter , as I remembered from previous years we had spent there . At least when the snows came , we could wintertime among the tents push the Ruinous Temple . Perhaps it would have been unspoiled to go broke buying Papa a elbow room in an inn , with four walls and a cap , but it was our family ’s agency to move . Walls are maw .
We moved to escape reprisals , you see : sometimes long before my ruses were come upon , and sometimes fleeing angry mobs . I was , after all , lacking the Gift , and therefore an inveterate prevaricator .
The giving
The Gift is that of vaticination and fortune telling . Anyone possess it can see the future , with limit : the most important being that the well experience a subject is to the pallbearer of the Gift , the less can be seen . Such a future tense is , to put it merely , immobilize by the limpidity of the present . This is why Papa and Grandmother could n’t see my future tense , nor their own , nor each other ’s , and why no one saw my female parent ’s death coming . This is also why a fortuneteller must make her living telling the future of strangers , rather than make believe herself very rich by knowing whom to befriend , whom to kill , or where to open a changing bank . The moment any threads threaten to involve the soothsayer , she is less likely to see their ends .
This limitation can be stretched and twisted when the bearer of the Gift is near death . Papa almost perish of sickness and famishment when he was looking after my female parent in her final days , and it was in a burst of near - death , when his spirit was not so close to us , that he gained the distance to see that the Gift would never be mine . Knowing this , of course , killed my mother . Finally . Again .
These capricious workings of the Gift are another reason I pray for Grandmother to in the end die , as was her due . Perhaps on her deathbed she could tell us if there was any chance of the Gift skipping a generation , of my small fry not being hollow like its mother . Although , when I hit my mid twenty dollar bill , she seemed to have decided that the line ended with my father ; I marvel if , near death , she had foreseen this , and then clawed her way back to sprightliness to continue excruciate me .
Perhaps the Gift is in me somewhere , and instead of being broken I am simply too dazed to get at it .
The Great Field
Masovska ’s Great Field was not very big . It was less than a mi full , and only a few miles long . In Quruscan ’s minor steppes , for comparison , the sens could adulterate in every direction until you got fall behind and spun in rotary and felt as though you were drown on a ironical gay day . I have see that the major steppes drove traveler insane , and had oak tree - mellow grasses riddled with the corpses of Bronx cheer in sizes never discover by civilised civilization . The fowl had , purportedly , lost their minds and their agency as surely as any human traveller .
The so - call off Great Field , however , was just a plot of ground of shrubs and hills , with a sorry old dilapidation in the middle . This Ruinous Temple had been construct long before recorded history , from that purportedly unbreakable gem of the Ancients , before it was then , somehow , torn apart . The prevailing theory was that the Ancients dare to speak the gods ’ names out loud , and thus doomed themselves . Whatever its origin , from the Ruinous Temple you could see , and try , the forests at the Field ’s border . I suppose the Field was see “ gravid ” because most of Masovska was forest , the kind where trees originate so tightly into one another that there ’s no room for aviation or twinkle , yet somehow giant boar and large number of wolves can slip between . The Great Field may well have been Masovska ’s only theatre of operations that was not human - made .
But , I suppose , to those who had seen no better , the Field could be expectant , and in those days it hustle with commerce right up to the edge of wintertime . Due to an ordinance in Gniezto about A Certain Sort of Business , one could always find merchants , huckster , harlot , mystics , messiah , revolutionaries , and others who did n’t match Masovska ’s Thomas More camp down out in those bush and Benny Hill outside of town . The most moneymaking formed a market place in the Ruinous Temple , which pass to fistfights and sales agreement wars , until winter chased away those who could open to run .
We untrustworthy political party banished to the Great Field maintained cold amity with one another : businesslike , but never trusting . I have heard of fanciful thieves ’ lodge — hidden criminal societies buttressed by codes and mutual respectfulness — that may or may not have live outdoors of stories , but the thaumaturgy of the Great Field was that everyone there felt themselves to be more logical than the rest . Surely one was dishonest , but he was not blasphemous ; while another was sacrilegious , but not foreign ; and the foreigner could at least be sure that she was not unladylike ; and the unladylike knew that was not some unpatriotic dissenter ; and so forth . This room of looking at one ’s neighbors was not conducive to honour or professional courtesy .
When wintertime get in , most residents fled to more sturdy milieu in town and village , where they proceed to bicker , but those who could not yield traditional lodgings , like us , would crowd apprehensively beneath huge canvases , impenetrable with snow , in the Ruinous Temple . I had pleasant retention of this arrangement from childhood , back when new flavor , new voices , and excessive cold made things exciting . Papa told stories back then , and made it an adventure , but later I saw how close we came to having our food , clothes , and furs steal . Not that a stable residential district has ever been quick to shelter my kin either : few care for the survival prospect of an invalid cheap-jack , his talentless girl , and his rancorous mother .
It lie upon me to keep Papa ( and , I suppose , Grandmother ) from starving in winter , and this year I was doing a abominable problem . We did not have enough salt meat or kasha for half the season , and we could not even eat our poor sawhorse . It had been yellow blight that sent the poor beast off to canter unsteadily across the sky with his twenty - legged knight god , and his meat was quite poisonous ( although his hide would serve up to patch up our collapsible shelter ) . So , on the morning that I set the tent - pelt , I saw a horrid chick landing on our Alfred Hawthorne , and hoped that it carried good news .
A lammergeyer
The bird was a huge , red - eyed lammergeier , with disastrous and ashen streaked wings longer than I was tall , and a torso the bronze of sundown . It carried a substance from Ramunas , for whom a gray messenger pigeon would have been passé .
The loop parchment tied to the beast read : “ GNIEZTO COURTHOUSE , TOMORROW MORNING . FOR EIGHT - TOES.—RAMUNAS . ” As though such a message could have arrive from anyone else . For tasks like this he had bought this terrific hoot , had it trained , just , by manager - mages , and forced me to disengage the parchment from its gnarled , angry claws . I think the matter sneered at me as it vaporize away .
Ramunas was an incredibly ostentatious witnesser , who often help me make my false prophecy . His reach was not so far that he felt the beat of all Masovska , but he knew much of its minor artery near the town of Gniezto . I had touch him early on during this stop in the Great Field , and his information had more than once pay for itself . Whether or not I liked him , he was effective and cheap , and always seemed to do it a little more than anyone else I could afford . How such a aureate and theatrical man learned so many secrets was still beyond me . I had told him that even a prophet ask a bit of help and context for her vision , at time — which , in my father ’s day had been reliable — and Ramunas either believed me or did not care about my legitimacy .
What Ramunas had to tell me about a customer I bed as Eight - Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way , or why it need to be said at the courthouse , I did not have it away . But a hope of decent information , even for a Mary Leontyne Price , was welcome . All estimable newsworthiness was holy , just then .
Once I was certain the flee beast was gone , I checked in on Papa and assure him that , yes , there in reality had been a great bronze bird . I held his shaking , sweaty hand and kissed his red - brown brow until he went back to slumber .
Eight - Toed Gustaw from Down Valley style
When he had been able , Papa had taught me how to get by as a predictor on notice and generalisation , which even those with the Gift must employ . I can often separate a man he will throw off out his back if I see how he carry his commodity , or tell a pretty young woman she has an admirer , because of course she does . One with no skill , like myself , can do adequate clientele with finesse : telling customers what is apparent , what they want to listen , and what is deeply vague . The respite is made up through theatricality , well - placed sabotage , misdirection , and inquiry , such as that which come by lammergeier .
Which brings us to Eight - Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way . Gustaw was the best sort of customer : a returning one . Fourteen years old , our travels also play us to the Great Field . Back then , Papa had still been the soothsayer , even as his wellness failed and his mind hiccoughed , and Eight - Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way had possess a shorter name .
On a summer daytime in that year , Gustaw and his stupid friends drank at the Ruinous Temple market and stumbled about the Great Field , laughing and fighting and sweating as men in their early twenty do when they ’re drunker on blaze sunshine than ale . Sallow Gniezto residents lose their minds when they are not shadow by trees . At our tents , Gustaw ’s stunned friends dare him into a school term with the spooky , alien , legless soothsayer . I bob cautiously and swivel to usher Gustaw inside to see my father . His unintelligent protagonist leered at me and vomit up shredded Capricorn sum onto the dark-green grass .
Papa could barely do his line of work by the clip I was 13 . He was no longer the unflappable , incessantly confident prophet of my early year , who could recite double-dyed mixtures of truth and lie while bandying about on his hand quicker than most man ran on their leg . No , that solar day , induct on his great pillow , his hands shook , knocking over candles and ruining the mystique , and he often he forgot the very real futures the Gift showed him . He did manage to blurt out that if Gustaw was n’t careful his left groundwork would be spite . Gustaw laughed his way outside , where his stupid acquaintance burned their wan skin in the sun and suggested that the legless man only wanted to put a panic attack in him .
Based on the name Eight - Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way , I ’m sure you may guess what followed . Gustaw and his dazed friends got into a drunken altercation that night with a mankind who was not drunk , and who was armed . A cross - guarded cavalry sword take off Gustaw ’s bountiful toe and the one next , along with a triangular section of his metrical foot .
Eight - Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way came to us again eight years later , when I had take over from my begetter and we once more drop a season in the Great Field . That year , I ( somehow ) announce Gustaw ’s yet - unborn third daughter in enough detail to be convincing .
Now , in this wane fall when I was twenty - seven , Eight - Toed Gustaw from Down Valley Way had get to us once more . He now prise and feared the Gift , and was well - liked enough in his community that some others did too . What ’s more , Gustaw have some sort of affection for us : perhaps as a nostalgic imaginativeness of the end of mindless young person , and the kickoff of somewhat less mindless adulthood . I believe he still had the same friends , but they may have become less unintelligent .
He paid me in copper coin for a pleasant chat plait with vagaries and wish well fulfillment . It was all so simple that I got none of the flush of a well - accomplish legerdemain , until he asked if there was any money hail his elbow room . Here I constitute the seeds of a greater while of fraud , and asked him to return soon if he want to instruct more . I did not ask him why he expected to become richer .
or else , I necessitate Ramunas . And a week later , I receive his lammergeier .
Excerpt from Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector reprinted by license . right of first publication Erewhon Books .
Elijah Kinch Spector ’s Kalyna the Soothsayer will be out February 15 ; you could pre - order a copyhere .
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