Release date: October 16, 2018
Subgenre: Fairytale retelling
About In The Vanishers' Palace:
From the award-winning author of the Dominion of the Fallen series comes a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast.In a ruined, devastated world, where the earth is poisoned and beings of nightmares roam the land...
A woman, betrayed, terrified, sold into indenture to pay her village's debts and struggling to survive in a spirit world.
A dragon, among the last of her kind, cold and aloof but desperately trying to make a difference.
When failed scholar Yên is sold to Vu Côn, one of the last dragons walking the earth, she expects to be tortured or killed for Vu Côn's amusement.
But Vu Côn, it turns out, has a use for Yên: she needs a scholar to tutor her two unruly children. She takes Yên back to her home, a vast, vertiginous palace-prison where every door can lead to death. Vu Côn seems stern and unbending, but as the days pass Yên comes to see her kinder and caring side. She finds herself dangerously attracted to the dragon who is her master and jailer. In the end, Yên will have to decide where her own happiness lies—and whether it will survive the revelation of Vu Côn’s dark, unspeakable secrets...
Advance praise for In the Vanishers’ Palace“Another stellar offering by Bodard. Her signature intensity is on display in this tale of people (and dragons) struggling to survive in the ruins of an alien conquest. Emotionally complex relationships interweave with richly drawn and deftly nuanced world-building.” —Kate Elliott, author of the Court of Fives series
“A transformative experience. With dragons.” —Fran Wilde, Hugo and Nebula nominated author of The Bone Universe and The Gemworld series
A woman, betrayed, terrified, sold into indenture to pay her village's debts and struggling to survive in a spirit world.
A dragon, among the last of her kind, cold and aloof but desperately trying to make a difference.
When failed scholar Yên is sold to Vu Côn, one of the last dragons walking the earth, she expects to be tortured or killed for Vu Côn's amusement.
But Vu Côn, it turns out, has a use for Yên: she needs a scholar to tutor her two unruly children. She takes Yên back to her home, a vast, vertiginous palace-prison where every door can lead to death. Vu Côn seems stern and unbending, but as the days pass Yên comes to see her kinder and caring side. She finds herself dangerously attracted to the dragon who is her master and jailer. In the end, Yên will have to decide where her own happiness lies—and whether it will survive the revelation of Vu Côn’s dark, unspeakable secrets...
Advance praise for In the Vanishers’ Palace“Another stellar offering by Bodard. Her signature intensity is on display in this tale of people (and dragons) struggling to survive in the ruins of an alien conquest. Emotionally complex relationships interweave with richly drawn and deftly nuanced world-building.” —Kate Elliott, author of the Court of Fives series
“A transformative experience. With dragons.” —Fran Wilde, Hugo and Nebula nominated author of The Bone Universe and The Gemworld series
Excerpt:
There were
two of them, sitting on the edge of her bed, lazily dangling legs over the
smooth sheets, dressed in flamboyant embroidered silk that shimmered with the
light from the room. They looked identical. No, they weren’t. Subtle shifts of
face and hands—harder to work out, because when they both moved, their faces
changed by fragments—revealing antlers in their hair, thin and curled
moustaches, a lion’s snout instead of a nose. Changing shapes between human and
spirit in the blink of an eye. “You’re dragons,” Yên said, flatly.
Their
smiles were dazzling and innocent. “I’m Dan Thông,” the one on the left said.
“And I’m
Dan Liên,” her sibling said. “I’m the younger one.” And, in the face of Yên’s
obvious confusion: “We’re your new students!”
The dragon.
Yên struggled to remember what had happened after the river. Her mind threw up
nothing except darkness, gradually closing in. “I’m going to need some time—”
A door
opened. Yên made the mistake of looking up, and saw it lying at a right angle
from her current position; and, through the doorframe, a corridor where every
wall had windows opening on the vastness of stars. Oh, ancestors, she was going
to be sick....
“Are you
all right? Hey, big sib, did they eat anything today?” Liên asked.
“She,”
Thông said, sternly. “Remember? Mother told us so. And you’re not leaving her
space to breathe.” Thông used gender-neutral pronouns. Liên had an ambiguous
appearance and used female ones.
“Children.”
That was the dragon’s voice, sharp and pointed. “Behave. Respect is due to
teachers, no matter how mortal they might be.” A pause, as her footsteps grew
closer, and then, “Especially if they’re mortal. They’re more easily harmed.”
Yên’s
stomach churned. She gave up on dignity and decorum, and bent over the edge of
the bed, throwing up the meager contents of her stomach. The dragon. Ancestors,
the dragon was going to kill her—
But she
hadn’t, had she. What was she waiting for?
When she
looked up, the dragon was leaning against one of the bedposts, with that same
distant amusement she’d had in the Plague Grove. She wore flowing silk: a
stark, black cloth of a shade that Yên had only seen in Vanishers’ cloth, with
not one clearer patch to mar the deep color. When she moved, it was as if the
night sky shifted and spread around her. What would it be like, to have those
sleeves enfold Yên—those long, thin fingers wrapped around Yên’s shoulders? Yên
found her breath catching in her throat again.
Beautiful.
No. No. She couldn’t afford to think of the dragon that way.
She was Yên’s master, Yên’s executioner. There was no future in desire or love.
“You—” Yên swallowed, pulling herself upward, turning away from the vomit on
the floor lest she be sick again. “You claimed my life.”
The dragon
raised an eyebrow.
Yên forced
herself to say the words, because she might as well burst the abscess.
“Everyone knows dragons kill.”
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About Aliette de Bodard:
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