The newest instalment in Tamora Pierce’s beloved Tortall universe is finally here. Tempests and Slaughter explores the backstory of fan favorite character Numair, and we’re debuting an exclusive clip from the audiobook version.
About ‘Tempests and Slaughter’
Tempests and Slaughter is the first novel in Pierce’s highly anticipated prequel series about Numair Salmalín, the lead supporting character in Pierce’s Immortals quartet. The Immortals, set a decade after the close of the iconic Song of the Lioness series, tells the story of Veralidaine Sarrasri, her introduction to the court of King Jonathan, and her unique and magical relationship with animals and the gods. Numair, one of the most powerful mages in the world, becomes her teacher, her companion, and eventually her lover.
During the course of the series, much of the conflict arises from the shadows of Numair’s past — born Arram Draper, Numair studied at the university in southern Carthak from childhood, and became close friends with Prince Ozorne, another mage student who happened to be a member of the Imperial royal family. A huge falling out forced Arram to change his name and flee for his life, as Ozorne outlived his family’s other heirs to become Emperor of Carthak.
Ozorne is the main villain of the series, particularly after Numair, Daine, and Alanna join a political delegation and visit Carthak to forge a peace, and the old friends face each other once more. Ozorne is a beautiful, terrifying tyrant, who eventually meets an extremely unusual and violent end, but we never got the full details of what went down between him and Arram, why they were friends in the first place, and what shaped both men into the people we met in The Immortals.
Clearly, this is a dynamic that’s been weighing on Pierce’s mind for some time, because she’s been teasing a book about Numair’s childhood as Arram Draper for nearly a decade. Eventually, it was officially announced that there would be an entire Numair trilogy, following his life from age 10 to 20, as a student mage who becomes one of only seven black robes — the highest possible measure of academia and power — in the entire Tortallan universe. Tempests and Slaughter explores Arram’s study of magic and his impossibly close friendships with Ozorne and Varice Kingsford — another character we met in the Immortals — and future books will tell the origin story that Daine learned about him in passing, about how he came to Tortall in exile and lived on the streets, before catching the attention of Alanna and Jonathan.
We’ll have a full review of Tempests and Slaughter later this week, but right now, we’ve got an exclusive excerpt from the audiobook to share. It’s read by actress Ari Meyers, who lends a pleasant tone and evocative character voices to the narration. This clip is the opening of chapter seven, about 18 months into Arram’s advanced classes alongside Varice and Ozorne. He’s about 13 years old, and he and his friends have just graduated from the Lower Academy and are beginning the studies of adult mages. This is Arram’s first lesson with a master he’s long admired, and it takes him into the dangerous and fascinating river that he finds himself often drawn to.
About the author
Tamora Pierce is one of of the most iconic and accessible traditional fantasy authors of the 20th century. She first garnered notice in the 1980s with The Song of the Lioness, a series of young adult books about Alanna of Trebond, a young noble girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to train as a knight, and for over 35 years, Pierce and her characters have shaped the lives of countless young women — and hopefully men — who discovered the meaning of empowerment and feminism within her pages before they had the vocabulary to describe it as such. Pierce is the Judy Blume of high fantasy — her frank and lively novels are as much coming-of-age stories and metaphors for real-world social injustice as they are sword and sorcery adventure tales.
Pierce writes in two separate worlds — Tortall’s universe, which share the coming of age of a variety of girl heroes of different generations: Alanna, Daine, the first legitimate lady knight Keladry, Alanna’s daughter Aly, and, jumping back a few hundred years, Beka Cooper, the ancestor of a current character; and the Emelan universe, which follows a group of unusual young student mages and the family they create together as they’re raised in a temple school. Both universes are medieval-ish, with distinctly different worldbuilding (most prominently the rules of magic, though it’s present in both) with Tortall being really traditional high fantasy and Emelan a more natural setting, closer to historical urban fantasy.
To date, Pierce has published 11 books in the Emelan universe. Tempests and Slaughter is her 20th set in Tortall. Famous for her female warriors, Tempests and Slaughter is also the first of Pierce’s Tortall books to star a male protagonist, though the Emelan books feature a boy as one of the four central point-of-view characters. Many of Pierce’s novels have enjoyed weeks at #1 on the NYT bestsellers list, and she was awarded the Margaret A. Edwards Award, granted by the American Library Association for a body of work with significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature, in 2013.
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