A Time of War. Katharine Kerr

      

       Voyager

       KATHARINE KERR

      A Time of War

Copyright

      Voyager

      An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by

      HarperCollinsPublishers 1993

      Copyright © Katharine Kerr 1993

      Cover design and illustration by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

      Katharine Kerr asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan–American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non–exclusive, non–transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

      Source ISBN: 9780586211977

      Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007375370

      Version: 2019–10–08

Dedication

      For Richard Wilfred Ashton

      My grandfather

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Pronunciation Notes

The Westlands

Part One: Puer

       Part Two: Amissio

       Part Three: Puella

       Part Four: Via

       Part Five: Carcer

       Part Six: Caput Draconis

       Keep Reading

       Appendices: Historical Notes

       Glossary

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Also by the Author

      About the Publisher

Map

Pronunciation Notes

      Vowels are divided by Deverry scribes into two classes: noble and common. Nobles have two pronunciations; commons, one.

      A as in father when long; a shorter version of the same sound, as in far, when short.

      O as in bone when long; as in pot when short.

      W as the oo in spook when long; as in roof when short.

      Y as the i in machine when long; as the e in butter when short.

      E as in pen.

      I as in pin.

      U as in pun.

      Vowels are generally long in stressed syllables; short in unstressed. Y is the primary exception to this rule. When it appears as the last letter of a word, it is always long whether that syllable is stressed or not.

      Diphthongs generally have one consistent pronunciation.

      AE as the a in mane.

      AI as in aisle.

      AU as the ow in how.

      EO as a combination of eh and oh.

      EW as in Welsh, a combination of eh and oo.

      IE as in pier.

      OE as the oy in boy.

      UI as the North Welsh wy, a combination of oo and ee.

      Note that OI is never a diphthong, but is two distinct sounds, as in carnoic, (KAR-noh-ik).

      Consonants are mostly the same as in English, with these exceptions:

      C is always hard as in cat.

      G is always hard as in get.

      DD is the voiced th as in thin or breathe, but the voicing is more pronounced than in English. It is opposed to TH, the unvoiced sound as in th or breath. (This is the sound that the Greeks called the Celtic tau.)

      R is heavily rolled.

      RH is a voiceless R, approximately pronounced as if it were spelled hr in Deverry proper. In Eldidd, the sound is fast becoming indistinguishable from R.

      DW, GW, and TW are single sounds, as in Gwendolen or twit.

      Y is never a consonant.

      I before a vowel at the beginning of a word is consonantal, as it is in the plural ending -ion, pronounced yawn.

      Doubled consonants are both sounded clearly, unlike