Year of the Snake

A blind commoner named Ratslava has neither beauty nor gift – only a stolen enchanted flute. With its help, Ratslava weaves songs that captivate the human mind, and because of it, she gets into trouble: she becomes part of the... tribute demanded by a cunning winged serpent. Once he was a man, and now he guards treasures, burns cities, and does not allow his prisoners to live until the next year. His peace is guarded by a fearsome warrior – the leader of the stone horde, whose name thunders from the southern lowlands to the ice of the north – and while the caravan with the tribute goes through the passes, Ratslava thinks about how to save herself. Meanwhile, the exiled prince Hortim wants to rescue his sister, the proud princess Malika, from the dragon's claws, but in trying to find allies, he suffers failure after failure. The road leads Hortim to distant fjords, where he unexpectedly finds what can help him in the forthcoming battles. “History is a wheel that spins in circles: this means their legend is not yet finished.” “Year of the Snake” is the first part of an amazing duology by the author of “Licho. Copper and Honey.”
At the center of the plot is an ambiguous and complex main heroine who has come into possession of a magical flute. Dark Slavic fantasy with elements of familiar epics and legends from our childhood. A world under the yoke of a cruel dragon, to whom people pay tribute. This time, part of the tribute became our heroine. The illustration on the cover and the map on the flyleaf were prepared by the popular artist Tanya Dyurer.