The Last Hawk
Rating
The Last Hawk is Catherine Asaro's third novel of the Skolian Empire, an interstellar civilization spanning hundreds of worlds and thousands of years. Each book approaches the Empire and a member of the ruling family from a different angle, or at a different moment in future history. Now, in The Last Hawk, Asaro tells the tale of the lost heir to the Empire. Fleeing the heat of battle in a wounded spacecraft, Kelric crash-lands on a proscribed planet where a matriarchy rules through the medium of a complex game. The women in power help to heal him, but destroy his ship and determine that he can never leave - for his knowledge of their world, if revealed to the Empire, would cause the rapid fall of their civilization. And so his rescue turns into an imprisonment of years, decades, a time in which he finds love and a challenging place in the universal game.