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Mandrágora (novel)
Mandrágora (Mandrake) is a fantastic-themed, adventure novel written by Laura Gallego García.

It was published in June 2003 by Pearson Educación under the publisher of Alhambra. Subsequently, the publishing house Bromera released an edition in Catalan in their collection Esfera. The purpose of the novel is to fuse fantastic and medieval novels with films and television series about teenagers in high schools. As a result, high school stereotyped relations are produced in a medieval castle.

Plot
In the prologue, the execution of a demonic invocation in the basement of King's Hector castle is related. At the beginning of the story, King Hector and Queen Leonora argue about the prolonged disappearance of Cornelius,their wise man, and the argument ends with the search for another one. Zacarias, a wandering renowned wise man, accepts the job under the condition of maintaining his apprentice with him. However, his apprentice is also his daughter Miriam, educated as an erudite, and the queen is not willing to allow that a damsel of her court is not instructed as she should. Therefore, the king establishes that the young girl will have to combine both activities.

The night she arrives at the castle and after receiving her first lesson of court style from housekeeper Brigida, Miriam meets princess Angela and her damsels, Isabela de Rosia and Valeria de Lago, who treat her in a pejorative way because they think she does not belong to aristocrazy. During the dinner, good-looking prince Marco and his colleagues Dario, Rodrigo de Rosia and Santiago show up with certain delay. Miriam starts to feel attraction to the prince, but suddenly, Santiago offends her with an expressive joke, then she hits him in the face and leaves the dinner while the others laugh.

That same night, just before sunrise, Miriam wakes up from a weird nightmare in which a woman was repeating the word mandrake. Before to being able to fall asleep again, she heards the steps of someone who cannot be seen, and starts following whatever he or she is to her father’s room, where suddenly she finds Cornelius rummaging in a bookcase. When Cornelius starts to become aware of the the presence of Miriam, he disappears easily. When the young woman wakes up Zacarias, he examines the bookcase and discovers behind it a secret room full of books about dark magic, which reveals that Cornelious is actually a necromancer.

On the following days, Miriam meets the court and, becoming aware about the differences that separate her from the other youngsters. She and the princess in addition to her damsels become even more enemies, and she continues having nightmares with the woman and investigates about the property of the mandrake.

Shortly after that, a ball is celebrated to commemorate the birthday of Prince Marco —all the nobles of the kingdom and one part of the court of King Simón attend. Just before Miriam arrived, she involuntarily listens a heated argument between King Hector and Count Gregor de Castel Forte, where the former refused to help the latter, creating, as a result,  a general discomfort on both sides. When Miriam enters the ball, she meets the courteous Count Ricardo de Rosia, before meets her father. At that moment, the wise man is assaulted by his counterpart, Nemesius, and both of them get into a dialectic battle of Latin quotations. In the meanwhile, Miriam, eclipsed by the much more sophisticated ladies, is approched by Santiago, they end arguing and she leaves the ball.

While she goes across the corridors, she hears footsteps again and she realises that the noises are made by someone who was inside the walls. Then, she is startled by Santiago, who had followed her, and he suggests her to search in the tower. When they arrive there, they find Zacarías injured. After his recovery, they discover that the attacker, who was Cornelius, had gone to the tower to steal one of his books of necromancy, which was about the invocation of spirits. Before finishing the analysis of the books, Queen Leonora interrupts them and she orders Zacarías to do an astrological chart and she commands Miriam to go to the joust that was about to begin.

The joust proceeded normally until a knight, who was completely covered with an armour and was believed to be dead, fought against prince Marco in order to kill him. When he was trying to give him the death blow, he began to show symptoms of disorientation and he escaped from there. While Zacarías was looking after the prince, Miriam and Santiago follow the knight until the woods, where they lose track of him. Then, a deer, behaving in a very strange way, guides them to him.

Nevertheless, they just can hear how the knight says goodbye to them and then the pieces of the armour fall down and they see that there was nothing inside. They consult Zacarías and he says that Cornelius is planning to create an army of spectral knights, that is to say, souls of dead knights inside their armours, and he needs an alive captain to lead them. When they are about to find the solution to the spell, they discover that the necromancer had torn out some pages of these books and it had caused the rage and indignation of the wise and his daughter.

They both decide to investigate the castle’s passages but then, Prince Marco interrupts them looking for Santiago. Seeing Miriam’s behavior, Santiago realizes that she is in love with the prince, and when he told that to her, she realizes that Santiago is in love with her too. All becomes troubling when the prince asks Miriam for private classes. That provokes a new discussion between Santiago and Miriam due to the fact that he knows that the prince’s intention with those private classes is not to seem illiterate in light of princess Rosalia. After that, Santiago admits that it was him who gave the prince the idea of taking private classes to spend time with Miriam and reconciliate with each other.

Miriam, is decided to win the prince’s heart at any price, and after having dreamed again with the woman, she leaves that night to look for mandrakes to make a love filter. During her search she meets the Guardians of the Forest, a fellowship of silvanas' witches who, after giving her the plant, they reveal her that she is one of them. Miriam returns to the castle being incapable to accept it and decides not to prepare the filter.

At that moment, she hears for the third time someone running stealthily by the castle passages. However, in this occasion it is not Cornelius, it is the belligerent Alexander, Duke of Alta Roca, the most important person of the nobility of the kingdom. When Miriam sees him, she concludes that he is the spectral knights’ captain, and when she runs to notify the breakthrough, she meets Count Ricardo de Rosia. By the time he is informed, both examine the passage and discover Cornelius lab, which connects with the wises' tower and with a secret exit of the castle.

The next day Miriam is requested by the duke of Alta Roca, after having slept until late that morning due to the events of the night before. She is enormously surprised to come across Santiago, who tells her that he is the deceased duke’s son, whose life had been snatched by count Ricardo de Rosia that morning during the duel he had challenged him. Besides, to make the situation even more complicated, the new duke listens to her accidentally when Miriam explains Zacarias what happened, revealing that she is the indirect cause of his father’s death.

At that time, the wise and his daughter are requested by King Hector to appear before him. The King wanted to know what had happened with Cornelius and the duel, and why the necromancer’s laboratory led to the tower in which Zacarias was when he suffered the effects of his poisoning. To save him, Miriam uses the mandrake, what makes her and her father be charged with witchcraft and, therefore, arrested.

While they are arrested, Santiago visits them and hears them wondering the poisoner’s identity, this makes him presume that they are innocent; the reason of his visit is to announce that an army of ghostly knights was invading the kingdom, and he had to depart in order to fight. Shortly after, the housekeeper Brigida and Miriam’s maid, help them escape in a request of the young duke.

While the king’s army loses before the ghostly knights, Miriam heads for the forest to ask for the help of the Forest Guardians and Zacarías heads for the town to look for Cornelius. The royal troops fall back on the castle while the witches form a magical barrier against the ghosts. The captain sends a knight to ask for instructions to Cornelius, who is followed by Zacarías to the guard of necromancer.

Taking advantage of the magical barrier, the king’s soldiers renew their assault, and Santiago discovers that their captain is Count Ricardo de Rosia. When Santiago faces him, the traitor count orders to his spectral henchmen to kill him. However, thanks to the distraction provoked by the fight between Zacarías and Cornelius, the latter loses the control of them and they become disorientated for a moment. The young man take advantage of this moment to leave the count out of combat. Losing their captain alive, the spectral knights elect as its new leader the one who have died more recently between them —Duke Alexandro de Alta Roca. Unable to kill his own son, the late Duke rebels against the necromancer and orders to lay down arms. Meanwhile, Zacarías finally manages to beat Cornelius.

In the end of the narration the destiny of each character is described: the court prefers to forget what happened; Cornelius and Count Ricardo de Rosia are punished and Miriam leaves the castle in order to find her true self.

Chronological and spatial framework
The whole story is developed in three different places: the castle of the fictitious kingdom of King Hector, and the enclosed forest and city, however, it is not clear when and where the story is located. Despite this, the way of life and the historical mentions that are produced frame it in the Medieval Europe.

List of chapters
Like all Laura Gallego García's novels, Mandrágora has foruteen chapters, prologue and epilogue included.
 * Prologue: The necromancer

1. The wise man and his apprentice

2. In the court of King Hector

3. Cornelius' secret library

4. What is my place in the world?

5. The ball

6. The discovered ghost

7. A treacherous joust

8. Ghostly knights

9. The Forest Guardians

10. At the end of the tunnel

11. Monkshood juice and mandrake’s root

12. Prisoners

13. The prohibition

14. The last order of the Captain


 * Epilogue: Goodbye to the court

External links Books’

 * Page in the writer webpage.


 * Book’s page in the editorial webpage.