"Berg,.Carol.-.D'arnath.1.-.Son.Of.Avonar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Berg Carol)

young minds, who inculcate our values and teach self-discipline, who shore up
our freedoms, remind us of the lessons of history, and ensure the future of the
arts. For a few in particular・em>Elizabeth Paar and Carol Roehl, Jane Conway,
Marcia Stefan, Sister Francesco, Sister Anselma, Robert Patten, David Minter,
Katherine Brown・em>and many others at OLV and Nolan and Rice, who inspired, who
shared their devotion to art and literature, or who just flat expected their
students to do the difficult, the boring, and the necessary in the name of
learning.



CHAPTER 1
Midsummer痴 Day・em>Year 14 in the reign of King Evard
The dawn wind teased at my old red shawl as I scrambled up the last steep pitch
of the crescent-shaped headland the villagers called Rif Paltarre・Poacher痴
Ridge. A brisk walk to the eastern edge and I seated myself on a throne of rock
as if I were a Leiran duchess attending a midsummer fete. But whereas my
girlhood friends might celebrate the longest day of the year by watching
jugglers, fire-eaters, and tittering ladies stepping through the spiritless
mimicry they called 途ustic dances,・I beheld color and shape being born from a
vast and silent wilderness of gray.
Stretching west for two hundred leagues, stood the snowcapped peaks of the
Dorian Wall, their brilliant rose brightening to eye-searing white. To the north
swelled the ocean of dark green forest. To the east the ground fell away gently
in a stone-bordered patchwork of meadows and farmland to the bronze ripples of
the Dun River and the haze-shrouded village of Dunfarrie squatting on its banks.
It was a splendid desolation.
As the light grew, I stuffed my water flask into the cloth bag hanging from my
belt, snugged the rags I壇 wrapped about my hands, and took up the true business
of the day・hunting dye plants to barter in the village. The first lesson I壇
learned on coming to Dunfarrie, when I had scarcely known that food grew in the
ground, much less that it must be coddled and coaxed and worried over, was that
those whose bellies are pinched by hunger know nothing of holidays.
In early afternoon, back aching, hands dirty and sore despite the rags, I
abandoned the glare and blustering wind of the heights for a shady clearing of
pine trees and oak scrub. I ate a few dried figs, hard and half turned to sugar,
and refilled my water flask at the stream that mumbled through the weedy
clearing, trying to decide whether to return to the ridge top to dig another
bundle of scabwort roots or head down to the cottage and the uncountable tasks
that needed doing before sunset.
A spider skittered across the scuffed leather of my boot. A jay screeched.
Beyond the stream, something large rustled the bracken熔ne of Evard痴 deer, no
doubt. No predators, human or beast, frequented the wooded hills behind Jonah痴
cottage. Nor did enemy soldiers. Leire痴 current battles were being waged in
faraway Iskeran. Nor did sorcerous enchantments lurk in the wild forest,
threatening to corrupt the soul. As the priests and people of the Four Realms
had demanded for four hundred and fifty years, the dark arts and those who
practiced them had been exterminated.
I lifted my head. The rustling came louder, closer, and now accompanied by a
muted, rhythmic pounding. Running footsteps・human・that halted somewhere in the