"Brooks, Terry - Heritage 01 - The Scions of Shannara" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brooks Terry)

Vale, nothing like the forested hamlet that he had grown up in.
It lacked the purity of the trees and streams, the solitude, the
sense of timeless ease that graced life in the Vale. It knew noth-
ing of that life and couldn't have cared less. But that didn't
matter to Par. He liked the city anyway. There was nothing to
say that he had to choose between the two, after all. There wasn't
any reason he couldn't appreciate both.

cole, of course, didn't agree. cole saw it quite differently. He
saw Varfleet as nothing more than an outlaw city at the edge of
Federation rule, a den of miscreants, a place where one could
get away with anything, hi all of Callahom, in all of the entire
Southland for that matter, there was no place worse. cole hated
the city.

Voices and the clink of glasses drifted out of the darkness
behind him, the sounds of the ale house breaking free of the
front room momentarily as a door was opened, then disappear-
ing again as it was closed. Par turned. His brother moved care-
fully down the hallway, nearly faceless in the gloom.

"It's almost time," cole said when he reached his brother.

Par nodded. He looked small and slender next to cole, who
was a big, strong youth with blunt features and mud-colored
hair. A stranger would not have thought them brothers. cole
looked a typical Valeman, tanned and rough, with enormous
hands and feet. The feet were an ongoing joke. Par was fond of
comparing them to a duck's. Par was slight and fair, his own
features unmistakably Elven from the sharply pointed ears and
brows to the high, narrow bones of his face. There was a time
when the Elven blood had been all but bred out of the line, the
result of generations of Ohmsfords living in the Vale. But four
generations back (so his father had told him) his great-great-
grandfather had returned to the Westland and the Elves,
married an Elven girl, and produced a son and a daughter. The
son had married another Elven girl, and for reasons never made
clear the young couple who would become Par's great-
grandparents had returned to the Vale, thereby infusing a fresh
supply of Elven blood back into the Ohmsford line. Even then,
many members of the family showed nothing of then- mixed
heritage; cole and his parents Jaralan and Mirianna were ex-
amples. Par's bloodlines, on the other hand, were immediately
evident.

Being recognizable in this way, unfortunately, was not nec-

8 The Scions of Shannara

essarily desirable. While in Varfleet, Par disguised his features,