"Brooks, Terry - Jerle Shannara 01 - Ilse Witch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brooks Terry)

life brought tears to his eyes.
He fingered the bracelet absently, remembering.
Thirty years earlier, his mother, as Queen, had authorized
an Elven sailing expedition to undertake a search for a treasure of
great value purported to have survived the Great Wars that had
destroyed the Old World. The impetus for the expedition had been
a dream visited on his mother's seer, an Elven mystic of great power
and widespread acclaim. The dream had foretold of a land of ice, of a
ruined city within the land, and of a safehold in which a treasure of
immeasurable worth lay protected and concealed. This treasure, if
recovered, had the power to change the course of history and the
lives of all who came in contact with it.
The seer had been wary of the dream, for she understood the
power of dreams to deceive. The nature of the treasure sought was
unclear, and its source was vague and uncharted. The land in which
the treasure could be found lay somewhere across the Blue Divide in
territory that no one had ever seen. There were no directions for
reaching it, no instructions for locating it, and little more than a
series of images to describe it. Perhaps, the seer advised, it was a
dream best left alone.
But Allardon's elder brother, Kael Elessedil, had been intrigued
by the possibilities the dream suggested and by the challenge of
searching for an unexplored land. He had embraced the dream as
his destiny, and he had begged his mother to let him go. In the end,
she had relented. Kael Elessedil had been granted his expedition,
and with three sailing ships and their crews under his command, he
had departed.
Just before leaving, his mother had given him the famous blue
Elfstones that had once belonged to Queen Wren. The Elfstones
would guide them to their destination and protect them from harm.
Their magic would bring the Elves safely back home again.
When he left Arborlon to travel to the coast, where the ships his
mother had commissioned were waiting, Kael Elessedil was wearing
the bracelet his brother now held. It was the last time Allardon saw
him. The expedition had never returned. The ships, their crews, his
brother, everything and everyone, had simply vanished. Search
parties had been dispatched, one after the other, but not a trace of
the missing Elves had ever been found.
Allardon exhaled softly. Until now. He stared at the bracelet in
his hand. Until this.
Kael's disappearance had changed everything in the lives of his
family. His mother had never recovered from her eldest son's dis-
appearance, and the last years of her life were spent in a slow wast-
ing away of health and hope as one rescue effort after another failed
and all were finally abandoned. When she died, Allardon became
the King his brother was meant to be and he had never expected to
become.
He thought of the ruined man lying wasted, voiceless, and blind
in the Healer's rooms in Bracken Clell and wondered if his brother
had come home at last.