"Brown,.Mary.-.Unicorn's.Ring.1.-.1986.-.Unlikely.Ones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Mary)

The Unlikely Ones
Mary Brown

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Best known for her popular quest fantasies, Mary Brown also wrote the historical
romances Playing the Jack and The Heart has Its Reasons, the post-apocalyptic
fantasy novel Strange Deliverance, and a fourth Unicorn Ring novel, Dragonne's
Eg. Several of her fantasy novels were selected by the American Library
Association for their Best Books for Young Adults list, by the New York Public
Library for their annual list of Books for the Teen Age, and by the Young Adult
Library Services Association for their Best Books for Young Adults list. Before
becoming a full-time writer, she had been an artist's model, actress, caterer,
and store clerk. She wrote her novels in a home located high in the scenic
mountains of Spain, which she shared with her husband, cats, tortoises, and
assorted fish and pigeons. Her death in 1999 was a loss to the many readers of
her quirky and fascinating brand of fantasy.

The Beginning
The Thief in the Night
The cave itself was cosy enough as caves go: sandy floor, reasonably
draught-proof, convenient ledges for storing treasure, a rain/dew pond just
outside, a southerly aspect and an excellent landing strip adjacent, but the
occupant was definitely not at his best and the central heating in his belly not
functioning as it should. Granted he must have been all of two hundred and fifty
years old but that was merely a youngling in dragon-years, measuring as he did a
man-and-a-half (Western Hominid Standard) excluding tail, and at his age he
should have been flowing with fiery, red health.
He was not. He was blue, and that was not good. Dragons may be red, scarlet,
crimson, vermilion, rose-madder at a pinch, purple, gold, silver, orange,
yellow, even certain shades of greenЧbut not blue.
He lay in a muddled heap on the cave floor, not even bothering to arrange his
tail into one of the regulation turns, hitches or knots, listlessly turning over
and over the pile of pebbles that heaped the space before him. The dull,
bluish-purple glow that emanated from his scales illuminated only dimly the
confines of the cave but made mock-amethysts and sham-sapphires of the grey and
white stones he sorted: a semiprecious illusion. Nothing could transform them
into a ruby from a sacred temple of Ind, an emerald from the rainforests of
Amazonia; a diamond from the Great Desert, a sapphire from the Southern Seas or
a great, glowing pearl from the oyster-mouth of the grey Northern River. And
that was the trouble: they were pebbles, nothing more, the insulting substitute
left by The Thief . . .
For the three thousand two hundred and fifty-fifth time or so he went over in
his mind that dreadful day, some seven years ago, when he had sallied forth all
unsuspecting for the Year's-Turn Feast. Over the few years previously spent
gold-and-silver-gathering in this retrospectively accursed, damp, boggy, sunless
island, he had made the cave his principal headquarters and had twice-yearly,
shortest day and longest, received his tribute of roast mutton, pork or beef
from the village below (after he had explained that raw maidens were not in his
line). He had good-humouredly tolerated the current yokel dragon-slayer