"L. Warren Douglas - The Veil of Years 3 - Isle Beyond Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglas L Warren)

embers or the eye of a demon.

"Where have you been?" snappedMa . "I have a task for you."

Goddesses' wishes and human ones seldom jibed, and Pierrette had no reason to welcome such words.
She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling a sudden chill.

"You won't like it at all,"Ma said, confirming the girl's silent unease.

"Show me," Pierrette said. "Let me make up my own mind."

The goddess knelt by the pool's edge, and Pierrette lowered herself to the mossy verge.Ma roiled the
water, and again an image formed beneath the ripples . . .
***

Like soaring gulls, goddess and girl hovered high above the black, jutting crags of an island, a truncated
volcanic cone awash in waves. It was a great ring many miles in extent, and leaden swells broke against
it. Lashing winds swept away a froth of white spume.

"Follow me,"Ma commanded in a gull's shrill voice. She tilted her wings and dropped swiftly toward the
scarps and across . . . into a world unsuspected from outside. Ring after ring of concentric islands lay
within a serene, deep blue lagoon, remnants of eruptions and explosions millennia past. Verdant forests
clothed the inner slopes of the immense caldera. A patchwork of green, gold, and russet fields covered
the islands like the plaid of a fine Gaulish cloak. Houses of imported marble lay scattered like handsful of
dice across cultivated land and pasture, linked by the threads of roads and lanes.
 Pierrette knew where she wasтАФthe kingdom known as the Fortunate Isles, pulled from the realm of
time's passage by the sorcerer-king Minho more than two thousand years before, when the empire of the
Cretan Bull was buried in flaming ash and flowing lava.

Her hard-working seagull's heart lightened.Ma 's task could not be too terrible: Minho was handsome
and charming. Though she had never seen him in the flesh, she was in love with him. "Marry me!" he had
begged her twice before. "Rule with me, and never grow old." She remembered herself seated on a
throne next to Minho's own. She was laughing, calling upon Taranis, god of thunderstorms, to roil the
waters of Minho's placid sea, commanding winds to shake his pear and olive trees, which bore fruit
regardless of season. From her fingertips sparked lightning bolts that rose to dance among the swelling
clouds . . . She had been only five, when she had that vision. It had not really happenedтАФyet.

At fourteen, testing her expanding skill at magic, she visited Minho again, arriving on a vessel made of
clouds, clothing herself in mist and vapor, moonbeams and the green and gold of spring irises. That time,
she begged the king to free her mentor, the mage Anselm, from the spell that held him trapped in his keep
atop the cliffs of the Eagle's beak. Again, Minho had offered her his kingdom, and again, she
refusedтАФbut his stolen kiss had remained on her virgin lips. Too distraught to recreate her vehicle from
the clouds and mists, she had fled on familiar magpie's wings.

Now, eager to see Minho again, she swept over the central island, a flat-topped cone, toward the
swelling black-and-vermilion columns of his palace.

"Wait!" screechedMa , winging in front of her. "Don't alert the king of our presence."

"But I want to see him . . ."