"Rawn, Melanie - Dragon Prince 3 - Sunrunners Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

Chapter Two





721: Castle Crag



On taking possession of Castle Crag in the spring of 720, Ostvel had set about several formidable tasksЧ the most immediate of which was to learn his way around the labyrinthine keep..

After spending much of his youth at Goddess Keep, an imposing and logical structure, he had become chief steward of Stronghold, a castle built for defense with a correspondingly efficient design. Skybowl, his holding for fourteen winters, was a small place without need or opportunity for eccentricities. But his new home was something else again.

Cut into the side of cliffs above the Faolain River and built out from those cliffs in cantilevered overhangs, Castle Crag was a maze of rooms, halls, suites, staircases, and the most exquisite oratory in all thirteen princedoms. Ostvel had taken his first tour of the place guided by a small battalion of functionaries, all eager to point out the wonders of his or her own domain within the keep. Their chatter had prevented him from gaining any reliable knowledge of where he was, let alone where he was being led.

That night he had frowned over his problem, knowing that the next day would show him as ignorant of the castle's environs as he had been at the moment he'd arrived. The servants, he knew, would be watching for mistakes; that afternoon Alasen had lost her way after what she suspected was purposeful misdirection on the part of a page. At midnight therefore he had enlisted her and their Sunrunner, an old friend of his named Donate, in a secret expedition through the twisting corridors. Each of them chose an essential location. Armed with a collection of trinketsЧbronze, gold, silver, copper, blue

ceramicЧprivately color-coded to each destination, they spent the rest of the night seeking out the best routes and at all important junctures left behind a vase, a candlestick, a figurine, a dish on convenient tables and shelves. "Copper to the kitchens," Alasen had recited as they finally fell into bed, exhausted but well-pleased with their trick. "Gold to your library, silver to mine, bronze to the great hall, blue to the gardens. But, Ostvel, what if somebody moves everything tomorrow morning?"

"You forget, my princess, that when you began rearranging our suite you ordered that anything we changed or added be touched only to clean it." "Did I?" She chuckled. "That was clever of me." The next morning all their signposts were still in position. With supreme confidence they strode through their new home. The servants were astounded. Donate even waited three whole days before rearranging the entire system. But the joke had been on the Sunrunner; he was the one who had forgotten the direct route to the back gardens.

Now, a year and a half later, Ostvel rarely needed a glance at the trinkets to remind him where he was. Still, every so often he found himself in an unfamiliar corridor without the faintest idea which hallway led where. On one of these confused wanderings, too embarrassed to ask directions from servants, he had 'discovered the archives.

He never ceased being grateful to the impulse from the Goddesss that had made him go through the archives himself rather than send them untouched to Stronghold or Dragon's Rest. The records of five High PrincesЧ Roelstra and his ancestorsЧand a Regent of Princemarch were stored at Castle Crag, enough parchment to fill a square measure of bookshelves. He had been working methodically back through them since finding the locked door that led into a series of dark, dry chambers. Into history. At first he had thought to have Alasen help him, but one of his first discoveries had quashed that notion immediately. For in the archives he had found Pandsala's precise, logical, oh-so-secret list of her murders.

Rohan had told him the bare minimum of facts: that during her regency Pandsala had removed several persons she considered detrimental to Pol's future as High

Prince. The disclosure had been brief and bitter. Ostvel had not pursued the matter despite horrified curiosity about what Pandsala had done and how. But he had at last understood why she was a forbidden topic around Rohan and Sioned, and why they had not gone to Castle Crag for her ritual burning.

Roelstra's daughters, he told himself, shaking his head as he locked his library door and sat down at the huge slate-topped desk. One of a score of keys unlocked yet another coffer of most-secret records. The lesser archives were being sorted by trusted scribes. Treaties, trade agreements, marriage contracts, the everyday effluvia of running a large and powerful princedom; none that held any dangers. But all that was in the locked coffers Ostvel read himself. Roelstra's daughters, he thought again; the labeled dates told him that within would be Roelstra's concealed records about lanthe, Feruche, and Rohan.

And perhaps what he feared to find: record of Pol's true ancestry.

He flinched when rusted hinges squealed a protest as he raised the lid. At least it had obviously not been opened in years, probably not since Pandsala received the keys he himself now possessed. He wondered what she had felt on reading this parchment giving Feruche to her hated sister, or this copy of a letter from Roelstra congratulating lanthe on the birth of her first son, Ruval. Ostvel stared at the name, remembering with terrible clarity the first time he had seen it: on Pandsala's list of murders.

He had decided to investigate the most recent records first after finding the archives, and chose a coffer bearing Pandsala's seal and the date 719. The top layer had been her private diary, sporadic entries regarding politics and their implications for Princemarch and the Desert; internal difficulties, how she had dealt with them, and what she suspected motivated them; and, dated in the summer of that year, a heartbreaking series of jotted notes regarding Pol.

/ am blessed by the Goddess with the presence of the only two I have ever loved. Pol is all I hoped he would be, and more besides. I love him more than I would have loved the flesh of my own flesh. His mother could not love him more. He ought to have been mine! Rohan is as I

remember him: as perfect and golden as his son. They both should have been mine. Instead they belong to Sioned. Why does she have everything and I nothing?

But those words had not given him the shock of the other parchments, drawn up as if formal Acts of her Regency. He had found them at the bottom of the coffer, neatly folded, each penned in her elegant script. Sentences of death. And at last he had learned the how of her murders, and the why.

He could see the documents as clearly as if they were spread out before him, could feel again the horror of first reading and realizing what she had done to her own blood on behalf of a boy she did not know was her own blood.

An induced miscarriage for Naydra, depriving her and her lord of an heir for Port Adni, which would become a Kierstian crown holding after Lord Narat's death. Slow poison lanced through the parchment of various letters sent to Cipris, before the latter could marry Halian of Meadowlord and produce a legitimate princely heir of Roelstra's blood who might one day challenge Pol. A hunting accident to dispose of Rusalka before her marriage could produce an heir. The same reasoning applied to Pavla; the method, the gift of a necklace whose prongs were tipped with a slow poison. Rabia, wedded to Lord Pat win of Catha Heights, had borne three daughters and died in childbed of the third, who survived herЧbut there had never been a breath of rumor that the death had been anything other than natural. Yet she was on Pandsala's lethal list, too, the means of her death delineated in bold pen strokes. Hired assassins in Waes had rid Pandsala of Nayati before she, too, could marry and produce offspring. Of Roelstra's eighteen daughters, the Plague had taken five; Pandsala had eliminated five more; five still lived. Of the other three, Kiele had been executed for the murder* of a Sunrunner and Pandsala was dead of sorcery. Ostvel himself had killed lanthe.

But Pandsala's crimes had not been limited to her sisters. An arranged accident for Obram of Isel, Saumer's only son, had left Arlis, grandson of both Saumer and Volog, heir to both princedoms. Thus the island would eventually be united under Sioned's kinsman. Reading this, Ostvel had thanked the Goddess he had not asked