"Rawn, Melanie - Dragon Star 2 - Dragon Token" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

"Coming up on sixteen," she reminded him with a little smile.

"Yes, and too fast to suit me. Very well, heartling,

we'll wait. But there are things about what happened that only Sioned can say for certain."

*

Lady Ruala was the mistress of Skybowl and of Fer-uche, her husband Riyan's castles, and of Elktrap Manor in her own right. None of her residences had a population over two hundred. The influx of refugees from Dor-val, sent across the Long Sand to Skybowl after landing near Tiglath, had strained her resources to their limits. And now Pol had just told her on sunlight that he would be arriving with the combined survivors of Radzyn, Whitecliff, Remagev, and Stronghold.

Ruala didn't bother asking where she was going to put them all. She bade him be welcome and said she would be ready for him. But when he had left her and she opened her eyes again, she gripped the balustrade stones and wondered what in the Goddess' Name she was going to do.

"Ruala?" asked a soft voice. "Are you all right, my dear?"

She barely heard Princess Audrite's question. She was too busy measuring the distance from the crater's lip to the water with her gaze, trying to calculate whether or not adequate shelters could be erected forЧGoddess help herЧover a thousand more people. "Ruala?"

She turned to Audrite, her rising panic soothed by the older woman's calm presence. "They're coming here. All of them."

"All?" Brown eyes, beautiful still for all her sixty-seven winters, blinked in startlement. Recovery was instantaneous. "Just so. See to your own people as you need to, and leave the Dorvali to me. We can meet with your steward at midday and begin building something along the shoreЧ" Suddenly she broke off and made a little gesture of apology. "I'm sorry, my dear. I'm behaving as if this were my castle." "Without your help thus far, I would have gone quite

mad," Ruala assured her. Graypearl and its port town, ten times the size of all of Ruala's holdings together, had taught Audrite how to manage vast numbers of people. Besides, it was useful to have the authority of their princess ready when Ruala needed it to deal with the fractious Dorvali merchants.

But near the end of that short and frantic winter day, Ruala found that not even Audrite could move Master Nemthe. Literally. The richest and most influential of the silk merchants, he flatly refused to see his family turned out of the chamber allotted them.

"He says, my lady," reported Ruala's steward in a voice shaking with anger, "that he sees no reason why he ought to give way for soldiers who failed in their duty to protect Stronghold."

Audrite's fine eyes narrowed dangerously. "It was a mistake to give him so large a chamber, but I thought it might make him less vocal in his complaints. I'll talk to him, Ruala."

"No, but thank you," Ruala said. She folded a parchment diagram detailing the placement of shelters around the lake and handed it to the steward. "I've relied on you too much. And there's more than one way to hood a hawk."

She had a good idea of where Nemthe would be: in his assigned chamber, once more adding up and moaning over what he had lost. Because Ruala and her husband were close to Pol, she had thus far been treated to seven recitations of Nemthe's woes. Each estimate of loss increased until she was beginning to realize that his claim to reparations would eventually total the yearly incomes of the Desert and Princemarch combined.

But Ruala did not immediately climb the stairs to Nemthe's room. She went instead to the inner garden, where many Dorvali exiles could be found every afternoon sighing over their plight. Ruala didn't blame them; they'd lost everything but their lives, and she supposed they found some comfort in communal misery. At least the daily gathering had the advantage of keeping them

and their complaints in one place and out of everyone else's way.

She made her way through knots of children playing with toys her steward had found in an old coffer upstairs. Eventually she spotted her quarry, who sat in the shade of an awning with his fellow silk merchants. Master Tor-michin's pure white hair wreathed a face of grandfatherly benevolence and a mind of singular ambition. No fool, Ruala intended to use the former to engage the latterЧ for his ambition was to outwit his rival Nemthe at every possible turn.

Not all the men rose when she approached. Ruala wasn't offended. Unlike most highborns living in remote castles, her experience of commoners was not limited to her servants. All her life she had known the proud and independent folk who lived in the Great Veresch and came sometimes to spend a few days at Elktrap Manor with her grandfather, Lord Garic. The merchants of Dor-val, though independent due to wealth and not isolation, were akin to the people of the Veresch in spirit if not tradition.

She distributed a polite smile among them, then made her green eyes their widest and sweetest. Trying this trick at the age of thirty-sevenЧreally, you're getting too old for it, she chided herself. It doesn't work anymore on men under sixty. Thank the Goddess that Tormichin is nearly eighty!

"Have you any idea where Master Nemthe is?" she asked the old man. "I've been trying to find him and I just can't. It's most vexing."

Mention of his rival took some of the charm from his face. "I don't keep track of him, my lady. Have you tried his chamber?"

"Oh, of course he'd be there! My thanks, Master TormichinЧI'm just not thinking straight these days."

"And small wonder, dear Lady Ruala," he said kindly. "You've done the work of fifty ever since we descended on you."