"Dave Duncan - A Man Of His Word 1 - Magic Casement" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Dave)

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Magic CasementMagic Casement
Book 1 of A Man Of His Word
By Dave Duncan
ISBN: 0-345-36628-X


ONE
Youth departs

1
Since long before the coming of Gods and mortals, the great rock of Krasnegar
had stood amid the storms and ice of the Winter Ocean, resolute and eternal.
Throughout long arctic nights it glimmered under the haunted dance of aurora and
the rays of the cold, sad moon, while the icepack ground in useless anger around
its base. In summer sun its yellow angularity stood on the shining white and
blue of the sea like a slice of giants' cheese on fine china. Weather and season
came and went and the rock endured unchanging, heeding them no more than it
heeded the flitting generations of mankind.
Two sides fell sheer to the surf, pitted with narrow ledges where only the
crying seabirds went, but the third face ran down less steeply, and on that long
mad slope the little town adhered as grimly as a splatter of swallows' nests.
Above the humble clutter of the houses, at the very crest of the rock, the
castle pointed black and spikey turrets to the sky.
No mere human hand could have raised those stones in a land so remote or a
setting so wild. The castle had been built long centuries before by the great
sorcerer Inisso, to serve as palace for himself and for the dynasty he founded.
His descendants ruled there still, in direct male line unbroken... but the
present monarch, good King Holindarn, beloved of his people, had but a single
child-his daughter, Inosolan.
Summer came late to Krasnegar. When inhabitants of milder lands were counting
their lambs and chicks, the brutal storms still rolled in from the Winter Ocean.
While those lucky southerners gathered hay and berries, the wynds and alleyways
of the north lay plugged with drifts. Even when night had been almost banished
from the pallid arctic sky, the hills ashore stayed brown and sere. Every year
was the same. Every year a stranger might have given up hoping and assumed that
summer was not about to happen at all. The locals knew better and in patient
resignation they waited for the change.
Always their faith was rewarded at last. With no warning, a cheerful wind would
blunder in to sweep the ice floes from the harbor, the hills would throw off
their winter plumage almost overnight, and the snowdrifts in the alleyways would
shrink rapidly to sullen gray heaps sulking in shadowed corners. A few days'
rain and the world was washed green again, fair weather following foul as fast
as a blink. Spring in Krasnegar, the inhabitants said, had to be believed in to
be seen.
Now it had happened. Sunlight poured through the castle windows. The fishing
boats were in the water. The tide was out, the beaches were clear of ice and
obviously eager to be ridden on. Inos came early down to breakfast, busily
spinning plans for the day.