"Dave Duncan - Tales of King's Blades 2 - Lord of The Firelands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duncan Dave)

sense if you puzzle at them. Cwicnoll
means "quick-knoll," "live summit," which
seems apt enough for a volcano. Haligdom would
be pronounced "holy dome" and Su`edecg not
far from "South Edge."
Many Old English words have gone out of use:
wer meaning "man" survives only in
"werewolf." Others have survived unchanged--a
hwoel is still a "whale." Cniht, which
originally meant "boy," (cnihtcild was a
"boy child") became "knight," and that k was still being
pronounced when English spelling was standardized a
couple of hundred years ago.
 AMBROSE

I



"The King is coming!" The excited cry
rang out over the sun-bright moorland and was picked
up at once by a half-dozen other shrill
trebles and a couple of wavering baritones. Alarmed
horses tossed heads and kicked up heels. The
cavalcade on the Blackwater Road was still very
far off, but sharp young eyes could make out the blue
livery of the Royal Guard, or so their owners
claimed. In any case, a troop of twenty
or thirty men riding across Starkmoor could be no
one but the Guard escorting the King to Ironhall.
At last! It had been more than half a year.
"The King is coming! The King is coming!"
"Silence!" shouted Master of Horse. The
sopranos' riding classes always teetered
close to chaos, and this one was now hopeless. "Go and
tell the Hall. First man in is excused stable
duties for a month. On my signal. Get
ready--"
He was speaking to the wind. His charges were
already streaming over the heather toward the lonely
cluster of black buildings that housed the finest
school of swordsmanship in the known world. He
watched to see who fell off, who was merely
hanging on, who was in control. It was unkind
to treat horses so, especially the aging,
down-at-heel nags assigned to beginners; but his
job was to turn out first-class riders. In a very
few years those boys must be skilled enough and fearless
enough to keep up with anyone, even the King himself--and
when Ambrose IV went hunting he usually