"Elliott,.Kate.-.Crown.Of.Stars.3.-.Burning.Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

Zacharias had heard that call once, from far away, when the
Pechanek clan had wandered the borderwild of the deep
grassЧ the land beyond human ken into which only heroes
and shamans might venture. Ai, God! He had never forgotten
it.

But he would not let it rip his hard-won courage from him now.

She stepped forward. Zacharias followed, leading the horse.

The heat of fire burned his face, but just before he could flinch
back from the flame, they passed through the gateway.
Bulkezu's call, the high-pitched song of wind through grass
and stone, the moist heat of a midsummer day blanketed by
fogЧ all of these vanished as completely as though they had
been sliced away by a keen and merciless blade.

I

THAT WHICH BINDS



THE ruins stretched from the river's bank up along a grassy
slope to where the last wall crumbled into the earth at the
steep base of a hill. Here, on this broken wall under the light of
a waning quarter moon, an owl came to rest. It folded its
wings, and with that uncanny and direct gaze common to owls
it regarded the ring of stones crowning the hilltop beyond.

Stars faded as light rose and with it, shrouded in a low-
hanging mist, the sun. The moon vanished into the brightening
sky. Still the owl waited. A mouse scurried by through the dew-
laden grass, yet the owl did not stir to snatch it. Rabbits nosed
out of their burrows, and yet it let them pass unregarded. Its
gaze did not waver, although it blinked once. Twice. Thrice.

Perhaps the mist cleared enough for the rising sun to glint on
the stones that made up the huge standing circle at the height
of the hill. A light flashed, and the owl launched itself into the
air, beating hard to gain height. From above the stones it
swooped down into the circle, where certain other stones lay
on the soil in a pattern unreadable to human eyes. Flame
flickered along the ancient grain of a smallish standing stone
in the center of the ring. Out of the flame came faint words
overheard in the same way that whispers escape through a
keyhole, two voici in conflict.

"It seems to me that you have all been too gentle. A firms
hand would have solved the matter long ago and bent this ori: