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

attendant who scrambled back up the embankment.

"Peace!" Lavastine frowned at the hounds, who swarmed
around him more like puppies frightened by thunder than loyal
fighting hounds.

A creature rustled in the thicket. The hounds went wild. Terror
closed his jaw over the count's hand and tugged him
backward while Steadfast and Fear leaped into the brambles,
teeth snapping on empty air. Hackles up, Sorrow and Rage
circled the bramble bush and Ardent and Bliss tore up and
down between Lavastine and the thicket. But there was
nothing there.

"Peace!" snapped Lavastine. He so disliked it when his orders
were not obeyed instantly.

Steadfast yelped suddenly, a cry of pain. The other hounds
went into such a wild frenzy around the thicket that servants
and noblemen scattered in fear, and then the hounds spun
and snapped and bolted away as if in hot pursuit, the entire
pack running downstream along the embankment. "Alain!
Follow them!"

Alain quickly followed the hounds, with only a single servant in
attendance. The hounds ran far ahead now, scrambling in a
fluid, furious pack down to a rocky stretch of beach. He
glanced back in time to see Lavastine strip and make his
careful wayЧas had the other courtiers before himЧdown the
slope to the river. While the younger men braved the crossing
to follow after the prince, the king and his mature councillors
took their ease in the shallow water and talked no doubt of
Gent and the Eika and recent reports of Quman raids in the
east and certain marriage alliances that must be accepted or
declined.

The hounds had disappeared, so Alain broke into a trot and
found them clustered just around the river's bend on the last
strip of narrow beach. Stiff-legged, they barked at the water.
Alain thought he saw a flash of something tiny and white
struggling in the current. Then, slowly, their barking subsided
into growls, growls to silence, and the hounds relaxed into a
steady vigilance as they regarded the flowing river.

Had he only imagined that flash of movement? The sun made
metal of the water as it streamed along. Its bright flash made
Alain's eyes tear, and he blinked rapidly, but that only made
the water shimmer and flow in uncanny forms like the shift of a
slick and scaly back seen beneath the waves or the swift
passage of a ship along a canyon of water.