"Kate Elliott - Crown of Stars 7 - Crown of Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

the common folk who rely on you. Combine your milites. If you do not cooperate, you will certainly
drown."
"The sun will return. Be patient. Act prudently until the crisis has passed. Do not abandon those who
will turn on you if they have no other way to save themselves."
These pronouncements his audience absorbed with an almost pitiable gratitude, but in only one case
could he act immediately. A guide led them to the wolves' lair. Liath called fire down within the warren of
caves where the wolf pack laired, and the soldiers killed over a dozen as the beasts tried to escape
flames and smoke. The wolves were dangerous predators, but they were beautiful, too, in the way of
dangerous things, and she hated to see them slaughtered like sheep. Yet afterward they found the
much-gnawed bones of several children in the outer cave. The wolves had grown too bold. Such a pack
could not be allowed to keep hunting.
"A small act in a desperate time," Sanglant said the next day, when they were riding again. His
voice was hoarse with apprehension and the helpless anger of seeing so much trouble that could
tear the realm asunder, but then, he always sounded like that. "I am ashamed to have them fall at
my feet with such praises. If the weather does not improve, half of them will be dead by next
spring."
"Eventually I must go to St. Valeria," she said. "What sorcery raised may possibly be
dispelled by sorcery."
"Stay with me a while longer, into the marchlands, at least."
"I will. But eventually I must go."
He nodded, although his expression was grave. "Leaving me with the dogs biting and growling
at my heels as I settle once and for all who is regnant in Wendar and Varre. Eventually you must
go. But not yet."




PART ONE
DEATHANDLIFE
 I

TRAVELERS
1
ALL morning Alain and the hounds walked east and southeast as they had done for many days.
Lavas Holding lay far behind them. Their path this day cut along an upland forest, mostly beech although
what seedlings had thrust up through the field layer were fir. The view through the woods was open but
because of the clouds the vista had a pearly sheen to it, as though he were staring into a lost world just
out of reach. Into the past, or into the future.
Yet the present had an inevitable way of intruding into the finest-spun thoughts. Sorrow barked to
alert him. A massive beech had fallen over the path in such a way that although Alain might climb with
difficulty over its barrel of a trunk, he could not hoist the hounds up and across. Nor was there room for
them to squeeze through the hand's-width gap below. He beat out a track along the length of the trunk
upslope only to find that a score of other huge treesтАФmore beech together with silver firтАФhad fallen
parallel so close that he was fenced in. Returning to the path and the waiting hounds, he ventured the
other way, skirting the thicket of branches at the crown, and discovered that here, too, more fallen trees
barred his path.
All had fallen in a northwesterly direction, snapped by a gale out of the southeast, the same tempest,
no doubt, that had swept Osna last autumn. That tempest had changed the world, and created a vast trail
of debris.
He pushed through the branches at the crown of the treeтАФa difficult path to break but one on