"Barbara Hambly - Darwath 5 - Icefalcons Quest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Hethya looked on them across the meadow with sadness and knowledge in her eyes.
"Not the rising of the Dark Ones that you remember, barbarian child," she added softly. "Not their brief,
final rising, when they wiped out the last of humankind before themselves passing on into another
dimension of the cosmos." Her hand shifted on the donkey's bridle, and she seemed oblivious now to the
dead bandit's blood crusted on her clothing.
"I remember the days when the Dark Ones rose like a black miasma and did not depart. Not in a season,
not in a year, not in a generation. I remember the days when humankind shrank to handfuls, not daring to
leave the black walls of its Keeps for years at a time, fearing the night, fearing the day almost as much.
When the world we knew was rent asunder and all the things that we cherished were swept away so that
not even the words for them remained."
"I remember," she said. "It was three and a half thousand years ago, but I remember what it was like, at
the original rising of the Dark. I was there."

"I don't know how young I was," said Hethya, sipping the tisane of hot barley that Gil-Shalos of the
Guards brought her, "when she first started speaking to me in me mind."
She drew up her legs under the borrowed skirts of homespun wool-worn and mended like everything in
the Keep these days-and looked around her at the notables of the Keep assembled in the smallest of the
royal council chambers.
"Six or seven, I think. I know I startled Mother-and horrified me aunties-by some of what I'd come out
with, things no young girl ought to think or know."
Her wry grin summoned back for a moment that red-haired child, with her pointed chin and wide-set
cheekbones and innocent hazel eyes, in a house whose diamond-paned window casements would have
been left open after dark to catch the evening breeze.
In her smile the Icefalcon, seated with Gil-Shalos and a couple of other warriors near the door, could
glimpse the reflection of parents and siblings who had mostly died uncomprehending, terrified, one night
when the thin acid winds blew cold from the shadows and the shadows themselves flowed out to drown
the light.
Minalde asked, "Does she have a name?" She leaned forward, dark braid swaying over the faded red
wool of her state gown, twined with the pearls of the ancient Royal House.
Hethya's tawny brows tugged together. "Oale Niu," she said at length. "Though I don't know whether this
is her name or her title. She calls herself other things sometimes."
The Icefalcon saw the glance that passed around the room, the murmur of wonderment and question like
wind rustling the aspens by the orchards.
Even the Keep Lords, the few members of the ancient Gae nobility who'd managed to make it to the
Keep with food stores and servants and miniature armies of retainers and guards, were impressed, and
they tended not to be moved by anything that didn't directly impinge on their real or imagined privileges.
Lord Ankres muttered something to Lord Sketh, who nodded, blue eyes bulging. Three of the Keep's
four mages-Rudy, Wend, and Ilae-leaned forward on their bench of smooth-whittled pine poles, draped
in mammoth and bison-hides.
Wise Ones, the Icefalcon's people would have called them, they had summoned spots of glowing
witchlight to augment the flickering amber of the small, round hearth, but the bluewhite light burned low,
giving the big double cell the intimacy of a private chamber.
"Oale Niu," Minalde repeated softly, tasting the shape of that name with a kind of wonder. The Lady of
the Keep and widow of Eldor, the last High King of the Realm of Darwath, had changed a great deal
from the shy seventeen-year-old the Icefalcon had rescued from the Dark Ones seven years ago.
Thin-boned and delicately beautiful, with lupine-blue eyes that had seen too much: a pawn who had
worked her heartbreaking way across the chessboard to become not a queen, but a king.
"And you remember to her?" asked Altir Endorion, Lord of the Keep of Dare.
He had his mother Minalde's eyes, large and blue as the hearts of the deepest-hued morning glories, and
her coal-black hair.