"Katherine Kurtz - Camber 1 - Camber Of Culdi" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kurtz Katherine)

CAMBER OF CULDI
Volume I in The Legends of Camber of Culdi
Katherine Kurtz
Contents
chapter one
In the multitude of people is the kings honour; but in the want of the people
is the destruction of the prince.
-Proverbs 14:28

Though it was but late September, a wintry wind howled and battered at the
ramparts of Tor Caerrorie, rattling the narrow, glazed windows in their frames
and snapping to tatters the gules/azure MacRorie standard atop the tower keep.
Inside, the only daughter of the Earl of Culdi sat huddled over the manorial
accounts beside a crackling hearth, wrapped in a fur-lined mantle against the
chill of the deserted great hall, a brindle wolfhound asleep at her feet.
Torches guttered on the wall behind her, though it was not yet mid-afternoon,
besmirching the stone walls with soot. Smoke mingled with the scent of mutton
roasting in the nearby kitchens, and a rushlight cast a yellow glow across the
table where she worked. It was with some relief that she finally marked the
last entry with her cipher and laid down her quill. Umphred, her father's
bailiff, heard her sigh and came to collect the rolls with a bow.
"That completes the accounts for last quarter, mistress. Is all in order?"
Evaine MacRorie, chatelaine of Tor Caerrorie since her mother's death seven
years before, favored Umphred with a gentle smile. The wolfhound raised his
great head to look at the bailiff, then went back to sleep.
"You knew it would be," Evaine smiled. She touched the old man's hand in
affection as he curled the membranes into their storage tubes and gathered
them into his arms. "Would you please ask one of the squires to saddle a horse
and come to me?" she added. "I have a letter to go to Cathan in Valoret."
As Umphred bowed and turned to go, Evaine pushed a strand of flaxen hair from
her forehead, then began nibbling at an inkstain on her thumb as she glanced
at the letter on the table. She wondered what Cathan would say when he got the
letter. For that matter, she wondered how her other brother, Joram, would
react when the news reached him.
Actually, Cathan's reaction was not difficult to predict. He would be shocked,
dismayed, outraged, in turn; but then the double bond of friendship to his
king and duty to his father's people would move him to plead the king's mercy,
to urge the tempering of royal wrath with princely pardon. Though the
MacRories themselves were not implicated in what had happened, the incident
had taken place on Camber's hereditary lands. She wondered whether Imre would
be in one of his difficult moods.
Joram, on the other hand, was not so bound by the cautious duty which ruled
his elder brother. An avowed priest of the militant Order of Saint Michael,
Joram was apt to explode in one of the grandiloquent tirades for which the
Michaelines were so justly famous, when he heard the news. However, it was not
the possibility of Joram's eloquent and caustic rhetoric which made Evaine
apprehensive; it was the fact that the priests of Saint Michael were just as
likely to follow verbal pyrotechnics with physical action, if prudence did not
take the upper hand. The Michaelines were a fighting as well as a teaching
order. More than once, their intervention in secular affairs had touched off