"Mercedes Lackey - Obsidian 02 - To Light A Candle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

afterward had been a shock. After all, every kind of magic required payment, and the first lesson
the Wildmage learned was that each spell of the Wild Magic came with a cost, both in the personal
energy of the caster, and in the form of a task the Wildmage must perform.

But in this case, it seemed his willingness to sacrifice his life had been enough. Or perhaps, just
perhaps, the cost had been his willingness to live and endure.

If you can call this living, he thought, as he rode along behind the others in the direction of home.
His injuries had been so severe that it had been a sennight before he'd been able to ride at all, and
his burned hands were so heavily bandaged that he couldn't possibly wear his armored gauntlets,
much less hold a sword. Any protecting that was going to be done was going to have to be done
by Jermayan, and maybe Shalkan, and possibly Vestakia; he was strictly along as baggage.

He had become so used to pain that now he could hardly remember a time when he had lived
without it as a constant presence. And underneath the pain was fear, fear he never openly
expressed, but was constantly with him. The fear of what was underneath those bandages.

He would much rather dwell on the minor misery of the rain.

His heavy hooded oiled-wool cloak was soaked through. His heavy silk sur-coat was wet. The
unending rain had managed to make it through both of those layers and even through the tiny
joins and chinks in the delicately-jointed Elven armor that he wore, soaking the padding beneath.

It wasn't that he was cold - he wasn't, even with winter coming on. All the layers he wore saw to
that. But he'd never felt so soggy in his life.

He rested the heels of his hands - wrapped in goatskin mittens to keep the bandages dry, and
medicated to the point where the pain was only a dull nagging - against the front of his saddle,
gazing around himself at the transformed landscape. Everything looked so different now! On the
outward trip, they'd been navigating mostly by his Wildmage intuition to find the direction of the
Barrier; his sister Idalia, who was a much stronger Wildmage, hadn't been able to locate it by
scrying, and until he and Jermayan had linked up with Vestakia, they'd had no way of sensing it
directly. So for the first part of the trip, they'd been traveling mostly by guess... and through a far
different countryside than this.

The rain had changed everything about the landscape that had once been so parched and barren.
There were lakes where none had been before, meadows had become impassable swamps,
trickling streams had become rivers, and all the landmarks he'd memorized on the outward trip
were gone. On their return passage, they'd had to rely on Jermayan's familiarity with the Elven
lands and Valdien's and Shalkan's instincts to find them a route that wasn't underwater or under
mud.

"Are we there yet?" he muttered under his breath.

"Sooner than you think," Shalkan answered.

Kellen sighed. He hadn't thought Shalkan would be able to hear him over the sound of the rain. But
by now, he should know better than to underestimate the keenness of the unicorn's hearing.

"How long?" he asked.