"Mercedes Lackey - Bardic Voices 03 - Eagle and the Nightingales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

vigorous and alert to the last."
She shook her head, though, rather than agreeing to take on Talaysen's little
wild-goose hunt with no more prompting than that. "I won't promise," she said, as the
dim sense of foreboding only increased with Talaysen's explanations. "I will think about it,
but I won't promise. All I will say is that I will take my travels in the direction of
Lyonarie." As Master Wren's face reflected his disappointment, she hardened her heart.
"I won't promise because I have no way of knowing if I can actually reach Lyonarie," she
pointed out. "I'm afoot, remember? You and Rune came here in a fine wagon with a pair
of horses to pull you and the baby travel is harder when you walk, not ride. You ought
to remember that. A hundred things could delay me, and I won't promise what I am not
sure I can deliver."
"But if you reach Lyonarie?" Talaysen persisted, and she wondered at his insistence.
Surely he and the King of Birnam had more and better sources of information than one
lone Gypsy!
"If I decide to go that far and if I reach Lyonarie any time before the next Kingsford
Faire, I will reconsider," she said at last. "I will see what I can do. More, I won't promise."
He wasn't satisfied, but he accepted that, she saw it in his face.
"You still haven't answered the other question," she continued, suspiciously. "Why
choose me?"
His answer was not one calculated to quell her growing unease, nor warm the prickle
of chill prescience that threaded her back.
"Much as I hate to admit this," said Talaysen, wielder of Bardic Magics and friend to
the High King of the Elves, "I was warned that this situation was more hazardous than we
knew, and told to send you and only you, in a dream."

Three weeks from the day she had left Talaysen beside the river, Nightingale guided
her little donkey in among the sheltering branches of a black pine as twilight thickened
and the crickets and frogs of early evening started up their songs. Black pines were often
called "shelter-pines," for their trunks were bare to a height of many feet, and their huge,
heavy branches bent down to touch the ground around them like the sides of a tent. The
ground beneath those branches was bare except for a thick carpet of dead needles.
Nightingale held a heavy, resin-scented branch aside with one hand, while she led the
donkey beneath it; her hair was wet, for she had bathed in a stream earlier that
afternoon, and the still, cool darkness beneath the branches made her shiver.
It wasn't just the cool air or the dark that made her shiver. Not all the warm sunlight
on the road nor the cheerful greetings of her fellow travelers had been able to ease the
chill Talaysen's words had placed within her heart.
He was warned to send me to Lyonarie in a dream, she thought, for the hundredth
time that day, as she unloaded her donkey and placed the panniers and wrapped bundles
on the ground beside him. What kind of a dream and who else was in it? Wren can be
the most maddening person in the world when it comes to magic he hates to use it,
and he hates to rely on it, and most of all he is the last person to ever depend on a
dream to set a course for him. So why does he suddenly choose to follow the dictates of
a dream now?
There had been a great deal that Talaysen had not told her, she knew that, as well as
she knew the fingerings of her harp or the lies of a faithless lover, but he had simply shut
his secrets inside himself when she tried to ask him more. Perhaps if she had agreed to his
scheme, he might have told her or perhaps not. Talaysen was good at keeping his own
counsel.
She went outside the barren circle of needle-strewn ground within the arms of the