"Mercedes Lackey - EM 2 - The Gates Of Sleep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

MERCEDES LACKEY
THE GATES OF SLEEP

PROLOGUE

ALANNA Roeswood entered the parlor with her baby Marina in her arms, and
reflected contentedly that she loved this room better than any other chamber in
Oakhurst Manor. Afternoon sunlight streamed in through the bay windows, and a
sultry breeze carried with it the scent of roses from the garden. The parlor glowed
with warm colors; reds and rich browns, the gold of ripening wheat. There were six
visitors, standing or sitting, talking quietly to one another, dressed for an afternoon
tea; three in the flamboyant, medievally inspired garb that marked them as artists.
These three were talking to her husband Hugh; they looked as if they properly
belonged in a fantastic painting, not Alanna's cozy parlor. The remaining three were
outwardly ordinary; one lady was in an up-to-the-mode tea gown that proclaimed
wealth and rank, one man (very much a countrified gentleman) wore a suit with a
faintly old-fashioned air about it, and the last was a young woman with ancient eyes
whose flowing emerald gown, trimmed in heavy Venice lace like the foam on a wave,
was of no discernible mode. They smiled at Alanna as she passed them, and nodded
greetings.
Alanna placed her infant carefully in a hand-carved cradle, and seated herself in
a chair beside it. One by one, the artists came to greet her, bent over the cradle,
whispered something to the sleepy infant, touched her with a gentle finger, and
withdrew to resume their conversations.
The artists could have been from the same family. In fact, they were from two.
Sebastian Tarrant, he of the leonine red-brown locks and generous moustache, was
the husband of dark-haired sweet-faced Margherita; the clean-shaven, craggy fellow
who looked to be her brother by his coloring was exactly that. All three were Hugh
Roeswood's childhood playmates, and Alanna's as well. The rest were also bound to
their hosts by ties of long standing. It was, to all outward appearances, just a
gathering of a few very special friends, a private celebration of that happiest of
events, a birth and christening.
Alanna Roeswood wore a loose artistic tea gown of a delicate mauve, very like
the one that enveloped Margherita in amber folds. It should have been, since
Margherita's own hands had made both. She sat near the hearth, a Madonna-like
smile on her lips, brooding over the sensuously curved lines of newborn Marina's
hand-carved walnut cradle. The cradle was a gift from one of her godparents, and
there wasn't another like it in all of the world; it was, in fact, a masterpiece of
decorative art. The frothy lace of Marina's christening gown overflowed the side, a
spill of winter white against the rich, satiny brown of the lovingly carved wood.
Glancing over at Sebastian, the eldest of the artists, Alanna suppressed a larger
smile; by the way he kept glancing at the baby, his fingers were itching to sketch the
scene. She wondered just what medieval tale he was fitting the tableau into in his
mind's eye. The birth of Rhiannon of the Birds, perhaps. Sebastian Tarrant had been
mining the Welsh and Irish mythos for subjects for some time now, with the usual
artistic disregard for whether the actual people who had inspired the characters of
those pre-Christian tales would have even remotely resembled his paintings. The
romance and tragedy suited the sensibilities of those who had made the work of
Dante Rossetti and the rest of the Pre-Raphaelites popular. Sebastian was not pre-
cisely one of that brotherhood, in no small part because he rarely came to London