"Mercedes Lackey - Owl Mage 1 - Owlflight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

people had made a good living out of going into the Pelagiris Forest and collecting some of the strange
plants and fungi that grew there for use as dye-stuffs, and that business had occasionally brought them
into conflict with the Hawkbrothers. Traders had come far out of their way for those dyes, and that had
encouraged some people to go in deeper, in search of any other things that traders might find valuable.
Of course, the deeper in they went, and the more they looked for ancient treasures instead of mosses and
fungi, the more likely it was that they would wander into Hawkbrother lands and be warned off, often at
the point of a drawn weapon. Once or twice, outsiders had come hunting treasure as well - and their
bound bodies would later be found neatly arranged on the Forest edge, without a single copper piece or
trinket missing, awaiting discovery and burial. Each such discovery would discourage deeper incursions
for a few months, but there were always greedy outsiders ready to dare the Hawkbrothers for the sake
of treasures, and their fates were a warning to the dye-traders to stick to their business and leave
whatever тАЬtreasureтАЭ was out there alone.
Nevertheless, there was enough and more than enough of legitimate тАЬquarryтАЭ to tempt the people
of ErroldтАЩs Grove out into the Pelagiris until things started getting out of hand. The village had been quite
prosperous, with visits from Heralds twice and three times a year, a fine wooden bridge over the Londell
built by the order of the Crown, and even a pair of Valdemaran Guards stationed to watch the bridge
and keep the peace on the road. There were still two sturdily built guardposts here, one on either side of
the bridge, to prove that ErroldтАЩs Grove had once been considered an important border town.
But war had come, war with Hardorn, and the Guards had been taken away to serve elsewhere,
never to return. Now the only way that the people of ErroldтАЩs Grove could keep the road open was to
run their own volunteer patrols over it. Then things had somehow gotten mixed up with magic as well,
and so far as the people of ErroldтАЩs Grove were concerned, order and their old way of life had all but
disappeared.
First had come the physical storms, worse than anyone had ever seen before, that washed out
the road in places, flooded the village twice, and buried it in yards of snow for most of the last several
winters. Then had come the mage-storms to batter them all along with the physical storms, and all anyone
from Valdemar could do after the HeraldтАЩs initial warning was to send a messenger with a map that
showed what places were going to change, and when. That was no great help, when all the places were
out in the wild Forest and no one could get out there to chase large animals away from the danger zone.
So the animals became monsters, or maybe the monsters were brought in by the magic; no one was
really certain. The only thing that everyone in ErroldтАЩs Grove could agree on was that now it was far too
dangerous to leave the village and its fields. You never knew if or when you might disturb something that
was canny enough to follow you back home. People stopped going into the Forest, and the dye-traders
stopped coming, since there was no longer anything here to trade for, or even worth the peril to
investigate.
Cowards! Darian thought, angrily scrubbing the tears from his eyes with his knuckles. Other
people kept going in! Other people weren тАШt so scared of their shadows that they gave up!
People like his parents, for instance. . . .
DarianтАЩs parents had been trappers, as had many generations of his ancestors on either side. But
when it became too dangerous to actually live in the Forest, they had made ErroldтАЩs Grove the base of
their operation, carefully working a territory with cautious respect for the HawkbrothersтАЩ claims and the
new strangeness that the mage-storms brought with them. Some of the creatures that arrived on the wings
of the mage-storms had handsome pelts of unusual colors, and traders would pay a lot for them. Other
changes had occurred in the normal species of the Pelagiris that had made improvements in color or
texture of the furs of animals native to the Forest, and for these, too, traders would come. Then, although
they were not as expert as the villagers had been, they would look for the dye-fungi when time permitted,
thus bringing back a bit of the prosperity that had left on the storm-winds.
They were careful! Darian silently told the village. They knew how to be careful! They would
never, ever have let anything follow them here, no matter what you think! They always made
certain to use traps that any truly intelligent species would spot, just to keep their consciences clean, but