"Dennis L. McKiernan - Mithgar - Eye of the Hunter" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKiernan Dennis L)

5. The "Common tongue" speech of the Elves is extremely archaic. To
retain a flavor of this dialect, in the objective and nominative cases of the
pronoun "you," I respectively substituted "thee" and "thou." Also, in the
possessive cases, I included "thy" and "thine" in the Elven speech, along
with a few additional archaic terms such as hast, wilt, and so forth.

6. To avoid minor confusion, the reader is cautioned to pay heed to the
dates denoting the time frame of each chapter. In the main, the tale is
told in a straightforward manner, but occasionally I have jumped back to
a previous time to fill in key parts of the story.

7. This tale is about the final pursuit of Baron Stoke. Yet the story is
tightly entwined with three earlier accounts concerning the hunting of
Stoke; these prior tales are recorded among others in the collection of
stories known as Tales of Mithgar.




"Auguries are oft subtle . . . and dangerousтАФ
thou mayest deem they mean one thing when they mean something
else altogether."




Map




Chapter 1
Out of the Storm

Late Winter, 5E988
[The Present]



Predator and prey: the sudden blast of snow interrupted the race for
life, the race for death, the boreal owl taking to the swirling branches of
a barrens pine, the arctic hare scuttering under the protecting overhang
of a rock jut. And driven before the wind, a wall of white moaned
across the 'scape, while both hunter and hunted sheltered, waiting for the
storm to end, for the race to begin again, for flight and pursuit, for life or
death.
But now the race was suspended as snow and ice hurtled across the
land, hammering upon anything standing in its way, the wind sobbing and
groaning and filling the air with the sound of its agony. And the hare
crouched beneath the rock and closed its eyes against the snow pelting