"Patricia A. McKillip - Riddlemaster 2 - Heir Of Sea And Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

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Heir of Sea and Fire
Patricia A. McKillip




1


In spring, three things came invariably to the house of the King of An: the
year's first shipment of Herun wine, the lords of the Three Portions for the
spring council, and an argument.
The spring of the year following the strange disappearance of the Prince of
Hed, who had, with the High One's harpist, vanished like a mist in Isig Pass,
the great house with its seven gates and seven white towers seemed to be
cracking like a seed pod out of a long, bitter winter of silence and grief.
The season dusted the air with green, set patterns of light like inlay on the
cold stone floors, and roused restlessness like sap in the deep heart of An,
until Raederle of An, standing in Cyone's garden, which no one had entered for
the six months since her death, felt that even the dead of An, their bones
plaited with grass root, must be drumming their fingers in their graves.
She stirred after a while, left the tangle of weeds and withered things that
had not survived the winter, and went back into the King's hall, whose doors
were flung wide to the light. Servants under the eye of Mathom's steward, were
shaking the folds out of the lords' banners, hanging them precariously from
the high beams. The lords were due any day, and the house was in a turmoil
preparing to receive them. Already their gifts had been arriving for her: a
milk-white falcon bred in the wild peaks of Osterland from the Lord of Hel; a
brooch like a gold wafer from Map Hwillion, who was too poor to afford such
things; a flute of polished wood inlaid with silver, which bore no name, and
worried Raederle, since whoever had sent it had known what she would love. She
watched the banner of Hel unrolling, the ancient boar's head with tusks like
black moons on an oak-green field; it rose jerkily on its hangings to survey
the broad hall out of its small fiery eyes. She gazed back at it, her arms
folded, then turned suddenly and went to find her father.
She found him in his chambers arguing with his land-heir. Their voices were
low, and they stopped when she entered, but she saw the faint flush on Duac's
cheekbones. In the pale slashes of his brows and his sea-colored eyes, he bore
the stamp of Ylon's wild blood, but his patience with Mathom when everyone
else had exhausted theirs was considered phenomenal. She wondered what Mathom
had said to upset him.
The King turned a dour crow's eye to her; she said politely, for his mood in
the mornings was unpredictable, "I would like to visit Mara Croeg m Aum for a
couple of weeks, with your permission. I could pack and leave tomorrow. I've