"Douglas Niles - Druidhome 2 - The Coral Kingdom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niles Douglas)

provided a focus for her mind when it would have been so easy to collapse into grief.
Corwell! She knew instinctively that she had made the right choice in the location for the ritual of the
king's passage. That pastoral kingdom, childhood home to both Tristan and Robyn, was a place where she
could get away from the chaos of the high court, returning like a wounded animal to the den from which she
had emerged as a cub.
Corwell was the ancestral home of the Kendricks, and both the queen and her daughters bore that
name. The ancient castleтАФprotected still by a palisade of wooden timbers, though the king had ordered a
stone wall started some years backтАФwould reinforce in the minds of the lords and kings of the Ffolk that
Robyn came by her rank honestly. And that her daughters, too, bore the blood of the island's royal line.
And there was more than political truth to her choice, just as Robyn was more than a queen to the Ffolk.
The kingdom of Corwell was on the isle of Gwynneth, and there Robyn would find Myrloch Vale, the heart
of the reawakening power of the goddess Earthmother.
Robyn Kendrick had once been the great druid of the isles. With the passing of her goddess, the order of
druids had drifted into the wilds of the Moonshaes, their numbers shrinking, their powers gone. But now,
thanks primarily to the actions of the two Kendrick daughters, the goddess had surged back to life, her
druids reborn.
Robyn herself was no longer a young woman. A return to the isolation of a druid's grove seemed like a
strange form of exile now, something she did not desire, nor would have accepted. Yet she had seen the
awakening of similar powers within AliciaтАФpowers that Alicia denied, preferring to believe that she would
become a warrior queen. Yet now the older princess wore silver bracers on her wrists, the coiled bracelets
in the shape of dragons that identified her as a chosen daughter of the goddess.
"Carry me a little longer, Mother. . . please."
Robyn whispered the words like a prayer and felt a lightening of her oppression. She did not feel
joyтАФthere were times she believed that happiness was a thing from her distant pastтАФbut she could steel
herself to her work.
Finally Robyn stepped to the window. The city and the harbor seemed to pause, frozen in tableau. The
queen leaned outward, spreading her arms wide, and they became her wings. The human woman fell from
the window, but an eagle of purest white flew away from the the castle, away from the townтАФaway from
all of Callidyrr.
In two days, that eagle would reach Corwell.

* * * * *

Brigit Cu'Lyrran hauled back on the reins of her white mare. Talloth reared silently, raising her rider so
that the elfwoman could see over the screen of quivering aspen branches before her. Her keen eyes had
detected a flash of movement up the valley several minutes before, in the direction of the Fey-Alamtine.
She had been rightтАФthe Synnorian Gate would open today! Quickly she nudged Talloth with her knees,
and the fleet mare exploded into a gallop, carrying her mistress swiftly up the trail. Passing a steep upward
branch to the left, a rarely used trail that led to the human kingdom of Corwell, she continued up the main
path.
In a few minutes, Talloth slowed to a lope, and then a trot as the trail opened into a clearing. The mare
instinctively paused before the Fey-Alamtine, the Synnorian Gate.
A wall of obsidian-black cliff shimmered before Brigit, as if an invisible sheen of water flowed across
the surface, but Brigit knew that the rock was dry. The visual effect had a magical cause.
Three or four times in her life the gate had been used, and once before she had been here to witness.
Those memories, from a hundred years ago, remained with her as vividly as this morning's. But today she
was the only one here, and as the shimmering grew more pronounced, she knew that the gate would open
soon.
As captain of the Sisters of Synnoria, Brigit spent much of her time riding the swales and valleys of this
tiny elven realm in the Moonshae Islands. Synnoria, and its beautiful capital Chrysalis, bordered the Ffolk