"Melanie Rawn - Dragon Star 1 - Stronghold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rawn Melanie)

They'd founded a school for physicians and a scriptorium. Specific borders
agreed to by all princes ensured that no more wars were fought over a few
square measures of land. Arts and sciences thrived. Interwoven trade made the
princedoms economically dependent on each other. Most importantly, Rohan had
nudged the other rulers into standardizing much of the legal code. Over the
years this had come to be known as the High Prince's Writ, and it would be his
most lasting achievement. It was more than any other High Prince had done
before him, more than anyone else could have hoped to do in a lifetimeтАФeven if
anyone else had been the dreamer Rohan was. But because he did have dreams,
leavened with vast patience and ruthless practicality, there was so much more
that he wanted to accomplish.
It was a proud thing to watch Pol fulfill their hopes. And Meiglan had
surprised them all with her adjustments to her role as his wife. Though she
would never be the kind of High Princess Sioned was, she had grown into her
own sort of wisdom. People didn't confide in Meiglan, or consult her about
matters of state. They merely did not guard their tongues around her. It was
an opportunity not open to Sioned, whose intelligence was well known and often
feared. She learned more from what people didn't tell her than from what they
did. But Meiglan was so quiet, so unobtrusive, that most of the time one
forgot she was there. What she reported was colored by her personal
prejudicesтАФshe loathed Pirro of Fessenden, for instance, and was terrified of
Ghiana. But she had learned to weed out what was important and present it with
an eye to Pol's needs. Her methods differed from Sioned's, but she got the job
done.
This past Rialla Rohan and Sioned had mostly watched the young couple's work,
giving private advice here and there. It was time for them to move into the
background; eventually Pol and Meiglan would take their places. The other
princes must accustom themselves to the next generation. Eminently practicalтАФ
but a little depressing.
Sioned wondered if Zehava had experienced the same thing when Rohan had been
the one young and strong and full of impatient energy. She understood Pol's
eagernessтАФ the young dragon exhilarated by the strength of his wings. Perhaps
Zehava had watched with the same smile she saw sometimes on Rohan's face, a
look of pride and rueful regret.
She sat at her dressing table, brushing out her hair, watching him covertly in
the mirror. The hot misted light of sunset drifting through open windows
turned his hair as gold as it had been in his youth. Looking at him as he
shrugged out of his sweat-stained shirt, it was impossible to convince herself
that this coming winter would be his sixty-first. That it would be forty years
next spring since she'd first seen him on the road to Stronghold, bloodied and
exhausted after killing the dragon that had killed his father. That they were
not just growing older, but growing old. That not only had she never fallen
out of love with him, but had, in fact, fallen in love with him all over again
many timesтАФmost recently this very summer.
Preposterous. The product of an overactive imagination that insisted on
picturing him at River Run, enchanted with the greenness, lazing back in
flower-strewn grass, making love to her in a hayloft, racing for shelter
during a sudden thundershower. Or at Dragon's Rest: long walks in the forest
or through Pol's beloved gardens, nights on their own in Meiglan's little
hillside cottage, a memorable evening when she took him on a tasting tour of