"Sherwood Smith - Crown and Court Duet - 02 - Court Duel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Sherwood)

Court Duel by Sherwood Smith (Book Two of the Crown and Court Duet)


PROLOGUE

THE SCRIBES IN THE HERALDRY GUILD WRITE THE history of Remalna. What I am doing here
is telling my own history: how I, Meliara Astiar, who grew up running wild with the village girls and
scarcely knew how to read, managed to find myself swept up in the affairs of kings.

Who will read my history? I try to imagine my great-great-great-granddaughter finding this book some
wintry dayтАФbecause in summer, of course, she will be rambling barefoot through the mountains, just like
I did. Harder to imagine are people in other lands far from Remalna, and in future times, reading my
story.

You might ask why I wrote this, when we have court scribes whose job it is to record important events.
One thing I have learned while reading histories is that though the best scribes will faithfully report what
people did at crucial moments, they often can only guess at why.

The scribes will begin, for example, with the fact that I was the second child born to the Count and
Countess of Tlanth, a county high in the northwest mountains of Remalna. My brother, Branaric, was the
elder.

Even in our remote part of the kingdom, the people struggled under King Galdran Merindar's heavy taxes
and became restless under his increasingly unfair laws. My father paid most of those taxes himself to
spare our people, and thus we Astiars, in our old, crumbling castle, were not much better off than the
poorest of our villagers.

Our mother was killed when Branaric and I were young. We were certain it was done by the order of the
King, but we did not know why. It was enough to make our fatherтАФuntil then a recluseтАФwork hard to
overthrow an increasingly bad government. On his deathbed ten years later, he made Branaric and me
swear a vow to free the country from the wicked King. Branaric and I shared the family title, as Count
and Countess of Tlanth, and shared the work of governing our county and preparing for the revolt.

Soon after Father's death we discovered the latest, and worst, of King Galdran's acts: He was going to
betray our Covenant with the mysterious and magical Hill Folk in order to harvest and sell the fabulous
colorwood trees, which grow nowhere else in the world. The forests have been home to the Hill Folk
since long before humans settled in Remalna. The Covenant made with the Hill Folk centuries before our
time guaranteed that so long as we left the forestsтАФcommon trees as well as our fabulous
colorwoodsтАФuncut, they would give us magical Fire Sticks each fall, which burned warmly until at least
midsummer.

So, untrained and ill prepared, Branaric and I commenced our revolt.

It was a disaster.

Oh, we were successful enough at first, when the huge army the King sent against us was led by his
cowardly, bullying cousin Baron Debegri. But when the Marquis of ShevraethтАФson of the Prince and
Princess of RenselaeusтАФreplaced Debegri, we lost ground steadily. I stumbled into a steel trap our side
had set out in a desperate attempt to slow up Shevraeth's army, was caught, and was taken by the
Marquis to the capital, where the King condemned me to death without permitting me to speak a word in