"Nancy Springer - Isle 03 - The Sable Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

"If you go near her," Trevyn gasped wildly, "I will kill you!"

"You can't," Gwern stated, and ambled away down the stairs. Trevyn sensed that he was right, and in
sheerest chagrin he wept.
"How was the carole?" Megan's mother asked her the next morning.

"Wonderful," her daughter answered. "There were mar┬мvelous ices. And I believe Trevyn liked my
dress." She smiled in a way that made her mother's heart ache, for the goodwife hated to see the girl
disappointed.

Confidently Megan waited for Trevyn to come to her. But instead came Gwern, with his bare brown feet
hanging down, bareback and bridleless on Trevyn's golden stallion. The big horse obeyed him at a touch.
Filled with sudden foreboding, Meg went out to the fence to meet him, and he vaulted down from his
steed to speak to her.

"Prince Trevyn started back to Laueroc early this morn┬мing," he told her. "I have come to take his leave
of you, since he would not."

Meg regarded him steadily, her sharp face only a little tauter than usual, for she was practiced in hiding
her feelings. "And which of us has frightened him away," she asked at last, "ye or me?"

"You," Gwern said promptly. "He bears no love for me."

Her face twitched at that. "And how does it come to be," she wondered aloud, "that ye're Trevyn, and
yet ye're not Trevyn?"

"I don't know," he grumbled, then looked at her with something like alarm. "Did you speak to him of
that?"

"Nay! He is not ready; he is terrified." Meg was the wise woodland Maiden, as Gwern knew, but she
knew herself only as a hurt and bewildered girl. Tears trickled from her eyes. "Will he ever come back to
me?" she murmured.

Gwern came to her, finding his way around the rough rail fence. "Megan, I love you," he said flatly. "Let
me stay with you, since Trevyn would not."



She quirked a wry smile at him, amused in spite of her misery. "I don't know much," she retorted, "but I
know wild, and ye're as wild as wind. And ye cannot bear to be long away from him. How long would
ye stay?"

"A few days," Gwern admitted. "But if he goes over ocean, I must learn to bear that pang. I cannot leave
earth. My sustenance is in the soil beneath my feet."

"And he longs to go to Elwestrand," Meg mused. "The tides wash in his eyes. . . . Go now, Gwern. I
don't need yer comfort. But if ye need mine someday, come to me."

She spoke bravely. But that night, after the fire was banked and she went to her bed, despair struck her
that went too deep even for tears. She had let herself show a woman's heart, and the showing had driven