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

He knew that feeling. His life had been a long battle with such heavy feeling since Hal and Trevyn had
left. Call it foreboding, but not yet so dark that it benighted his thought┬мful curiosity. He penned a reply to
Rafe, commending the girl to his watchful care, then placed Meg's letter in his files. Months later, he still
remembered her name.
Book Two

MOTHER OF MERCY



Chapter One

This gaudy craft was a dead thing, Trevyn decided, with no power of its own. Certainly it was not a
living, swimming being like the elf-ship he had seen. He felt no vitality in its timbers, as often as he lay and
lost himself in study of the mystery of its motion. He could discern no surge from behind or below, no
gathering of heart at the bottom of the billow or of breath at the top. As the weeks went by, Trevyn
became certain that the source of the power lay far ahead. He was in a bright bauble drawn by invisible
wires, smacking crudely against the waves, for ail the world like a child's toy being dragged across a vast
watery yard. He thanked the One that the sea remained calm.

As yet, Trevyn had known nothing of the nausea that makes sea crossings a misery. To pass the time,
and to keep from growing weak with the long voyage, he exercised for hours every day. Then he paced
the deck as he studied the sky and sea. His course was to the south and east. Every morning at daybreak
the rays of the rising sun haloed the hulking form of the wolfish figurehead. To Trevyn it seemed unfair,
even treasonous, that the emblem of his father's royal greatness should bedeck the wolf, which to him had
become a



symbol of lowest evil. Since he could command neither the ship nor the sun, he learned to turn his back
on this moment.

Trevyn had examined the figurehead closely on his first day out and had found it to be nothing more than
gilded wood with glass eyes and pearly teeth. But at night it seemed to him that the lupine form was lit
with more than reflected sheen. Amid the gleaming of the starry sea, he could not be certain. Yet the thing
gnawed him with slow fear, even colored his dreams with its frozen leap, and he went near it no more.
Another thing troubled Trevyn: that Meg from time to time would intrude her thin face before his inward
eye. He strove to forget her, and turned his back on her image as on the wolf. Yet, had he noticed,
where Meg's image was the dread of the wolf was not.

By the sixth week of the voyage, Trevyn began to see birds hunting the sea, wheeling ahead and to the
left. He looked that way eagerly, searching the horizon for land. In the seventh week he spied it, a low,
dark smudge where sky met sea. Trevyn judged that the land was no more than a day's voyage away,
though the ship's course lay counter to the sighting.

But the sun next day came up in a sultry,- coppery glow. The wolf loomed against it featureless and
terrible, like a faceless specter in a dream. Trevyn stared at it in spite of himself, this thing that he could
neither fight nor flee, and he paced the deck in unrest. The sky was filled with omen, a clamor heard with
inner ears. Soon dark gray clouds blotted out the murky sun, and the storm clamored in truth. Rain fell,
hiding the land like a molten curtain. Wind harried the rain, and the swell grew. The glittering ship plunged