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

dangerous as a starving wolf. Wael, his advisor, was a shrunken wizard of incalculable years, a scholar of
intrigue and the arts of influence as well as a sorcerer. The two men found little to like in each other and
less to trust, but their mutual greed for power bound them almost as securely as love, for the time. They
hunched in council over a figurehead in form of a leaping, gilded wooden wolf.

"It seemed faultless," Wael breathed in his soft old voice, hypnotic as the hissing of a serpent. "A young
prince must perforce fancy a fairy boat of gold, and once he was on it, all was easy. I drew him here
more surely than if I held him by a rope in my hand. Who would have thought it would ship┬мwreck?
Never has such a storm been seen in the spring of the year. In autumn, perhapsтАФ"

"Ay, ay," Rheged interrupted impatiently, "no one can fault your scheme, laugh though they might that we
took



armed men to the harbor to await a swimming wolf! They do not smile to my face, not unless they wish
to die quite slowly, but I cannot stop the snickers behind my back. But that is past; the question now is,
what to do about Isle? It is small use to us that the heir is dead, if his body cannot be found."

"Perhaps he is* not yet dead," Wael mused. "If he got ashore, he could be anywhere by now, it has
been almost two weeks. But we should hear news of him, for he would cut a strange figure in these parts.
Perhaps he has been enslaved. It would be wise to check the markets."

Rheged nodded sardonically and made a note.

"If I could only have something that belonged to him, a piece of clothing or a knife or even a coin," Wael
went on intensely, "I could draw him to me, dead or alive, as surely as ifтАФ"

"As if you held him by a rope in your hand," Rheged finished sourly. "What of it? Am I to send to Isle,
now, for an article of his apparel?"

"Nay, nay, Majesty, send men to search the beaches! Offer (rewards enough to render them honest.
And send spies throughout the realm to find news of him. Offer rewards for that, also."

"You make plentifully free with my gold," muttered Rheged. "Even so, it shall be done. It will be worth
much gold if I can hold that prince my hostage."

"Or even," whispered Wael, "your sacrifice at the altar of the Wolf."

"As you will," Rheged growled. "But how is that to help my invasion of Isle?"

"That upstart little country, Isle!" Wael laughed softly, a wheezing, murky sound. "King, I could have
given you that victory a dozen times by now. But it is the game itself that brings more joy, and the game
has just begun, do you see? Just begun!" Wael lurched forward in his intensity. "And you know wolves
belong to the winter. We will strike then."

"If you say so, wizard," the monarch wearily assented. "As you say."

The slave market was nothing more than a large cobbled clearing set amid the houses and shops of a
place called Jabul.