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

battlements, King Hal made his study and solitary retreat.

Trevyn climbed up there after him when they had stabled the horses, and to his dismay Gwern followed.
It troubled him that the dirt-colored stranger should come so familiarly to his uncle's room. Hal was more
than Sunset King; he was a bard, a visionary and a seer. In all the kingdom, only three persons
approached him with the love of equals: Queen Rosemary, his beloved; his brother Alan; and Lysse, the
Elf-Queen, Trevyn's mother and Alan's wife. Trevyn held him in awe. When he entered the tower
chamber he silently took his seat, knees loaded down with tomes of history, awaiting Hal's leisure. But
Gwern poked and prowled around the circular room, disturbing Hal's scholarly clutter. And Hal stood
gazing out of his high, barred window, seeming not to mind.

"What do you see?" Gwern asked suddenly. Trevyn winced at his effrontery. The King of the Silver Sun
had always looked to the west, toward Welas and the reaches of



the sunset stars, and Trevyn had never dared to ask him why. But Hal turned around courteously.

"I see Elwestrand, what else?" he replied, the sheen of his gray eyes going smoky dark. "And a fair sight
it is."

"Where is Elwestrand?" Gwern craned his neck, peering.

"Nay, nay,'* Hal explained eagerly, "you must look with your inner eye. Elwestrand is beyond the
western sea." His voice yearned like singing. "I have seen a tree with golden fruit, and a great white stag,
and bright birds, and sleek, romping beasts. I have seen unicorns."

"Elwestrand is the grove of the dead," Trevyn told Gwern sharply, jealous that Hal would speak to him
so equably.

"Grove of the dead?" Hal turned to regard his nephew with a tiny smile on his angular face. "Elwestrand
is but another step on the way to the One, for all that it lies beyond the sunlit lands."

"It must be dark," Gwern said doubtfully.

"Nay, indeed!" Hal cried. "It shines likeтАФlike the fair flower of Veran used to shine, here in Isle, before
the Easterners blighted it. ... Elwestrand is lilac and celadon and pearly gray-gold and every subtle glow
of the summer stars. And glow of dragons from the indigo sea, every shade of damson and quince and
dusky rose. The elves remembered it all in their bright stitchery--all that this world was, and this Isle,
before the Eastern invasion, before man's evil shadowed and spread." Hal turned back to his window on
the west, pressing his forehead against the bars.

"My kindred the elves sailed to Elwestrand," Trevyn told Gwern more softly. "All of them except my
mother."

"Now they live amidst the stuff of their dreams," Hal said from his window.

"But does no one return from Elwestrand?" Gwern asked.

"Who would wish to return?"