"Nancy Springer - Isle 05 - The Golden Swan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

Trevyn quieted me with a soft glance. We are not very different, you and I, that glance said. We are
equals. I stood stunned.

"You will find your way, I am sure of it," he said. "I was a mute, too, for a while, when I was with your
mother. Perhaps you are indeed intended to continue what I have begun. Remember the words of the
seeress, and await the word of the One."

Chapter Three

Frain ate often during the next several days. When he was not eating, and sometimes as he ate, he talked
with Trevyn. I would listen.
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




"Dair is my son," Trevyn explained when he judged it was time. Frain looked both shocked and dubious.

"But how can that be, my lord? Are you older than you seem? I would have said that you two were
nearly of the same age."

"Nay, I am just twenty. And Dan- was born only two years ago. He was a wolf. They mature faster than
human young," said Trevyn offhandedly. "There was some magic involved," he added after a moment.

"I should think so." Frain stared hard at me, his face like a mask. "Well, there is magic in Vale as well,
though, it is a harsher magic than what I sense here, and there were creatures there that were half beast,
and I was not afraid of themтАФ"

"Magic, on the mainland?" Trevyn interrupted eagerly.

"I never really thought of Vale as part of the mainland."

He spoke of Vale at some length. It was a place apart, turned inward upon itself because of the
mountains that ringed it all around. It was ruled by canton kings and a high kingship of sacred monarchs
who often went mad. , Frain's foster brother Tirell was the son of one such king. Two things became
clear as Frain spoke: one, that he loved his brother Tirell with a wolfs love, unquestioning. And the other,
that Tirell had gone insane and hurt him badly. It was Tirell who had crippled his arm.

On top of that there was the matter of his fostering, of which he had been ignorant, that he had been
given away at birth by his own parents. And on top of that there was the matter of Shamarra.

She was very beautiful with a delicate beauty, like crystal, pure and apart, like clear water. "She was the
lake," Frain explained. "Or theтАФ'being of the lake, the goddess of the lake. And the lake is very deep
and shadowy and still, a hidden thing, it lies amid the mountains of death, what we call Acheron, where
no one ever goes."

We have seen it, I said. Trevyn glanced at me sharply to hush me, for Frain found my voice disturbing. It
took him some while to go on.

He had fallen into ardent love with Shamarra. He had looked into her lake without terror, bathed in it