"Christopher Stasheff - Warlocks Heirs 01 - M'Lady Witch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stasheff Christopher)

On a day like this, though, he was perilously close to admitting that he was attractive. He certainly felt so, for all the world must love a lover. And it
was such a relief to be away from Runnymede and his parents' court, from intrigue and the need to be formal and wary!


Alain didn't know it, of course, but the girl to whom he planned to propose was even more of a hot potato than a hot tomato. That wouldn't have
stopped him-he was a trouble-magnet himself; crown princes always are. Assassins and conspirators lie in wait for them, ready to seduce them into
plotting against their parents, or to kill them if they aren't seducible. That was why Alain travelled with a bodyguard of knights, and why his father
had made sure he was well trained with sword and battle-axe.


Cordelia, on the other hand, wasn't apt to have any bodyguards around; her parents cultivated the simple and humble image, as much as you can
when the King and Queen have insisted that you live in a castle. But she was easily more lethal than Alain could ever be, if she wanted to be-she


file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Warlock's%20Heirs%2002%20-%20M'Lady%20Witch.htm (1 of 136) [10/15/2004 1:11:36 PM]
 M'Lady Witch

was, in the eyes of the superstitious peasants, a witch, and a very powerful one.


Actually, she was an esper, a person born with powers of extrasensory perception and, in her case, extrasensory activity. She was a telepath, a
projective, a telekinetic ... and the list went on. About all she couldn't do was teleport.


Of course, it was possible that she might run into something that even she couldn't handle-say, an army or two. If that happened, all she had to do
was call for help from the Wee Folk, and a brigade or two of elves, pixies, and brownies would pop out of the woodwork to aid her. If anything
stopped them-such as too much Cold Iron, which tends to accumulate around knights-she could always send out a mental call for the rest of her
family, and her father would teleport to her, with her brothers right behind. Her mother would arrive a little later, by broomstick. The family had not
yet encountered any enemy that could stand against them-provided, of course, that nothing kept them apart.


Rod Gallowglass wasn't quite as adept at using his ESP powers as his wife and children were, because he had spent half his life under the blithe
impression that he was an ordinary mortal. Shortly after the birth of his fourth child, he had found out the hard way that he could work "magic," as
the local superstitious peasants called the results of his ESP work. He had decided that magic was catching.


Rod Gallowglass's late development was understandable, considering that he hadn't even known there was a planet where there were so many
espers, until he came there; he had been born and raised on a high-tech planetoid where the family business was the manufacturing of robots, and
had run away from home to spend his twenties bumming around the civilized, modern planets, looking for wrongs to right. Sometimes he wondered
how he had ever gotten into this situation. Then he would look at his wife, even now in her fifties, and decide it had just been good luck.


Being a little more honest with himself, he would admit that it had been a matter of needing a purpose in life. He had found one by becoming an
agent for the Society for the Conversion of Extraterrestrial Nascent Totalitarianisms, an organization dedicated to spreading democracy by sniffing
out dictatorships and other forms of oppressive government, and steering their societies toward one of the many forms of democracy. Exploring the
galaxy for new totalitarian governments to topple, he had stumbled across Gramarye. Now he was assigned here for the rest of his life-because
SCENT knew how important Gramarye was going to be. Rod, on the other hand, had known how important the beautiful, voluptuous "witch"
Gwendylon was going to be, and had married her, cleaving unto her forever-and therefore, of course, to her planet and people, too.