"Patricia C. Wrede - Stronger Than Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wrede Patricia C)

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STRONGER THAN
TIME
Patricia C. Wrede
THE KEEP ROSE HIGH ABOVE THE RING OF BRUSH AND
briars choking the once-clear lawn around its base. Even when the
sun was high, the tower's shadow lay cold and dark on the twisted
mass of thorns, and at dusk it stretched like a gnarled black finger
across the forest and up the mountainside. Arven hated walking
through that somber dimness, though it was the shortest way home.
Whenever he could, he swung wide around the far side of the keep
to stay clear of its shadow. Most people avoided the keep altogether,
but Arven found its sunlit face fascinating. The light colored the
stone according to the time of day and the shifting of the seasons,
now milk white and shining, now tinged with autumn gold or rosy
with reflected sunset, now a grim winter grey. The shadowed side
was always black and ominous. Once, when he was a young man
and foolish (he had thought himself brave then, of course), Arven
had dressed in his soft wool breeches and the fine linen shirt his
mother had embroidered for him, and gone to the very edge of the
briars. He had searched all along the sunlit side of the keep for an
opening, a path, a place where the briars grew less thickly, but he
had found nothing. Reluctantly, he had circled to the shadowed side.
Looking back toward the light he had just quitted, he had seen white
bones dangling inside the hedge, invisible from any other angle:
human bones entwined with briars. There were more bones among
the shadows, bones that shivered in the wind, and leaned toward
him, frightening him until he ran away. He had never told anyone
about it, not even Una, but he still had nightmares in which weather-
bleached bones hung swaying in the wind. Ever since, he had
avoided the shadow of the keep if he could.
Sometimes, however, he miscalculated the time it would take to fell
and trim a tree, and then he had to take the short way or else arrive

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home long after the sun was down. He felt like a fool, hurrying
through the shadows, glancing up now and again at the keep
looming above him, and when he reached his cottage he was always
in a bad temper. So he was not in the best of humors when, one
autumn evening after such a trip, he found a young man in a
voluminous cloak and a wide-brimmed hat sitting on his doorstep in
the grey dusk, waiting.
"Who are you?" Arven growled, hefting his ax to show that his white