"Love and War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthology)

"FOR EVERY WRAITH WHO BREAKS HIS FAITH

He coughed, and a hairline of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. The stag, looking up through filmy eyes, took up the song for him:

They finished, singing together. It took them a long time, since one or the other often stopped to gasp for air, and it seemed important to them that they finish as one:

Done, they collapsed against each other. "Not a bad song, really," the king said. "Needs a little tightening here and there, perhaps, fewer cousin-rhymes, but at least it's something of us left behind."

"True. Many have died with less fame and with worse poetry." The stag's antlers shuddered painfully back into place. The stag, eyes upward, lay his head on the king's lap and stared at the draconian. "Who would have thought that I should be hunted by such as this? Or that you should hunt them?"

The king's voice was low and halting. "True. They are vile, and we were proud. But for once, we both have died for something besides ourselves. And when you have been dead as long as I — " he wavered, and said in a last breath — "a little variety in one's chosen way of dying is not such a bad thing."

And as the stag joined the king in final death, he thought sleepily that after a thousand years of nightly betrayal, transformation, pursuit by the dead, painful death and more painful rebirth, almost any change was pleasant. He cradled his head against King Peris's stomach, and the two accepted death as, long ago, it had accepted them.

No one but Time removed the bodies; eventually they disappeared. The stone draconians became overgrown and powdered under the pressure of weather and vines; time's best warriors. Only the one draconian, wearing an ancient crown and scarred on its breast with a cloven hoof, remains. For reasons no one living knows, it does not crumble. Go to the wood, no longer called Darken, and you may see it yet.

Once, not long ago, the Forestmaster came into the glade and stood before the single draconian. The crown was tarnished, the sword rusted; only the hoof-print was still sharp and clear. The Forestmaster stared at the print, then looked thoughtfully around the glade. There was not so much as a mound to show that anyone had died here, and even the memory of the draconians was fading from those who lived in Shadow Wood.

The unicorn tipped her head up and quietly sang two stanzas she had heard recently, added onto a very old ballad: