"The Dream Thief" - читать интересную книгу автора (Abé Shana)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Once there was a princess.

She was very fair indeed, no doubt the fairest princess of any princess who had ever been or ever would be. For she was not merely a princess but an actual dragon in disguise, and that meant she was beyond beauty: she had eyes that glowed and skin like a moonlit rainbow. When she spoke, the rivers paused to listen, and when she moved, the ground yielded beneath her feet in reverence to her greater glory.

She heard the minerals that sang beneath the mountains, pockets of diamonds, heavy veins of gold. She could vanish into wisps and bound across the sky with wings and scales and frightening beauty, because in her delicacy she represented the very finest of her kind.

It is well known that the drákon are the most lovely of all creatures. Their bodies are sinuous and slick; their eyes blaze and their claws are crystal daggers. They glint green and blue and red and gold, all the colors of all the jewels. And since this medieval princess was considered the best of even these beings-her walk, her face, the grace of her hips and legs and her slender, clever fingers-she was prized above all things.

Dragon-men from the four corners of the sky came to woo her. Human men laid flowers where she walked, and spoke of the music of her voice, or the color of her hair, or how her eyes would pierce their souls with a single, indifferent glance, draining their hopes and dreams.

It was not her fault she was like this. It was only who she was born to be: the precise, absolute pinnacle of her kind. She was a treasure, guarded in a mighty castle perched high in the Carpathian peaks, betrothed to a dragon-prince. Her life was a glimmer of gemstones and alchemy. Her future was writ in stone. She would marry and breed and bear superb children, and the drákon would reign for a thousand, thousand years above the earth.

If only that peasant boy hadn’t shown up. If only he hadn’t dared to seize what was not his own.

So:

Once there was a princess.

And once there was a lowly serf.

Their futures were about to clash. Destiny would shudder. Silver stars would fall. But nothing was going to stop that boy from stealing what he desired.

He was a real bastard, if you think about it.