"Rawn, Melanie - Dragon Star 2 - Dragon Token" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

Volog and Latham and Rohan and hundreds of others had died. More deaths would follow—though not, please the Goddess, anyone else she held dear. She would rather lay her living body down on an already lit pyre than lose any of them.

She watched the reflected candle flames against black glass, tiny fires that could not reach into the night beyond crystal windows. But there was another Fire that could. She possessed that Fire. Perhaps it was time she learned how to use it.

Perhaps then she would know an honest peace, one she herself made.

*

During the long day after Stronghold was set ablaze, other people in other keeps learned what had happened.

But in many places there were no Sunrunners to listen on light.

At Tiglath, a thin fog rolled in off the Sunrise Water and kept the Sunrunner there isolated. Sionell spent a heartbreaking morning trying without success to coax Rabisa, her brother's widow, back to some semblance of life. Then she spent the afternoon preparing to receive her husband's victorious army back from a battle not yet fought. That he would not be the victor never crossed her mind.

In the rugged hills of Dorval, where once the faradh'im had lived, there was no Sunrunner to receive and tell the news. Prince Ludhil and Princess Iliena inspected supplies seized from under Vellanti noses on the previous day's raid, then planned the next one. They avoided talking of their children, safe with their grandparents in the Desert.

At Skybowl there was no Sunrunner and no need of one. Lady Ruala, Riyan's wife, was a sorcerer to her last drop of blood. Untrained in most of the arts, still she knew how to speak on sunlight with her husband. When he told her about Rohan, she allowed herself to weep for a little while, then sought out Prince Chadric and Princess Audrite.

At Radzyn and Whitecliff, and in the port town below Graypearl, news of the High Warlord's triumph came in more conventional ways.

At Gilad Seahold, Faolain Riverport, and Remagev, at Tuath Castle and Waes, there was no one at all.

At River Run there was a Sunrunner who didn't know he was. Saumer of Kierst-Isel led his late lord's tired army into the keep where Kostas and Tilal and Sioned had been born, and where Kostas would be burned that night. Every so often he glanced sideways at Rihani, whose wound taken at Catha Heights had begun to fester.

At Einar and Medawari; at Zaldivar and Athmyr; at High Kirat where Princess Danladi sat in the same gentle, frightening silence as Rabisa did at Tiglath; at Kadar Water and Grand Veresch and River Ussh and a score

of smaller keeps throughout the princedoms, Sunrunners listened to Maarken, who spoke from Pol's side, or Hollis, who spoke from Sioned's. And not that night but the next, candles would burn in silence, and all who had died between Roelstra's death and Rohan's would be remembered.

At Faolain Lowland, the Sunrunner Johlarian brought the news to Lord Mirsath and Lady Karanaya, and then shut himself in his chamber so the once-beloved sunlight could bring him no more horrors.

At Balarat, the Sunrunner had been murdered. But that place had no need of her to receive word that Rohan was dead.

*

At Goddess Keep there were hundreds of Sunrunners—and one who stood alone on the battlements in the setting sun with tears streaking his face.

It had just gone dusk. Andry rested his hands lightly on the stone balustrade and gazed down at the assembled Sunrunners and common folk. His athri, Jayachin, stood with her young son at the head of the latter crowd, hiding resentment that she would not stand with him in honoring Rohan. As if she had the right, he thought bitterly, as if she had even seen him more than once or twice in the distance at a Rialla.

Very few here, either Sunrunner or commoner, had known Rohan. Many faradh'im remembered Sioned during her girlhood here, and wept for her loss. None but Andry had known Rohan. In this, as in other things, he

was alone.

All the Sunrunners wore gray mourning. The refugees from Waes and elsewhere had little enough; that they had made an effort to conform to the ritual—a gray tunic here, a headscarf there, everyone wearing at least a token of the color—touched him. They had so little, and yet they each held an unlit candle, a precious thing in their poverty. Whatever else he had been, whatever he had done or not done, however he had succeeded or

failed, Rohan had been their High Prince for more than thirty years. Andry drew breath in the stillness, and began to speak.

*

Nearly the breadth of the continent away, those who had known Rohan best—some of them all his life—also assembled. Amid the stone spires and towers and strange shadows of the Court of the Storm God, they wore no gray and held no candles in the night. The moons had not risen, nor would they. Only cool starlight shone down on the warriors and servants, nobles and Isulk'im, and a tall, solitary figure whose blond hair faded to silver in the gloom.