"Kate Elliott - Jaran 4 - The Law of Becoming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

task the gods have given you to do, and then do it."

They had had this conversation a hundred times before over the twelve years they had known one
another. No doubt they would repeat it a thousand times more in the years to come. But Sonia knew
only part of the truth.

The threads of starlight Tess used in the weave were invisible to the jaran. She kept them that way.
She had devised a complicated web that concealed and revealed the true nature of her life, her origins,
her purpose here, in alternating strands, so that no one strand was so weak, foundering on half-truths,
that it might break and thus collapse the entire fragile edifice.
 Strand One (revealed): Tess Soerensen was the sister of Charles Soerensen, formerly Prince of
Jeds, a flourishing city-state far to the southwest of the plains, and now a fugitive in his mother's
country of "Erthe," far across the seas. Having given up his princely seat, Charles had gone to fight
against the Empire that had conquered and subjugated Erthe, hoping in time to free his mother's land
from the Chapalii yoke.

Strand Two (concealed): Earth was not a country far across the seas, but a planet orbiting a distant
star, up in the heavens. Far from giving up any pretense to power, Charles had indeed passed the
princedom of Jeds into Tess's hands, but only to resume with full force the dukedom granted him by
the same conquering Chapalii.

Strand Three (revealed): The Chapalii were not human. They were zayinu, the ancient ones.

Strand Four (concealed): The Chapalii were aliens. Their interstellar Empire had swallowed Earth
and her sister planets a hundred years before, bringing a period of peace and stability and a number of
technological advances to the mostly human population of the amalgam of planets known as the
League. But Earth and the League were subject states. They were not free.

Strand Five (revealed): Charles Soerensen meant to lead a rebellion against the Chapalii Empire,
and so Tess (as Prince of Jeds) had allied herself with Ilyakoria Bakhtiian, the leader of the united
jaran tribes.

Strand Six (concealed): The jaran, Jeds, the lands the jaran had already conquered, all lay on an
interdicted planet called Rhui, in the Delta Pavonis system. Charles needed the mostly untapped
resources of Rhui for his rebellion. To this end, he and Tess had agreed to do what they could to aid
the jaran in uniting as much of the western continent of Rhui under one authority—jaran authority—as
possible, so that when they needed the resources of Rhui a decade or a century from now, these
resources could be swiftly commandeered.

Strand Seven (revealed): Tess was married to Ilya Bakhtiian.

Strand Eight (concealed): Well, she really was married to him. That had happened before the rest
of the plan sprang to life. But she had concealed her true origins from him. He didn't know she came
from another planet. He didn't even know that he lived on a planet, much less that there were other
planets with other life or that the universe existed on any but an abstract, philosophical scale even as it
rested within the hands of the gods themselves.

By what right did she keep from him, from Sonia, from all of them, knowledge of the stars? She
could list the rationales easily enough, one, two, three: