"Katherine Kerr - Deverry 10 - The Black Raven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

'Ah,' Verrarc said. 'Then it were somewhat you did that did drive her away?'
'Somewhat I did not, that I should have done.' The truth sprang out, as sudden
as the tears. 'She did lay upon me a sacred charge, and I did fail in it. Ah
ye gods, that I should have been so weak and unworthy of her love!'
Verrarc moved to sit down with her on the bed. She turned into his arms and
sobbed, while he stroked her hair and whispered 'there, there' over and over
again. At last she quieted, but she clung to him.
'Well, now,' Verrarc said, 'this charge be best done, then, and mayhap she'll
return to you.'
'So I do hope, though it be not such an easy task. It were about a thing that
had been stolen from her, you see, and it does lie now in the midst of her
enemies. She did ask me to restore it to her.'
'What might this thing be?'
She looked up, and he could feel her trembling in his arms.
'That I can never tell you, Verro,' she whispered. 'I beg you, demand not that
from me. My secrets you shall have, when the time be ripe for the telling of
them. But it were a blasphemy were I to tell you her secrets.'
For a long moment he studied her face. Was she lying or not? He simply
couldn't tell.
"Well and good then,' Verrarc said at last. 'What lies between you and your
goddess be not mine to meddle in, anyway.'
Once, long ago, in some immeasurably ancient time, Evandar and his people,
Alshandra among them, had dwelt between the stars as beings of pure energy and
no form. Somehow, when the Light birthed the vast panoply of worlds, they had
been 'left behind', as Evandar put it to himself. How or why, he could no
longer remember. Yet, since they had been born to follow the path that all
souls must take into the physical plane and the world of matter, they had
longed for a solid existence in the beauty of a world. To sate their hunger
for life he had built that area of the etheric plane he called the Lands, a
perfect illusion of the world of Annwn, with its grassy meadows and rivers,
its forests and hills - a shadow world so lovely that they had spurned the
real world waiting for them on the physical plane.
He had woven them bodies, too, out of the astral substance, modelling them on
the elven race he had come to love. Over the aeons Evandar's dweomer had grown
so immensely powerful that he had for a time thought himself as powerful as a
god, until the destruction of the Seven Cities of the Far West had stripped
him of his arrogance. No matter how much raw dweomer power he expended, no
matter how hard he fought with every sort of weapon, in the end the Hordes had
won and destroyed every beauty of the elven world. The lesson lived with him
still, that as soon as he left his own lands, he too was a slave of change and
death, even though his own being seemed immune to both.
And now Time was pursuing him, it seemed, determined to force the lesson home
another time. After untold centuries of a perfect spring, the Lands lay
besieged by winter. Evandar returned to find his meadows frosted white, his
streams frozen, his trees stripped bare, and his people huddled miserably
together by the bank of a silver river. When they saw him they cried out.
'Bring back the spring! Give us summer!'
'I did that before, and the winter returned to us anyway. Mayhap we'd best
just ride the winter out.'
In a screaming pack they rushed forward and surrounded him, yelling, begging,