"Katherine Kurtz - Deryni 3 - High Deryni" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kurtz Katherine)

For MARGARET FRANCES CARTER:
because every mother
with an offspring who writes
should have a book from her Author-Chili
A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books
Copyright (c) 1973 by (Catherine Kurtz
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of
Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of
Canada Limited, Toronto.
ISBN 0-345-34766-8
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition; September 1973 Eighteenth Printing: June 1991
Cover Art by Darrell K. Sweet

HIGH DERYNI

CHAPTER ONE
The sword liereaveth, at home there is death.
Lamentations 1:20
The name they had given the boy was Royston Royston Richardson, after
his father and the dagger he clutched so fearfully in the deepening twilight
was not his own. Around him in the fields of Jennan Vale, the bodies of the
dead lay stiffening among the rows of newly ripening grain. Night-birds hooted
in the deathly silence, and wolves yipped in the hills away and to the north.
Far across the fields, torches were being lit in the streets of the town,
beckoning the living toward what slim comfort numbers might afford. Too many
dead of either side lay cold at Jennan Vale tonight The battle had been brutal
and bloody, even by peasant standards.
It had begun in the middle of the day. The riders of Nigel Haldane,
uncle to the boy-king Kelson, had approached the outskirts of the village just
past noon, royal lion banners billowing crimson and gold in the noonday sun,
the horses sweating lightly in the early summer heat. It was only an advance
guard, the prince had said. He and his troop of thirty were merely to scout a
route for the royal army's march toward Coroth to the east no more. For
Coroth, rebellious Duchy Corwyn's seat of local government, was in the hands
of the insurgent archbishops, Loris and Corrigaru. And the archbishops, aided
and supported by the zealot rebel leader Warin and his followers, were urging
a new persecution of the Deryni: a race of powerful sorcerers who had once
ruled all the Eleven Kingdoms; the Deryni: long suppressed, long feared, and
now personified by Corwyn's half-Deryni Duke Alaric Morgan, whom the
archbishops had excommunicated for his Deryni heresy but three months before.
Prince Nigel had tried to reassure the folk of Jennan Vale. He had
reminded them that the king's men did not plunder and pillage in their own
lands; young Kelson forbade it, as had his father and Nigel's brother, the
late King Brion. Nor was Duke Alaric a threat to the peace of the Eleven
Kingdoms even if the archbishops had ruled otherwise. The belief that the
Deryni as a race were evil was superstitious nonsense! Brion himself, though
not Deryni, had trusted Morgan with his life time and again, had esteemed the