"Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 01 - The Black Gryphon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

with fine, precise stitches.
The chirurgeons that had been his teachers had admired those stitches, once upon a time.
No one knows hurt and heartache like a kestra'chern, because no one has felt it like a
kestra'chern. If he had told the boy that, would the young idiot have believed it?
What if I had told him a story—"Once on a time, there was a Kaled'a'in family, living far
from the camps of their kin—"
His family, who, with several others, had accepted the burden of living far from the Clans, in the land
once named Tantara and a city called Therium. They had accepted the burden of living so far away, so
that the Kaled'a'in would have agents there. His family had become accustomed to the ways of cities
after living there for several generations, and had adopted many of the habits and thoughts of those
dwelling within them. They became a Kaled'a'in family who had taken on so many of those characteristics
that it would have been difficult to tell them from the natives except for their coloring—unmistakably
Kaled'a'in, with black hair, deep amber skin, and blue, blue eyes.
Once upon a time, this was a family who had seen the potential for great Empathic and Healing
power in one of their youngest sons. And rather than sending him back to the Clans to learn the
"old-fashioned" ways of the Kaled'a'in Healers, had instead sent him farther away, to the capital of the
neighboring country of Predain, to learn "modern medicine."
He took a sudden sharp breath at the renewed pain of that long-ago separation. It never went away;
it simply became duller, a bit easier to endure with passing time.
They thought they were doing the right thing. Everyone told me how important it was to
learn the most modern methods.
Everyone told me how important it was to use the Gifts that I had been born with. I was only
thirteen, I had to believe them. The only problem was that the College of Chirurgeons was so
"modern" it didn't believe in Empathy, Healing, or any other Gift. The chirurgeons only believed
in what they could see, weigh, and measure; in what anyone with training could do, and "not just
those with some so-called mystical Gifts."
The Predain College of Chirurgeons did provide a good, solid grounding in the kinds of Healing that
were performed without any arcane Gifts at all. Amberdrake was taught surgical techniques, the
compounding of medicines from herbs and minerals, bone-setting, diagnoses, and more. And if he had
been living at home, he might even have come to enjoy it.
But he was not at home. Surrounded by the sick and injured, sent far away from anyone who
understood him—in his first year he was the butt of unkind jokes and tricks from his fellow classmates,
who called him "barbarian," and he was constantly falling ill. The Gift of Empathy was no Gift at all when
there were too many sick and dying people to shut out. And the chirurgeons that were his teachers only
made him sicker, misdiagnosing him and dosing him for illnesses he didn't even have.
And on top of it all, he was lonely, with no more than a handful of people his own age willing even to
be decent to him. Sick at heart and sick in spirit, little wonder he was sick in body as well.
He had been so sick that he didn't even realize how things had changed outside the College—had no
inkling of how a mage named Ma'ar had raised an army of followers and supporters in his quest for
mundane, rather than arcane, power. He heard of Ma'ar only in the context of "Ma'ar says" when one of
his less-friendly classmates found some way to persecute him and felt the need to justify that persecution.
From those chance-fallen quotes, he knew only that Ma'ar was a would-be warrior and philosopher
who had united dozens of warring tribes under his fist, making them part of his "Superior Breed."
Proponents of superior-breed theories had come and gone before, attracted a few fanatics, then faded
away after breaking a few windows. All the teachers said so when he asked them.
I saw no reason to disbelieve them. Amberdrake took his tiny, careful stitches, concentrating his
will on them, as if by mending up his sleeve he could mend up his past.
He had paid no real attention to things happening outside the College. He didn't realize that Ma'ar
had been made Prime Minister to the King of Predain. He was too sunk in depression to pay much
attention when the King died without an heir, leaving Ma'ar the titular ruler of Predain. King Ma'ar, the