"Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon - Valdemar - Darians Tale 03 - Owlknight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

Owlknight

Darian?s TaleIOwl 03

Mercedes R. Lackey and Larry Dixon.

We?ve got soul.

We?ve got each other.

We?ve got the whole world to embrace.

This one?s for you.

One

A shrill whistle caught Darian?s attention, and he looked up and over the lake
of k?Valdemar Vale, shading his eyes with his hand. As he expected, he saw
Snowfire waving at him from his ?balcony,? three-quarters of the way up the side
of the cliff that edged the far side of the lake.

Actually, it would have been more accurate to say that he saw a tiny figure with
white hair waving from the balcony - at this distance he couldn?t have said for
certain that it was Snowfire. It wasn?t Nightwind, though; her hair was still
raven-wing black.

The sky above the cliff shimmered with a light, pearly opalescence, although it
was perfectly possible to see the clouds and blue sky beyond the new Veil, a
magic shield that protected k?Valdemar.

I would never have believed we?d get a Veil so quickly, he marveled once again.
If anyone had told me that the Heartstone would support a Veil this soon, I
would have told him he was wildly optimistic. It wasn?t a full Veil, which would
have excluded all weather; this simply kept things at a constant, pleasant
temperature, no matter the season. Rain came through, and snow fell to the
ground as rain once it passed through the Veil, so they still got some weather.
They couldn?t do without roofs yet.

He whistled back at Snowfire, and waved his arm in the direction of the Council
House, the newly built structure that housed all Joint Council sessions. It wasn?t
much of a structure; now that the Vale had protection, it didn?t need to be much
of a structure. It had ?walls? of wicker work covered in vines, a roof that was
half skylight and half slate, a floor of natural turf which flourished in the
light. For furniture, in deference to the Valdemar contingent of the Joint
Council, there were chairs and a table, but the chairs were of woven grapevine
and wicker with soft cushions, and the table was a compass-rose shape of tree-trunk
sections, topped with three rising layers of polished wood with one section for
each member of the Council. The Tayledras of k?Valdemar, of course, felt no need
for formal furniture, and neither did the tribesmen of the Ghost Cat clan.