"Mercedes Lackey - Owl Mage 3 - Owlknight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

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.
Up on the cliff, Snowfire waved both arms back, signifying that he understood the Council was
gathering. He disappeared into the dark opening in the cliff face behind him, presumably to fetch his mate,
Nightwind. His errand of notifying Snowfire and Nightwind completed, Darian Firkin k’Vala k’Valdemar
turned back and entered the shaded and secluded pathways of his Vale, heading for the Council House
himself.
An odd and sometimes seemingly contradictory combination of qualities was Darian. A
Journeyman-level Mage, from a land which did not have such things until very recently - a citizen of the
country of Valdemar, yet also a Hawkbrother of the once-secretive Tayledras, adopted into the clan of
k’Vala - even his clothing reflected those contradictions.
He wore soft fabrics of Hawkbrother manufacture; the loose trousers, gathered at the ankle, that
both sexes wore, and the wide-sleeved, open-collared shirt that was also a staple among the Tayledras.
Good, strong dyes were readily available in the Vale, so the rich gold of his shirt and brown of his
trousers were commonplace inside the Vale, though not necessarily in the Valdemaran lands beyond.
But the embroidered, fitted vest he wore, though not of Valdemaran manufacture, was definitely
of the local style. Of light brown leather lined in darker brown silk, it was embroidered in a motif of owls.
Once again, contradiction - the cut of the vest was Valdemaran, the motif was clearly Tayledras.
So there it was, contradictions implied in his very dress, contradictions that sometimes confused
others, but never confused him. For all the contradictions, Darian was comfortable in his dual citizenship,
and sometimes took an impish delight in how uncomfort-able it made others.
He looked up at the sound of a crow’s catcall just above his head, laughing when he saw a falcon