"Mercedes Lackey - Sacred Ground" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

swiftly enough to find them. That was the way it was; theWah-K'on-Tah saw to it, in whatever ways it
suited the Great Mystery to work. If, however, she chose to perchand wait—she would never find those
wise counselors. And it wasn't a good idea to tempt other, smaller mysteries into action against her by
being lazy.

So she flew, low over tallgrass prairie, until movement below sent her up to hover as only kestrel, of all
the falcons, could.

Rabbit looked up at her from the shadows at the base of the grass, his nose twitching with amusement.
"Come down, little sister," he offered. "Come and tell me what you seek, out of your world and in mine."

She stooped and landed beside him, claws closing on grass stems as if they were a mouse. "An answer,"
she said, folding her wings with a careful flip to align the feathers properly, for a raptor's life depends on
her feathers. "What is it that keeps me unworthy to become a pipebearer? Where have I failed?"

"I am not the one to ask," said Rabbit. His pink nose quivered as he tested the air, constantly, and his
gray-brown coat blended perfectly with the dead grass of last year. "You know what my counsel is;
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silence and care, and always vigilance. I do not think that will help you much. But perhaps our cousin in
the grasses there can answer you."

He pointed with his quivering pink nose at a spiderweb strung between three tall grass stems and the
outstretched branch of a blackberry bush. Spider watched her from the center of her web, swaying with
the breeze; a large black and tan orb-spider, nearly the size of her kestrel-head. Rabbit accepted her
word of thanks and hopped away. In a moment he had vanished among the grasses.

She repeated her question to Spider, who thought it over for a moment or two, as the breeze swayed
her web and flies buzzed tantalizingly near. "You must know that I am going to counsel patience," she
said, "for that is my way. All things come to my web, eventually, and break their necks therein."

Kestrel bobbed her head, though she did not feel particularly patient. "That is true," she replied. "But it is
more than lack of patience—I must be unready, somehow. There is something I have not done properly."

"If you feel that strongly, then you are unready," Spider replied, agreeing with her. "I see that you do
have great patience—except, perhaps, with your Grandfather. But he is a capricious Little Old Man, and
difficult, and his tricks do not make you laugh as they did when you were a child. I think perhaps I cannot
seewhat it is that makes you unready. Why not ask one with sharper eyes than mine?"

She wondered for a moment if there was a hidden message in that little speech about her Grandfather,
but if there was, she couldn't see it. Spider pointed to the blue sky above with one of her forelegs, and
Kestrel's sharp eyes spotted the tiny dot that could only be Prairie Falcon soaring high in a thermal. Her
feathers slicked down to her body in reflex, for the prairie falcon of the plains of the outer world would
quite happily make a meal of a kestrel.

For that matter, if she let fear overcome her, Prairie Falcon of theinner world would happily make a
meal of Kestrel.