"Patricia A. McKillip - Od Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

This book is an original publication of The Berkley
Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, business
establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2005 by Patricia A. McKillip.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or
distributed in any printed or electronic form without
permission. Please do not participate in or encourage
piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s
rights. Purchase only authorized editions. ACE is an
imprint of The Berkley Publishing Group. ACE and the
“A” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group
(USA) Inc.
First edition: June 2005
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKillip, Patricia A.
Od magic /Patricia A. McKillip.— 1st ed.
p. cm. ISBN 0-441-01248-5 1. Wizards—Fiction. 2.
Gardeners—Fiction. 3. Kings and
rulers—Succession—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.C3H0425 2005 813'.54-dc
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 ONE

Brenden Vetch found the Od School of Magic beneath a cobbler’s
shoe on a busy street in the ancient city of Kelior. The sign hung
over the door of a tiny shop that badly needed paint. Brenden gazed
incredulously at the door, then again at the sign. Od, it insisted, in
neat black letters, School of Magic. From the sign a shoe depended:
a wooden clog, sturdy enough to sail, fastened to the sign with a
dowel through its center like a mast.
Brenden hesitated. People jostled around him, strangers all of
them, for he was a long way from home. Home was the rocky hills
and cold, deep rivers of the north country, valleys patterned green
and gold and all the colors of wildflowers for three short seasons of
the year, while the blank white wasteland of the fourth seemed to
last forever. He had walked down from there. The royal city, older
than the Kingdom of Numis itself, had sprawled past its gates and
stone walls centuries before. Brenden had spent the previous day
just getting from its outer boundaries of fields and cottages, taverns
and markets, across one of its five bridges and within the shadow of
the walls of the inner city. The gates had long since moldered away;
streets ran through the walls where they had once stood locked and
barred against strangers and the night. Nobody guarded them now;
they let anyone in, even the likes of the dusty, footsore traveler
with nothing to his name but an old leather pack, and little enough