"Kathy Tyers - Firebird 1 - Firebird" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tyers Kathy)

PRELUDE

Lady Firebird Angelo of Naetai was fifteen years old, and she was trespassing.

With Lord Corey Bowman in her wake, she squeezed and twisted through a narrow, odd-shaped
opening between the outer wall of the palace and the inner partition that curved around the Electoral
Chamber—a passage that would have been expressly off-limits, had anyone else known it existed.

The palace’s builders, seven hundred years before, had been more concerned with appearance than
security. There were many such irregularities of construction, places where the walls did not exactly meet
or where they came together at peculiar angles, which created all sorts of chinks and cracks and blind
passageways in Firebird’s ancient home: excellent places from which to hide or spy on the unsuspecting,
and Firebird had learned a great deal that way over the years.

Palace Security had searched out and sealed all the breaches that gave illegitimate access to the Electoral
Chamber. How the House Guard had missed this one, Firebird didn’t know. Perhaps they had found and
closed it up once, and someone else had reopened it.

That thought made her a little uneasy—that someone else might have had the audacity to spy on this
highest council in the N’Taian Planetary Systems. The fact that she herself was spying was irrelevant. In
three years—if she lived so long—she would have a seat on that council by right of birth. But that a
commoner, or servant, or worse, a foreign agent, might have listened, or could listen in if they knew of
this place…

Once she no longer had use for it, she intended to remind the House Guard of its existence and have
them make sure no others remained. She would not have any council she sat on subject to prying eyes.

Her companion stumbled, adding a soft scuffle to the drone of voices filtering through the partition.
“Corey!” she hissed. “Be quiet!”

Light gleamed into the crawl space ahead through a chink in the inner wall. Beating Corey to the
peephole, Firebird peered through first. In the Chamber, the Queen’s Electorate hosted two
ambassadors from Naetai’s huge neighbor, the Interstellar Federacy. Their arrival this morning at Sae
Angelo Spaceport had been tantalizingly secretive: Firebird had seen the Federate shuttle land herself, but
no one would explain why the delegation had come, and the Electorate had closed this session to
observers.

Both her older sisters, as Electors, were seated at the central section of that table. She glanced first at her
only confidante in the family: Carradee, the blonde Crown Princess, who sat beside the throne of their
mother, Queen Siwann. Carradee’s smile, gently tolerant, confirmed Firebird’s suspicion that the family’s
elder heiress would prefer to ignore the Federacy entirely. No Consort’s chair now separated Carradee
from the stately, silver-haired Siwann. Prince Irion had been dead almost a year, and Firebird’s heart still
wrenched at this evidence of her father’s passing —a hunting accident. So they said, she thought as her
gaze rested on Siwann. The Queen had mourned Irion, but governmental business had continued with
hardly a pause, capably managed as before by the Electors and Siwann—a strong leader who had
already become much more than the traditional Electoral figurehead.

Beyond Carradee sat the middle sister, Princess Phoena, the “beauty of the family.” Though significantly
taller and lighter-haired, Phoena looked nearly enough like Firebird to be her twin. Phoena’s large,
long-lashed dark eyes watched the Federates with intelligent intensity, and her honey-smooth complexion