Читать онлайн «Magic's Pawn (The Last Herald-Mage Series, Book 1)»

Magic’s Pawn

by

Mercedes Lackey

Last Herald Mage 1

One

“Your grandfather," said Vanyel's brawny, fifteen-year-old cousin Radevel, "was crazy. "

He has a point, Vanyel thought, hoping they weren't about to take an uncontrolled dive down the last of the stairs.

Radevel's remark had probably been prompted by this very back staircase, one that started at one end of the third-floor servants' hall and emerged at the rear of a linen closet on the ground floor. The stair treads were so narrow and so slick that not even the servants used it.

The manor-keep of Lord Withen Ashkevron of Forst Reach was a strange and patchworked structure. In Vanyel's great-great-grandfather's day it had been a more conventional defensive keep, but by the time Vanyel's grandfather had held the lands, the border had been pushed far past Forst Reach. The old reprobate had decided when he'd reached late middle age that defense was going to be secondary to comfort. His comfort, primarily.

Not that Vanyel entirely disagreed with Grandfather; he would have been one of the first to vote to fill in the moat and for fireplaces in all the rooms. But the old man had gotten some pretty peculiar notions about what he wanted where - along with a tendency to change his mind in mid-alteration.

There were good points - windows everywhere, and all of them glazed and shuttered. Skylights lighting all the upper rooms and the staircases. Fireplaces in nearly every room. Heated privies, part and parcel of the bathhouse.

Every inside wall lathed and plastered against cold and damp. The stables, mews, kennel, and chickenyard banished to new outbuildings.

But there were bad points - if you didn't know your way, you could really get lost; and there were an awful lot of places you couldn't get into unless you knew exactly how to get there. Some of those places were important - like the bathhouse and privies. The old goat hadn't much considered the next generation in his alterations, either; he'd cut up the nursery into servant's quarters, which meant that until Lord Withen's boys went into bachelor's hall and the girls to the bower, they were cramped two and three to a series of very tiny attic-level rooms.

"He was your grandfather, too," Vanyel felt impelled to point out. The Ashkevron cousins had a tendency to act as if they had no common ancestors with Vanyel and his sibs whenever the subject of Grandfather Joserlin and his alterations came up.

"Huh. " Radevel considered for a moment, then shrugged. "He was still crazy. " He hefted his own load of armor and padding a little higher on his shoulder.

Vanyel held his peace and trotted down the last couple of stone stairs to hold the door open for his cousin. Radevel was doing him a favor, even though Vanyel was certain that cousin Radevel shared everyone else's low opinion of him. Radevel was by far and away the best-natured of the cousins, and the easiest to talk round - and the bribe of Vanyel's new hawking gauntlet had proved too much for him to resist. Still, it wouldn't do to get him angry by arguing with him; he might decide he had better things to do than help Vanyel out, gauntlet or no gauntlet.