Moonrise

Начало книги

Do the seasons warm? Perhaps a very little, though the wall of ice still stands across the continent, the seas lie shrunken, and Lord Winter rules more than eight Warm-time months each year.

If Warm-times do come again, I will not see them, since I am dying, and so leaving the service of the Achieving King. And, after all, I have seen enough. I cannot believe in the Shadow World, though I wish to, for there my friends would be waiting for me. My dear Catania, and Newton – sad, reluctant ruler. Dangerous Jack Monroe… my Gardens Lady Bongiorno, and the late great Queen of Kingdom River. They have seemed too grand, too vivid for death's idiot emptiness.

I have not been so grand, so vivid. Still, I will miss my breakfasts.

Note found in the desk of Neckless Peter Wilson, Lord Librarian at island. Filed in the daily Book by Her Honor, the Lady Portia-doctor.

Knowledge of one's self – a study often unrewarding as a southern songbird's battering at its own reflection. Futile as complaining of cold in a world gone to cold for six hundred years, thanks to treacherous Jupiter's altered orbit.

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