（外文电子版资料）Lackey, Mercedes - Valdemar (2) - The Last Herald Mage 01 - Magics Pawn.doc

Magic’s Pawn by Mercedes Lackey Last Herald Mage 1 One “Your grandfather, said Vanyels brawny, fifteen-year-old cousin Radevel, was crazy. He has a point, Vanyel thought, hoping they werent about to take an uncontrolled dive down the last of the stairs. Radevels 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 Vanyels great-great-grandfathers day it had been a more conventional defensive keep, but by the time Vanyels grandfather had held the lands, the border had been pushed far past Forst Reach. The old reprobate had decided when hed 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 didnt know your way, you could really get lost; and there were an awful lot of places you couldnt get into unless you knew exactly how to get there. Some of those places were important - like the bathhouse and privies. The old goat hadnt much considered the next generation in his alterations, either; hed cut up the nursery into servants quarters,