（外文电子版资料）Patricia C. Wrede - Stronger Than Time.pdf

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Patricia%20C.%20Wrede%20-%20Stronger%20Than%20Time.html STRONGER THAN TIME Patricia C. Wrede THE KEEP ROSE HIGH ABOVE THE RING OF BRUSH AND briars choking the once-clear lawn around its base. Even when the sun was high, the towers shadow lay cold and dark on the twisted mass of thorns, and at dusk it stretched like a gnarled black finger across the forest and up the mountainside. Arven hated walking through that somber dimness, though it was the shortest way home. Whenever he could, he swung wide around the far side of the keep to stay clear of its shadow. Most people avoided the keep altogether, but Arven found its sunlit face fascinating. The light colored the stone according to the time of day and the shifting of the seasons, now milk white and shining, now tinged with autumn gold or rosy with reflected sunset, now a grim winter grey. The shadowed side was always black and ominous. Once, when he was a young man and foolish (he had thought himself brave then, of course), Arven had dressed in his soft wool breeches and the fine linen shirt his mother had embroidered for him, and gone to the very edge of the briars. He had searched all along the sunlit side of the keep for an opening, a path, a place where the briars grew less thickly, but he had found nothing. Reluctantly, he had circled to the shadowed side. Looking back toward the light he had just quitted, he had seen white bones dangling inside the hedge, invisible from any other angle: human bones entwined with briars. There were more bones among the shadows, bones that shivered in the wind, and leaned toward him, frightening him until he r