"Berg,.Carol.-.D'arnath.1.-.Son.Of.Avonar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Berg Carol)

wrists again, and slammed my back against the bole of an oak, his other hand
clamped about my throat.
He was big葉all and broad in the chest and shoulder. His face was a blur of
white, red, and brown: fair hair, blood, sun, dirt, terror・no・fury, not terror・I
assumed I was going to die before I could see him with any clarity. But all at
once, as if wrenched by an unseen hand, he snatched his hands away and staggered
backward.
I took a full, satisfying, sight-clearing breath, and willed bone back into my
knees. The naked young man擁ndeed he wore not a stitch耀tood motionless. His limbs
and torso were powerfully muscled and threaded with bloody scratches, his pale
hair unkempt, and his eyes a startling blue, the deep, rich color of lapis,
fixed on my face as if he had never seen a human person before.
Trying to hold his eyes engaged, I slid sideways a finger痴 breadth. My skirt
snagged briefly on the tree. Another step. Then I felt nothing behind me. I spun
on my heel and bolted.
Damn and blast! Two steps and I was sprawled on the forest floor, my mouth full
of dirt and pine needles, my chin stinging. I scrabbled forward, trying to get
my treacherous feet under me, half turning backward, expecting to see his hands
reaching for me again. But the man had not moved a step. Instead he had extended
his hands palms up, as if dedicating a sword at the temple of Annadis. Ripping
my skirt loose from the brambles, I lurched to my feet and backed away, then
turned and darted a bit more carefully down the hill. One last glance over my
shoulder showed him take a single step in my direction, sway drunkenly, and
crumple earthward. I didn稚 stay to watch him hit.
* * *
By the time I reached the lower boundary of the forested hills, neither feet nor
pulse were racing any longer, but my thoughts lingered back on the ridge. Those
unbelievably blue eyes might have been the single spot of color in a painting
rendered entirely in shades of gray. He hadn稚 the look of any poacher I壇 seen
locked in the Dunfarrie pillory. Desperate, but without the ravenous derangement
of a starving peasant. Skilled at violence, but lacking the reckless competence
of the professional thief. He hadn稚 broken my neck.
The stream pooled in a weed-choked depression at the edge of the trees before
meandering sluggishly across the dry meadow. Shooing away a cloud of gnats, I
dropped to my knees by the pool and doused my face and neck, wincing as the cool
water stung my scraped chin and the skin left raw and bruised by his wide hands.
I didn稚 care what else he was. He was a brute. I壇 wager that all of them were
brutes要illain and hunters together.
Mumbling oaths like a common soldier, I straightened my skirt and yanked at my
shift, which had gotten uncomfortably twisted beneath my shapeless tunic. As if
my clothes weren稚 threadbare enough, I壇 have to pull out my cursed needle to
repair the rips. Drying my hands on my skirt, I set out across the meadow toward
the squat, sod-roofed shack that was my home and the weedy garden that kept me
living.
After a few hot hours of work, the immediate annoyances of turnip beetles and
wire-like threadweed had pushed the incident to the back of my mind. The threats
of persistent drought and harsh Leiran winters hung over my head like a
heavy-handed schoolmaster, requiring me to work as hard as I could manage from
dawn to dusk every day of the year. The work occupied only back, shoulders, and
hands, though; my intellect was as dull as the flat, unvarying landscape east of