"Claremont, Chris & Lucas, George - Chronicles of the Shadow War 02 - Shadow Dawn - part02" - читать интересную книгу автора (Claremont Chris)

bulk, he was solid as forged steel. The only softness about him was
the clothes on his back.
"I've never seen skin like yours," he noted.
One of a kind, that's me was her silent retort. Aloud, she was more
circumspect. 'It's a wide, wonderful world," she told him. 'You'd be
amazed at what you'll find in it."
"Considering my present company, I already am."
She rolled her eyes, shutting her mental ears against Rool's hoots
of derision, but secretly she was smiling with an awkward shyness
she'd never before felt.
His answers proved as vague as hers. He was from somewhere, en
route to somewhere else, the clear impression being that his depar-
ture was hasty and involved some flagrant breaches of hospitality
and etiquette, not to mention propriety. Troubadours had notorious
reputations but in Duguay's case it appeared to be wholly deserved.
His capture was deftly explained away as a case of being in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Of the spell the elves planned to cast,
he professed total ignorance. All that mattered to him was that he
was to be the sacrifice that activated it.
For all his mysteries-and who was she to throw those stones,
who kept tightly shuttered the doors and windows of her own
past?-Duguay proved himself the ideal partner for the road. He was
good company, silent when needed, always ready with a story to
make her laugh or a witty, occasionally wicked observation, and a
song to lift her spirits or make the miles go that much faster. When
they broke for lunch and later found a place to pass the night, he
pulled forth an instrument from his pack and spent some time in
practice with it. Over the course of the days that followed, she saw a
bodhran, a tiompan, a set of bellows pipes, and a pennywhistle, a fid-
dle, and a guitar, and had she not seen how artfully he arranged his
kit-and tried hefting the load onto her own back-she was ready to
swear he used a variation of her own traveling pouches and stored
everything in a hidey-hole of magic.
For all that she came to like him, though, she still found herself un-
able to look him in the eye.
They were proceeding through highland country, and would be
until they reached Sandeni, where the continent dropped literally off
a cliff toward the west and ultimately to Angwyn. Mile after endless
mile of rolling hills that passed through the most impressive forest






Elora had beheld since Angwyn. Old-growth conifers, pointed
crowns stabbing skyward like lancers at attention, the smallest of
their trunks broad enough for a stout man to hide behind unseen.
Bastian was their primary hunter, providing them with a fresh kill
for every dinner, rabbit one day, trout or salmon another. Responsi-