"David Drake - Lord of the Isles 05 - Goddess of the Ice Realm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

pleasant features, , you saw the scars; and when Chalcus was stripped down to a linen kilt like the
sailors, you could see he had scars of one sort or another over most of his body.

From taste and habit Ilna dressed plainly, in unbleached woolen tunics and a blue wool cloak
when the weather required it; Chalcus by contrast was a dazzle of color whenever circumstances
permitted. Today he wore breeches of red leather, a silk shirt dyed in bright indigo, and between them a
sash colored a brilliant yellow with bee's pollen which matched the fillet binding his hair. Ilna knew that
the nobles gathered on the quay to meet them would think Chalcus looked like a clown; but they
wouldn't say anything, at least not the ones who took time to note the sailor's eyes and the way use had
worn the hilt of his incurved sword.
"I do hope Mistress Kaline won't still be sick when we're introduced to Count Lascarg," Merota
said in a carefully polite voice. "She'll never be able to live down the embarrassment if that happens."
Ilna looked sharply at her ward, thinking for a moment that she was serious. Then Merota's
angelic expression dissolved in a fit of giggles.

"Yes," Ilna said, allowing herself to smile minusculely before her face stiffened again into its
accustomed sternness. "But if necessary we'll both help her stand. I've found it settles me to hold on to
others."
She didn't care for Mistress Kaline as a person; but then, she didn't care for very many people.
Ilna had continued to employ Mistress Kaline after Merota became her ward, in part because the stern
old snob did in her way truly love the child, but also because Ilna was more afraid of her own power than
she was of anything else in this world or beyond it. It would be easy to dismiss the governess who'd
sneered at Ilna as an orphan with no culture and no forebears... but for Ilna, it would have been equally
easy to weave a pattern that would rip Mistress Kaline's soul straight to Hell.

That way lay damnation. It was a path Ilna had once travelled, and from which she would never
fully be able to return.

"You're really all right, Ilna?" Merota asked softly.

Ilna reached down with her right hand and squeezed the girl's. Sometimes Merota acted younger
than her nine years, but at others it seemed that she was taking care of Ilna instead of the other way
around.

"Yes, child," Ilna said, deliberately resuming the pattern she'd been knotting from the hank of
short cords she kept in her sleeve. "I've made some bad decisions in the course of my life, and I'll
probably make more mistakes as I get older. But in the main, the pattern's not one anyone has a right to
object to."

Ilna glanced at the fabric her fingers were knotting while her mind considered other, less pleasant,
things. Her pattern in coarse twine would calm those who looked at it, raise their spirits or cool their
anger. Ilna didn't weave charms any more than the sun was a charm because it warmed those on whom
its rays fell. What Ilna wove had the same natural certainty as the wind and the rain, as daylight and
death.

She put the finished fabric in her right sleeve, then took a fresh hank of cords out of her left and
began again. The patterns were just a way of occupying her fingers; the work didn't calm her, exactly, but
her irritation was more likely to come to the surface if she wasn't doing something.

A trumpeter signaled from the flagship, the five-banked monster to the right of Garric's. Captain