"Doranna Durgin - Seer's Blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Durgin Doranna)

morning, she divided her hair into sections, fingers flying to braid the insipid brown plaits, damp rawhide
laces waiting on the bed to fasten them.

Usually the hills provided her escape from her cousins' taunts.Skin-to-bone! Head-tetched! You been
beat with an ugly stick?

But yesterday they had given her mystery as well.

Strangers.

Only her older brother Rand knew of Blaine's frequent trips into the mountains that cradled their hollow;
if anyone else ever found out, she'd be denied them. Years ago, her flight from teasing kin had turned into
a true appreciation of the woods, even of the steep climbs and often treacherously slippery slopes of
damp, humus-covered soil. The ribbon of level ground that wound along the ridges lured her, for there
the air was free of wood smoke and the view revealed something besides the opposite hillside of
Owlhoot Holler.

And there, she could ponder the remnants of the book. There, she could sit on her favorite rock and
gaze at the unfathomable patterns of rock and tree in the well-worn, close-set ridges of the Shadow
Hollers community. A deep hollow dropped between each ridge; along with the inevitable silver ripple of
a creek, the bottoms held small patches of flat land. Dotted along the creek, crammed onto the flat places
and even up against the slopes, sat homesteads like her ownтАФsparse populations that blossomed at the
broadened hollow's mouth where each creek met the Dewey River.

Yesterday, drawn down into Fiddlehead Holler by the conversations belowтАФconversations held by men
who must not know the mountains funneled noise uphillтАФshe'd found that the bottom of unsettled
Fiddlehead Holler held more than a creek.

Strangers.Here to trade? Must be, with the number of wagons they had alongтАФsmall ones, for easier
travel through the hills. Maybe they'd have books, or fine riding horses, or pretty ribbons. Maybe there'd
even be a family, with a girl her own age. She hadn't had the nerve to find out, not the day before. Not to
close in on them, for even her blinderтАФmade of sassafras, soaked in a new moon fog and painted with
the slick sap of slippery elm, just of the size to fit in her pocketтАФwouldn't keep their eyes from her if she
left the cover of the spring rhododendron patch she had found upslope of them.

Hanging onto her braids, Blaine patted the bed quilt, in search of the rawhide stripsтАФhidden in the dim,
early morning light of the rough-hewn log house.There . Jerking them into tight knots around the ends of
her braidsтАФknots she'd no doubt regret when it came time to turn her hair loose againтАФand pretending
not to hear Lenie's sleepy question, Blaine pulled on her jacket and hurried out onto the porch, her
footfalls ringing hollow on the old planksтАФ

тАФWhere she stopped short in dismay. How had her daddy gotten out here before her? And gotten old
Prince harnessed, to boot?

But there he was. Cadell. Short and wiry, already topped by Rand's sturdy height, and blessed with a
pair of blue eyes sharp enough to spot a child in mischief through a barn wall.

There would be no sneaking off into the mountains today.

Their stout-limbed horse stood by the post at the edge of the chicken-scratched yard, and she knew