"Doranna Durgin - Wolverine's Daughter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Durgin Doranna)

mountain summers were for gathering meat and plants to tide herself and Lytha over the winter, although
the year had long passed since she had become capable of surviving on her own. The winters were for
making the round, rock-walled home more comfortable to live inтАФand lately something for Kelyn to tend
her mother through. And what was this farm without her mother to center it? Was it even a farm
anymore? Was it still her home?

Lytha had come here a lifetime agoтАФKelyn's lifetimeтАФto birth her daughter and raise Kelyn in her
father's land. A land, she'd said, more suited to raising the daughter of the WolverineтАФlegendary even at
that young ageтАФand for keeping Kelyn too busy with life and survival to get into the trouble for which
any child of the Wolverine would no doubt have a knack. Trouble from which no one parent alone could
keep her. Lytha had never expressed any expectation that Thainn would or should consider staying with
her. She never seemed to mind that the burden of raising that daughter had fallen on her shoulders alone.

The early spring wind, cold and biting, lifted the edge of the fur-lined cloak Kelyn wore, and she cursed
her laziness for not having slipped her arms through the looping inner straps that would have kept it
closed securely around her despite the wood she carried. She trotted quickly to the emerging shape of
the pyreтАФbehind the house, where the prevailing wind would carry the flames away from the thatched
roof.

Kelyn dumped the wood beneath the pyre frame, ignoring the two long-dried limbs that bounced off her
foot, and hastily gathered the cloak around herself, warming her cold fingers in the luxurious fur of the
snow panther she'd slain in the highest peaks of the mountains. Luxury, that is, if she'd tried to buy it in
even the rudest of marketplaces, days of travel from here. Here, it was another of the furred skins
mounded around the sleeping pallets, all results of Kelyn's skill with staff and knife and sling. This one,
with the supple fur of the snow panther at her shoulders and waist supplemented by two rock cat skins to
protect her to mid-calf, was just more striking than most.

Despite the cloak's warmth, when the next gust of wind hit, Kelyn stiffened. Wind carried noise along
with cold, and now it brought her the faintest of whoops, the louder neighing cry of a horse calling to its
companions. Kelyn whirled into the wind, squinting into the tears it brought to her eyes while the cloak
flapped fiercely against her grip. There, just cresting the top of the barren hill opposite the farm. Riders.
Three of them, hovering on the ridge itself, their horses plunging against their bits and calling out to the
fourth, whose rider galloped it foolishly down the side of the hill. Kelyn sent a curse at him, wishing him
the fall he deserved, but the sturdy little horse plunged onward, and after a moment, the other three
followed.

Strangers.Ketura! They weren't here to lay offerings on her mother's pyre. Kelyn hesitated only a
moment, just long enough to pick out the wavering shape of a raised sword. Looters, then,
reiversтАФvultures who had detected the scent of death from afarтАФfor what little this area's inhabitants
owned, they clung to far too fiercely to encourage casual raids. The looters' quick presence stunk of
magic.

Kelyn ran for the roundhouse, shoving aside the flapping leather doorway and leaping down three steps
to the dirt floor in the same motion. She had to move fast, choose what to save. She flung her satchel on
top of the rough wood chest that held foodstuffs and supplies, and grappled with the heavy chest a
moment before she got enough of a grip to heave it up against the dirt-and-rock wall of the house. She
snatched a handful of furs and tossed them leather-side-up over the chest, and, with a loud grunt of
effort, hoisted their largest water crock, a container almost the size of her torso, high up into the air. It
crashed down to soak the leathers, chest and all.