"Elliott,.Kate.-.Crown.Of.Stars.3.-.Burning.Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

moment unweaving itself, and Zacharias shrieked, flinging up
his hands to protect himself, although mere flesh could not
protect him against stone.

This was more than witchcraft.

The woman appeared again in the center of the circle,
surefooted and unshaken by the earth's tremors except for
the flashing shimmer and sway of beads dangling among her
gold necklaces. Bulkezu struggled up from his hands and
knees behind her. Zacharias tried to call a warning, but the
breath sucked into his lungs congealed there and he could
only gasp and choke and point.

With a grunt, the woman swung around to bring the flat of the
obsidian blade down between the two arched spines of
Bulkezu's wings, onto his head. The blow laid him flat on his
stomach, and his helmet canted awkwardly to one side,
almost torn off. Blood swelled from the base of his skull to
mat his black hair. The shaking subsided, but the haze
remained. Outside the circle the other riders flitted by this
portal and that, still searching for an entrance.

The woman stepped closer to BulkezuЧthat fast he rolled to
one side and jerked himself up and back around in a half turn.
The tips of his deadly wings hissed through the air to slice her
across the abdomen and through her sheath of necklaces.
Beads of jade and turquoise, pellets of gold, rained onto the
ground around her. He leaped backward, up to his feet, sword
held before him. His helmet he slapped down, and again when
it would not settle right around his eyes, and then, with an
angry grunt, he wrenched it off and flung it to one side so that,
finally, his face was exposedЧproud and handsome in the
Quman way.

Ugly red welts bloomed on the woman's bronze-dark skin.
Blood welled from the cuts and snaked down in vermilion
beads to lodge in the waistband of her skirt.

They faced off, each wounded, each warrior now. In this way
they measured each the other: the Quman warrior made
fearsome by the glint of the griffin feathers bound into the
wings at his backЧonly a man who had killed a griffin could
wear such wings; and the foreign woman, not of human breed
or birthing, with her bronze cast of skin and hair, her own blood
seeping unheeded down her belly. Her gaze on her opponent
was as unyielding as the stone behind Zacharias' back.

Bulkezu sprang forward, batting at the spear with his sword
and closing the distance between them. Zacharias gasped