"Kate Elliott - Jaran 2 - An Earthly Crown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

he knew that she had the same kind of reckless, bold heart as he did. And because she
had never cared one whit that he was an orphan. "Trouble will come of that, I trust."
She sounded satisfied, as if she hoped the trouble would come soon, and in an
unexpected and inconvenient manner. "Well met, Feodor," she added. "I missed you."
Then she spun and strode back to the tent. She knelt beside one of the seven
commanders under the awning. Anton Veselov's fair complexion flushed red first, and
then he paled. Bakhtiian turned right round and considered them, but he said nothing.
After a moment, Veselov rose and walked out the side of the awning and around to
the semicircle. The youngest etsana shifted to let the soldier sink down beside her. He
drew his saber and laid it across his knees: his authority as the new dyan of his tribe.
' 'The gods will look askance at that,'' murmured Feodor.
"There's no other man in the line to give it to," said Aleksi, but he also felt
uncomfortable, seeing a sister and brother sitting together in authority over a tribe.
Bakhtiian waited for the stir to die down. Aleksi settled back into a crouch to
wait, and Feodor slid his gaze back to Nadine Orzhekov. As if she felt his gaze, she
looked back over her shoulder at them. A smileтАФor a smirkтАФquirked her lips up.
Feodor flushed. He collapsed ungracefully beside Aleksi, looking pale and staring
hard at his hands. Bakhtiian's niece sat down in her place and did not look their way
again.
The wind blew. The assembly was silent. The sun's disk slid down toward the
western horizon.
A flame winked. Aleksi blinked, staring at the tent, and discovered where Tess
had been all along. The tent flap that covered the entrance to the interior had been tied
up just enough to let an observer hidden inside watch without being seen. Now, with a
lantern lit at her side, Tess Soerensen was visible to him. Her head bent, as if she was
tired, or too burdened to bear up any longer. Bakhtiian's khaja wife, sitting silent in
her tent as her husband declared war on all khaja people. Aleksi felt a vise grip his
heart, in fear for her, and for himself. What if she left him here, to return to her
brother's lands?
Then, with a grin, he relaxed. Her right arm moved, a slight movement but one he
recognized. She was writing. It was a foreign word, and a khaja thing to do, recording
words and events with these scrawls she called letters, as if she hadn't the memory to
recall it all properly, in her heart. Which she had often, and cheerfully, admitted that
she had not. She glanced up. She was staring at someone: at Ilya Bakhtiian? No.
Aleksi followed the line of her sight and he saw that she was staring at the sky,
at, in fact, the only star bright enough to show yet in the twilight sky. She often stared
at the heavens that way, as if they held an answer for her, as if she sought something
there, like a singer who seeks the heart of a song in the gods' lands. Oh, yes, he knew
she held some secret inside her, a secret that her own husband did not guess at. What
it was, he had not yet divined, but Aleksi had spent most of his life watching people,
interpreting their slightest action, their simplest words, because until this last four
months he had only his powers of observation and his undeniable skill with the saber
to keep him alive. Tess Soerensen was not like other people, not like her adopted
people the jaran, certainly, but not like the khaja either. She was something altogether
different, betraying herself not in obvious, grand ways, but in the subtle, tiny things
that most people overlooked.
Tess's gaze fell from the star and settled on her husband. She loved him in a way
that was, perhaps, a bit unseemly for a woman of the tribes. But Tess wasn't jaran;
like Aleksi, she was an outsider. Suddenly she glanced to one side and spotted Aleksi,
and grinned, swiftly, reassuringly. And went back to her writing.