"David Freer - The Forlorn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Freer Dave)

searchers were running down the stairs.

Sideways was simply too far for her to reach. But up was plausible. Climbing the bars on this window
she could reach the bars of the next, and from the top of them the gutter was within reach. She pulled
herself onto the roof just before the Morkth troops spilled into the gardens. A few feet away was a low
ornamental curlicue, with a gargoyle at the head of a down pipe. She slithered to lie behind it. Her thin
arms were shaking, making the bangles tinkle faintly. Without real fear she could never have done such
physical feats. She'd never done any manual labor in her life, and her only muscular training had been for
bed arts, which had rather neglected her arms and shoulders. She lay in the gutter behind the stone
gargoyle and shivered. It would be more than an hour before she dared to move enough to look out.

When at last she was a little more self-possessed, and able to think rationally and beyond her immediate
survival, Shael peeped out cautiously. The picture that presented itself was not an attractive one. There
were still patches of fighting, but it was obvious that it was nearly over. The black-clad Morkth troops
were herding frightened prisoners along the streets. Sections of the town still burned. She shivered with
fear. Would the fire spread? Would they fire the palace?

Resolutely she shrugged off the thought. She must plan. She must win clear of this place. The fallen
city-state of Shapstone was less than a tenth part of her father's lands. Even if it had been conquered she
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could still go . . . She stopped short. He was dead. She hadn't loved her father, and he certainly had
never shown the least real affection towards her. She had never expected any. She was his tool, a
valuable tool, but still a tool, to be married off to his best advantage. She had never questioned this: It
was simply what she was bred for. She now realized that with his death, she was nothing.

The Tyn States were his creation. If he had fallen, so had their unity. None of them would welcome the
Tyrant's daughter as a ruler. They were more likely to kill her in various unpleasant, slow and vengeful
ways. Her mother's people in far-off Arlinn would not welcome her either. Her father had taken the lady
at swordpoint to be his bride, stepping over the bodies of several of her kin who had objected. The act
that had resulted in Shael's conception would have been regarded as rape in any eyes but that of the law.
Of course, when you were the law . . .

Shael knew that in the eyes of the nobles of Arlinn she was tainted with her father's blood. They would
offer her no refuge. She cast the net of her mind about for someone else to turn to and drew it back,
empty. Friends, not mere toadies, were something she'd never had. What need had there ever been?
Relatives were simply other claimants to the throne, and her father had been singly effective in his purge
of those. The few that had fled to dubious safety in the lands of exile certainly had no cause to love her.

Where to then? There seemed no answer, exceptaway from here. Shael was not a likable person, but as
she lay there, with the evening wind blowing cold, it would have been easy to feel sorry for her. With
goosebumps on her bare arms and tear streaks in her makeup, she looked far more like a miserable
sixteen-year-old than a twenty-four-carat bitch of a princess.

She rationalized that it would be better to wait for the conquerors to get drunk beyond competence
before she tried to escape from her hiding place. In reality, which she could not truly hide from herself,
she was simply too scared to move from that little patch of safety. She hugged herself and pulled her