"6 Faith of the fallen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goodkind Terry)

of how long she had been asleep.
She worked her tongue against the pasty dryness in her mouth. Her body felt
leaden with the thick, lingering slumber. She was as nauseated as the time when
she was little and had eaten three candy green apples before a boat journey on a
hot, windy day. It was hot like that now: summer hot. She struggled to rouse
herself fully, but her awaking awareness seemed adrift, bobbing in a vast
shadowy sea. Her stomach roiled. She suddenly had to put all her mental effort
into not throwing up. She knew all too well that in her present condition, few
things hurt more than vomiting. Her eyelids sagged closed again, and she
foundered to a place darker yet.
She caught herself, forced her thoughts to the surface, and willed her eyes open
again. She remembered: they gave her herbs to dull the pain and to help her
sleep. Richard knew a good deal about herbs. At least the herbs helped her,
drift into stuporous sleep. The pain, if not as sharp, still found her there.
Slowly, carefully, so as not to twist what felt like double-edged daggers
skewered here and there between her ribs, she drew a deeper breath. The
fragrance of balsam and pine filled her lungs, helping to settle her stomach. It
was not the aroma of trees among other smells in the forest, among damp dirt and
toadstools and cinnamon ferns, but the redolence of trees freshly felled and
limbed. She concentrated on focusing her sight and saw beyond the foot of the
bed a wall of pale, newly peeled timber, here and there oozing sap from fresh
axe cuts. The wood looked to have been split and hewn in haste, yet its tight
fit betrayed a precision only knowledge and experience could bestow.
The room was tiny; in the Confessors' Palace, where she had grown up, a room
this small would not have qualified as a closet for linens. Moreover, it would
have been stone, if not marble. She liked the tiny wooden room; she expected
that Richard had built it to protect her. It felt almost like his sheltering
arms around her. Marble, with its aloof dignity, never comforted her in that
way.
Beyond the foot of the bed, she spotted a carving of a bird in flight. It had
been sculpted with a few sure strokes of a knife into a log of the wall on a
flat spot only a little bigger than her hand. Richard had given her something to
look at. On occasion, sitting around a campfire, she had watched him casually
carve a face or an animal from a scrap of wood. The bird, soaring on wings
spread wide as it watched over her, conveyed a sense of freedom.
Turning her eyes to the right, she saw a brown wool blanket hanging over the
doorway. From beyond the doorway came fragments of angry, threatening voices.
"It's not by our choice, Richard... We have our own families to think about...
Wives and Children
Wanting to know what was going on, Kahlan tried to push herself up onto her left
elbow. Somehow, her arm didn't work the way she had expected it to. Like a bolt
of lightning, pain blasted up the marrow of her bone and exploded through her
shoulder.
Gasping against the racking agony of attempted movement, she dropped back before
she had managed to lift her shoulder an inch off the bed. Her panting twisted
the daggers piercing her sides. She had to will herself to slow her breathing in
order to get the stabbing pain under control. As the worst of the torment in her
arm and the stitches in her ribs eased, she finally let out a soft moan.
With calculated calm, she gazed down the length of her left arm. The arm was
spitted. As soon as she saw it, she remembered that of course it was. She