"Barbara Hambly - Darwath 4 - Mother Of Winter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

thought, until he was dead.
She woke and found that she had her knife in her hand. She lay in the corner of the
bishop's courtyard, fire between her and where a voice that might have been human,
half a mile or more away, was blubbering and shrieking in agony, as something made
leisurely prey of its owner.
Good, she thought, calm and strangly clear. He's distracted.
Why did she feel that the matter had been arranged?
The blanket slid from her as she rose to hands and knees, knife tucked against her
side. In her bones, in her heart, with the same awareness by which she knew the
hapless ghoul was being killed for her benefit, she also knew herself to be invisible to
the stretched-out fibers of Ingold's senses, invisible to his magic. If she kept low,
practiced those rites of silence the Guards had taught, she could sever his spine as
easily as she'd severed that of the thing that had torn open her face.
His fault, too, she thought bitterly, surveying the thin fringe of white hair beneath the
close-fit lambskin cap. His doing. His summoning, if the truth be known.
I beautiful before ...
She knew that wasn't true. Thin-faced, sharp-featured, with a great witchy cloud of
black hair that never would do what she wanted of it, she had never been more than
passsably pretty, a foil for the glamour of a mother and a sister whose goals had been
as alien to her shcolarly pursuits as a politician's or a religious fanatic's might have
been.
The awareness of the lie pulled her back-pulled her fully awake-and she looked down
at the knife in her hand.
Jesus, she thought. Oh, Jesus ...
''Ingold. . ."
He moved his head a little, but did not take his eyes from the dark, of the court. "Yes,
child?"
"I've had a dream," she said. "I want to kill you."
Chapter Two

"Once upon a time there was a boy..." Rudy Solis began.
"Once upon a time there was a boy." Altir Endorion, Lord of the Keep of Dare,
wriggled his back against the side of the big chest-bed to get comfortable and folded
his small hands, the low glare of the hearth's embers shining in his speedwellblue
eyes.
"And he lived in a great big palace..."
"And he lived in a great big palace."
"With lots of servants to wait on him and do whatever he asked."
The blue eyes closed. Tir was thinking about that one. He had long black lashes,
almost straight, and his black forelock, escaping from the embroidered sheepskin cap
he wore, made a diacritical squiggle between cap rim and the drawn-down strokes of
his brows. In thought like this he seemed older than five years.
"He went riding every morning on horses by the river and all his servants had to go
with him," Tir went on after a moment. "They'd all carry bows and arrows, except the
boy's servants had to carry the boy's bows and arrows for him. They'd shoot birds by
the river..."
His frown deepened, distressed. "They shot birds that were pretty, not because they
wanted to eat them. There was a black bird with long legs wading in the river, and it
had a little crown of white feathers on its head, and the boy shot at it with his arrows.
When it flew away, the boy told his servants, 'I would that you take this creature with