"Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 2 - Witches of Wenshar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

profile against the brilliance of the open door, she could feel the thought
moving through him, the tension in those heavy shoulders. "Face it,
Chief. If this woman Kaletha doesn't teach you how to use your
powers, who will?"
He moved his head a little, and she had a glimpse of the amber
glint of his eye. Then he turned away again. "She's not the only wizard
in the world."
"I thought we'd just established there weren't any at all."
"I don't like her."
"When you had the school at Wrynde, did the people who came
to learn the arts of war from you need to like you?" When he didn't
answer, she added, "If you're starving, do you need to like the baker
from whom you buy your bread?"
He looked back at her then, a deep flame of annoyance in his eye
that she'd read the truth in him. She drank off her beer and set the
tankard down; her forearms, below the rolled sleeves of her
blue-and-white embroidered shirt, were muscled like a man's, marked
with the white scars of old wars. Across the common room under the
glare of the bar lamps, a couple of women in the dusty clothes of
miners were flirting with a lovely young man in brown silk, their voices a
low mixture of sound, like a perfume of roses and musk.
"If you want to move on, you know I'll ride with you. You know I
don't understand wizardry, or the needs of power. But you called
Kaletha an armed idiot for having power and not using it wisely. What
does that make you?"
Anger flared in that slitted yellow eye-she was reminded of a big,
dusty lion baited in its lair and about to growl. But she met his gaze
calmly, challenging him to deny what she said, and, after a moment, it
fell. There was a long silence.
Then he sighed and pushed his half-finished tankard from him. "If it
was battle, I'd know what to do," he said, very quietly, in a voice she
seldom heard him use to her and never to anyone else. "I've been a
soldier all my life, Hawk. I have an instinct of fighting that I trust,
because it's been borne out in battle after battle. But I'm mageborn.
Whether I like it or not, there's a wizard inside of me-not buried and
whispering, as it is with the mageborn when their powers first stir, but
grown and wild as a dragon. I passed through the Great Trial into the
fullness of power without getting even the teaching that most mageborn
managed to pick up in secret from the local grannies when Altiokis was
alive and killing off wizards. It's like being born, not as a baby, but as a
man-having no more mind than a baby, but wanting what a man wants."
Broodingly, he cradled the tankard between his blunt-fingered
hands. Away from the lamplight near the bar, the shadows were
darkening; the wind that ghosted through the door was cooler now than
the trapped, stuffy-smelling heat, scented with dust and the wildness of
the desert evening.
"There are times when the want consumes me. In the nine months
since I came to the power, it's been like a fire inside me, burning me up.
That patchwork of learning I was able to pick up in Mandrigyn before I
was banished makes no sense to me. I have instincts shouting at me