"Robin Hobb - Assassin 1 - Assassin' s Apprentice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hobb Robin)

reluctant wonder. And lastly he closed his eyes for a second, hooding them
against some pain. "It's a thing that will try her lady's will to the edge of
her very name," Burrich said softly.
He released my jaw and stooped awkwardly to pick up the bread and cheese I'd
dropped. He brushed them off and handed them back to me. I stared at the thick
bandaging on his right calf and over his knee that had kept him from bending his
leg. He reseated himself and refilled his mug from a pitcher on the table. He
drank again, studying me over the rim of his mug.
"Who'd Chivalry get him on?" a man at the other end of the table asked
incautiously.
Burrich swung his gaze to the man as he set his mug down. For a moment he
didn't speak, and I sensed that silence hovering again. "I'd say it was Prince
Chivalry's business who the mother was, and not for kitchen talk," Burrich said
mildly.
"Even so, even so," the guard agreed abruptly, and Jason nodded like a
courting bird in agreement. Young as I was, I still wondered what kind of man
this was who, with one leg bandaged, could quell a room full of rough men with a
look or a word.



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"Boy don't have a name," Jason volunteered into the silence. "Just goes by
`boy.' "
This statement seemed to put everyone, even Burrich, at a loss for words. The
silence lingered as I finished bread and cheese and meat, and washed it down
with a swallow or two of beer that Burrich offered me. The other men left the
room gradually, in twos and threes, and still he sat there, drinking and looking
at me. "Well," he said at long last. "If I know your father, he'll face up to it
square and do what's right. But Eda only knows what he'll think is the right
thing to do. Probably whatever hurts the most." He watched me silently a moment
longer. "Had enough to eat?" he asked at last.
I nodded, and he stood stiffly, to swing me off the table and onto the floor.
"Come on, then, Fitz," he said, and moved out of the kitchen and down a
different corridor. His stiff leg made his gait ungainly, and perhaps the beer
had something to do with it as well. Certainly I had no trouble in keeping up.
We came at last to a heavy door, and a guard who nodded us through with a
devouring stare at me.
Outside, a chill wind was blowing. All the ice and snow that had softened
during the day had gone back to sharpness with the coming of night. The path
cracked under my feet, and the wind seemed to find every crack and gap in my
garments. My feet and leggings had been warmed by the kitchen's fire, but not
quite dried, so the cold seized on them. I remember darkness, and the sudden
tiredness that came over me, a terrible weepy sleepiness that dragged at me as I
followed the strange man with the bandaged leg through the chill, dark
courtyard. There were tall walls around us, and guards moved intermittently atop
them, dark shadows visible only as they blotted the stars occasionally from the
sky. The cold bit at me, and I stumbled and slipped on the icy pathway. But