"Tanya Huff - The Fire's Stone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

would save him from himself. She chipped away at his shell of stone and night by night uncovered bits
and pieces of his past, enough so she could ask further questions.

He had left home at barely fourteen. Why? He had chosen to become a thief, a profession he excelled at,
true, but not one destined to provide a steady income, peace of mind, or a ripe old age. Why? She might
be safe, but young women terrified him and young men were fiercely taboo. Why?

Actually, it took little digging to find that the taboo against young men was strictly cultural. In Aaron's
homeland the soil was poor, the growing season short, and the neighbors likely to torch the crops at any
real or imagined slight. Every child was another pair of hands and every pair of hands was desperately
needed. Same sex pairs produced no children and same sex love went from being impractical, to being a
crime, to blasphemy against god-a god Faharra felt held asinine ideas of what constituted blasphemy,
and who in their right mind could believe there was only one god anyway?

Blasphemy was punished by fire.

Unfortunately, Aaron's religious instruction had been intense.

"I was Clan Heir, " Aaron had explained with a shrug, "and Clan Chief rules both people and priests."

Perhaps. But Faharra watched him watching the crowds that passed outside her garden and wondered if,
maybe, the priests thought they were saving him from the fire.

From Clan Heir to thief. Quite the fall. And more than just a thief. . . . Where others plodded, Aaron
danced. Where others fell, he soared. How better to deny a father

whose word was absolute law. Faharra had been pleased to run into that answer at last. Her own father
had been the worst kind of horse's ass and she had been overjoyed when her strong-minded mother had
finally divorced him. Her personal theory said that one father could do more to mess up a child's life
than every mother in existence put together. She realized she was not entirely without bias on this
matter, but that was all right; she blamed it on her father. What had Aaron's father done to turn his son so
far from him and what he stood for?
Aaron's mother had died in childbirth.
Aaron felt-had been made to feel-responsible for her death. Was that what made Faharra safe as a
friend? That she was too old to bear children? And Faharra added a hearty thank the Nine and One for
that.

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It took her ten months of poking and prodding and sifting tales to get to the one question that led to all
the rest.
"Aaron, what happened to your cousin? What happened to Ruth?"
Aaron grew so still Faharra could almost see the stone she had spent long months chipping away
reforming around him. He grew so still he might have become stone himself. When he finally spoke, his
voice, in painful contrast, was almost matter-of-fact.
"My father had her flogged to death. "
And then he disappeared; slid off the window ledge and into the night, carrying his own darkness with
him.
In the tedious hours between Aaron's visits, Faharra had held his past up to the light, turned it, studied it,