"Kay, Guy Gavriel - Last Light Of The Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

Of course no one else had ever done anything about Halldr. Bern
was the one now riding Thinshank's favourite stallion amid stones
and boulders in cold darkness on the night before the governor's
pyre was to be lit on a ship by the rocky beach.

Not the wisest action of his life, agreed.

For one thing, he hadn't anything even vaguely resembling a plan.
He'd been lying awake, listening to the snoring and snorting of the
other two servants in the shed behind Kjellson's house. Not
unusual, that wakefulness: bitterness could suck a man from sleep.
But somehow he'd found himself on his feet this time, dressing,
pulling on boots and the bearskin vest he'd been able to keep so
far, though he'd had to fight for it. He'd gone outside, pissed
against the shed wall, and then walked through the silent blackness
of the town to Halldr's house (Frigga, his mother, lying somewhere
inside, alone now, without a husband for the second time in a year).

He'd slipped around the side, eased open the door to the stable,
listened to the boy there, snuffling in the dreams of a straw-
covered sleep, and then led the big grey horse called Gyllir quietly
out under the watching stars.

The stableboy never stirred. No one appeared in the lane. Only the
named shapes of heroes and beasts in the gods' sky overhead.
He'd been alone in Rabady with the night-spirits. It had felt like a
dream.

The town gate was locked when danger threatened but not
otherwise. Rabady was an island. Bern and the grey horse had
walked right through the square by the harbour, past the shuttered
booths, down the middle of the empty street, through the open
gates, across the bridge over the ditch into the night fields.

As simple as that, as life-altering.

Life-ending was probably the better way to describe it, he decided,
given that this was not, in fact, a dream. He had no access to a
boat that could carry the horse, and come sunrise a goodly number
of extremely angry menЧappalled at his impiety and their own
exposure to an unhoused ghostЧwould begin looking for the
horse. When they found the son of exiled Thorkell also missing,
the only challenging decision would be how to kill him.

This did raise a possibility, given that he was sober and capable of
thought. He could change his mind and go back. Leave the horse
out here to be found. A minor, disturbing incident. They might
blame it on ghosts or wood spirits. Bern could be back in his shed,
asleep behind Arni Kjellson's village house, before anyone was the