"Katherine Kerr - Deverry 08 - A Time Of Justice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

where white tents decked out with red banners stood. Jill suspected that the important leaders of the
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Horsekin sheltered there.

To the south and west the land fell away, leaving the city perched on the top of cliffs. At the western
edge of town, where the dun itself stood, any climb up would require ropes and stakes, while to the south
the road ran steep and narrow. Below the cliffs in those directions stretched a wide plain, where the bulk
of the army camped, comfortable but vulnerable to attack when the relieving army finally arrived. To
protect their men on the plain, the Horsekin were digging ditches and piling up earthworks, or rather,
their human slaves were doing the digging and piling. Since they depended on their heavy cavalry and
needed to ensure free movement for their own horsemen, they would never be able to make a solid ring
all the way round the camp. Rather, they'd placed earthworks as baffles more than walls to protect
vulnerable points.

Inside the city walls seethed potential chaos. Crammed into every valley among the three hills, lining
every street, crowding every open space, townsfolk and refugees from the farms roundabout huddled
amidst cattle and sheep, dray horses and chickens. They'd been living that way for weeks now, and the
gwerbret's town marshals had recruited some of the men from their lord's warband to help keep order.
Fights were breaking out, over food and water, though for now at least the town ran no danger of
starving, and over space, a scarcity indeed. Filth, human and animal, was piling up, swept or carried
down to line the inside of the walls. In a pinch, it could become another weapon, hurled by basket or
catapult. Even up at the dun, which stood behind its own walls on the highest hill, the stench rose thick.
From long practice Jill could ignore it, but the threat of plague was another knife at the city's throat.

She herself felt none too strong these days, nor did she look it. Her hair, cropped off like a lad's, was
perfectly white, and her face was thin, too thin, really, so that her blue eyes seemed enormous,
dominating her face the way a child's do. Overall, she was shockingly gaunt, not that such was so unusual
for a woman who was over seventy. What worried her was the shaking fever she carried in her blood, an
unwelcome memento from a long-ago sojourn in tropical lands. Even though she was the greatest master
of dweomer that the kingdom had ever seen, she could cure herself with neither magic nor the medicines
known in those days. All she had to fight it was her strength of will.

Every day, before she began her magical work, she would try to scry out Rhodry. Normally, since she'd
known him so long and so well, she would have seen his image simply by turning her mind his way; her
vision would have appeared on any convenient dappled thing - the clouds in the sky, sunlight dancing on
a bucket of water, trees tossing in a wind - with barely an effort on her part. These days, though, she
could only summon a haze as thick and grey as smoke where an image should have been. Although she
couldn't know, she could guess that he wore some powerful talisman, whose bound spirit worked to hide
him. On the morning that Rhodry took leave of Enj, though, her scrying just happened to coincide with
Rhodry's thinking about her, and for the briefest of moments she caught a glimpse of him.

'At least he's alive,тАЩ she said aloud. 'And I'll thank the gods for that.'

It was, of course, perfectly natural to fear for a fighting man at the beginning of a war, but Jill had a
further concern. Some months past she'd received in a hideous flash of ill-knowing a glimpse of bitter
Wyrd hanging over him as if upon dark wings. The omen had come in such a rush of certainty, like a