"Katherine Kurtz - Heirs 1 - Harrowing of Gwynedd" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kurtz Katherine)

Queron smartly behind the left ear. Queron crumpled into the snow without a
sound, his vision going black, and Revan's voice had seemed to come from a
long way off.
"Sorry, m'lord, but throwing your life away is stupid!" Revan had murmured,
as he rooted in Queron's scrip for a Healer's drug kit. "Gabrilite or not, I can't
let you do that."
 That had been the end of their quarrel. With the sedative Revan gave him in
melted snow, Queron had drowsed the afternoon through, never quite
unconscious, but too groggy to offer further resistance of any kind. He had
dreamed then, too, haunted by the images of his brethren being tortured and
killed, the nightmare embellished and intensified by the sounds that floated up
from the yard beyond.
Gradually, the winter shadows lengthened. Slowly the heart-wrenching
screams and the gabble and gurgle of dying gave way to the hungry crackle of
the flames and then the softer whisper of a rising wind and the feather of new
snow falling, mercifully muffling some of the horror.
More wind wailed somewhere outside Queron's present dream, and he bit
back a groan as he stirred in his haystack hollow. Again he tried to claw his way
up to consciousness, out of the nightmare, but still it held him fast. He
whimpered a little as it dragged him into its depths again, not wanting to
remember what he had learned from Revan when he woke that other time,
there on the slope above Dolban.
тАЬIt's over now,'' Revan had said softly, leaning heavily on his olivewood staff
and looking for all the world like some latter-day John the BaptistтАФwhich was
precisely what Revan intended. Suddenly Queron had found himself wondering
whether that made any more sense than what the men below had done.
"I know it doesn't make any sense," Revan had said, when Queron did not
speakтАФas if he somehow had caught Queron's very thought, though the Healer
knew that was impossible. "What possible sense could there be, much less any
modicum of justice, to burn to death more than three-score men and women
simply because they chose to honor and revere the memory of a man they
believed holy?"
"Is that why they did it?" Queron had whispered, his vision blurring anew as
he gazed down at the blackened stakes in the yard, and the soldiers moving
among them.
"More or less." Revan had turned his head to look Queron in the eye. "I
spoke with several of my Willimite 'brethren' while you were asleep," he said
quietly. "They, in turn, had spoken with several of the soldiers down below.
Apparently, the orders came directly from the bishops in council at Ramos. Go
ahead and read the details for yourself. I'm not afraid."
And Revan was not afraid, though a lesser man might have had ample reason
to be, after physically assaulting a Deryni of Queron's ability. As Queron lightly
touched the younger man's wrist and began to focus, trying not to make the
physical contact too obvious to anyone watching, he was surprised and
humbled by the younger man's fearless trust. Though Revan could not have
stopped his doing anything he wanted, Reading was always easier with the
subject's active cooperation.
But the wonder of that discovery was blunted almost immediately by what
Queron had learnedтАФthat the abbey's own patron saint was at least indirectly
responsible for the attack. The men now gaining ascendancy in Gwynedd,