"Mercedes Lackey - Owl Mage 1 - Owlflight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

And they have every reason to doubt me, he admitted to himself, taking another careful, tiny
stitch and tying it off.
тАЬBesides,тАЭ he added as an afterthought, тАЬyou can get Widow Clay to watch him. She canтАЩt work
in the fields with that bad leg, but she can still weave baskets, or knit and sew while she keeps an eye on
him, and who knows? She might decide that heтАЩs better than no husband at all, and then your wives
wonтАЩt have to cook and clean for him anymore.тАЭ
Justyn felt a bit badly that he was talking about Kyle as if the woodcutter wasnтАЩt there, but in a
sense he wasnтАЩt. HeтАЩd had enough poppy and brandy that he wouldnтАЩt recall a thing that had been said
once the drugs wore off. And even if he did, Justyn rather doubted that heтАЩd take offense at any of it,
since worse things had been said in his presence that he never took offense to. He felt no guilt
whatsoever about setting up Widow Clay, however. The good Widow had been setting her cap at him
of late, and that was something he wanted to put an end to by whatever means it took! The last thing he
needed was some meddling woman coming in here and тАЬsetting his life to rights.тАЭ
Both the farmers brightened at that idea, and they didnтАЩt say anything more about magic. Instead,
they exchanged the kind of cryptic sentences that almost amount to a code among close kin, and Justyn
gathered that their conversation had something to do with a plan to persuade the Widow Clay that her
best interests lay in dragging Kyle over the broom. Justyn rather doubted that Kyle would mind if she did;
heтАЩd probably accept being married with the good - natured calm with which he accepted having his leg
stitched up. As for the Widow-well, she'd have nothing to com-plain about in Kyle.
Justyn continued to sew the two sticky flaps of skin together with tiny, delicate stitches a woman
would have envied, but the meticulous work was not engrossing enough to keep his mind off the past.
The irony was, at one time he would have been able to mend a minor wound like this
with magic, using magic to bind the layers of skin and muscle together, leaving the leg as
sound as it had been before the injury. Granted, his grasp of power had been minor
compared to the great mages like Kyllian and Quenten, but at least it had worked reliably-
and what was more, it probably would be working better after the end of the Storms than the
magics of those who were his superiors in power. He had never used ley-line magic, much
less node-magic, and the loss of the ley-lines would have made little difference to him. He
had been a hedge-wizard, one of those who practiced earth-magics, with a little touch of
mind-magic thrown in for good measure, and he had served in the ranks of Wolfstone's
Pack, a mer-cenary company recruited by Herald-Captain Kerowyn to aid Valdemar and
Rethwellan in the war against Hardorn. His had been a minor role in that Company; using
the earth-magics to tell him where the enemy was and how many his numbers were, helping
patch up the wounded, helping conceal their own men from the enemy and his mages.
Kerowyn's Skybolts had worked with the Pack in the past, and they were one of the few
mercenary Companies she felt sure enough of to trust in the treacherous times when Ancar
still ruled Hardorn. All that had been explained very care-fully to the members of the Pack, as
had the risks and pos-sible rewards, and the Company had voted unanimously to take the
contract. After all, it was Captain Kero they were talking about; no one who took the same
side as she did ever found himself working for people he would really rather have lost down
a mine shaft. And usually no one found himself facing a situation where foreign commanders
were spending mere lives like base coin that they couldnтАЩt get rid of fast enough.
Justyn had only just hired on with the Pack, and heтАЩd been eager to see some real fighting, to get
right into the thick of things. But he had quickly discovered that the place of a junior mage, a mere
hedge-wizard, was going to be back with the support-troops.
And foolish me, that wasnтАШt enough excitement for me.
He tried to volunteer every time they called for able bodies, but wisely the commanders kept
passing him right over - until they came to the desperate running battles with AncarтАЩs troops that
decimated their own ranks and left the commanders little choice but to put a weapon into the hands of
anyone they could spare and hope for the best.