"Holly Lisle - Secret Texts 3 - Courage Of Falcons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

She wished she could remember what that task was. That imper-
ative had been so clear when she floated beyond the Veil. She'd
known itтАФand though it had been daunting, she'd been sure she
could return and carry it out. Back in the newly ancient and decaying
flesh of her body, though, the crystal clarity of the realm beyond death
vanished in a haze of muddled thoughts, bodily needs, pains, and
hungers. What did she still have to do? The zandawould not tell her.
Summoned Speakers would not tell her, and the strain of summoning
them had weakened her to the point where she dared not try again.
Dughall did not know and his magic could not find it out for her, either.
She closed her eyes to think, with the warmth of the sun pouring onto her skin and the soft blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She fought to connect with the answers she had once known. And once again her flesh defeated her.
She slept.
Chapter 26
Yanth turned to Ry and said, "You think she holds the patent on stubbornness and stupidity, but she isn't the one who left."
Jaim said, "Eat the damned food before it spoils. It's no pleasure watching you stalking across the floor like a caged beast, wasting away to nothing."
Ry paced the floor, gray-faced and dead-eyed. "I gave up everything I had to be with her. My home, my position, my family, my fu-ture. But she wasn't satisfied with thatтАФshe wanted me to give up myself, too, and I won't do that."
Yanth said, "She was wrong. We've been over that more times than I want to think about. She was wrong, you were right. . . but you left. You're the one who said, "You aren't worth spending any more time on. I decree that our problems can't be fixed. Good-bye.' So you can't complain about the fact that she didn't run after you. If you cared, you would have stayed."
"'I did care," Ry growled.
"Excellent way to show it," Yanth said.
"Both of you shut up. RyтАФsit down and eat. YanthтАФdon't antag-onize him. I'm sick of this subject. I'm sick of your fighting. I'm sick of both of you, if truth be told."
Ry and Yanth both turned on Jaim. "Then you can leave, if truth be told," Ry said. "No one barred the door."
And Yanth said, "I'll show you the way out if you'd like." Jaim said, "I can leave. Unlike you, Ry. I'm not Family or barzanne. No mob is hunting me for the oneтАФno zealot will want my skin for being the other. No one is going to take me out for a day or three of public torture before ripping me into pieces and nailing the pieces to the city wall just for being in this damnable city. Look out there." He pointed to the window, half-shuttered, that opened onto the bay. "There are ships out there. Ships. We could be on one of them, bound anywhere, and not shut in here hiding because you don't dare show your face in the street."
"I won't leave the city."
"Why? Because she might come to you and tell you how wrong she was and how sorry she is?" Jaim stood up and stared at his friend. "She isn't going to do that. She was wrong until you leftтАФbut when you walked through the gates and didn't go back, you ended things. You closed the door on her apologies. You told her nothing else she could say mattered to you. So if you want to hear what she has to say, you're going to have to go to her to hear it."
Ry was quiet for a long time. "I can't go back," he said at last.
Yanth snorted. "You can. Your legs work. We can climb the damned mountain and knock on the damned gate. You just don't want to, because if we go back up there, then it's her turn to decide whether she wants to open the gate or notтАФand you don't want to find out she won't open it."
And Ry thought, Yes, that's probably true. He'd left her with a hellish chore waiting for herтАФdestroying the Mirror of SoulsтАФand he'd made it clear that he wouldn't do the thing he had to do to help her destroy it. He'd refused to become a Falcon with her. He didn't understand what had gotten into himтАФhe'd been upset with her, but he'd never intended to say the things that he'd ended up saying.
Which wasn't to say he hadn't meant them. He had. But if she was wrong for wanting him to give up being a Sabir, perhaps he was
wrong for not caring if his presence offended the last surviving members of her Family Being suddenly without Family of his own, he found it hard to care about her relationships with her relatives.
Which was simple jealousy, and petty of him.
In the end, though, the thing that decided him was the same thing that had let him walk through the gateтАФshe hadn't tried to stop him. He could see where he had been wrong to leave. But if she had truly loved himтАФif she had felt about him the way he felt about herтАФshe would not have let him walk through the gates and out of her life without making some attempt to make him change his mind.
His head hurt, and his body ached as if he'd spent two days Shifted and hadn't eaten after. He turned to Yanth and Jaim, wishing that she would come through the door right then, knowing that she was still back in Galweigh House, not coming after him. Not going to fight for them. He said, "We're leaving Calimekka. Get us transportation."
Jaim and Yanth exchanged wary glances, and Yanth said, "Where do you want to go?"
Ry turned his back to them. "Do you think I care? Do you think I'll ever care? Just make the arrangements to get us out of here."
He heard only the faint clinks of coin-filled purses being tied into belts, and the soft click of the door as it opened, then shut. When he turned around, they were gone.
Chapter 27
The Army of the Thousand Peoples rolled northward, into warmer terrain, into the embrace of land not always hunkered against the onslaught of ice and snow and darkness. It passed the Wizards' Circles that had once been the lustrous cities of a great civilization, and that had become glassy sheets of water that cried out with the voices of the dead. The army walked first west, then north, gathering soldiers and believers, clearing villages of their young and strong and hopeful, growing huge. And hungry.
The Army of the Thousand Peoples became a plague on the land, swarming like the poisonleapers that hatched every thirty-one years and flew through the air in clouds so thick they blotted out the sun. Where the army passed, the land lay bare, stripped of everything edible, both animal and vegetable. It grewтАФfrom ten thousand to fifteen thousand to twenty thousandтАФand it crawled inexorably forward.
And then, on the rough and rocky banks of the Glasburg Sea, where once, in the city named Glasburg, a million people had danced in perfumed streets and strolled down grassy lanes between gleaming white arches and delicate spires, it came to rest. It foraged from the
sobbing sea, and from the cruel and twisted land. And it waited. Patiently. Hungrily. In sight of the southernmost borders of Ibera, in sight of the promised land.
For the final miracle on which it waited had not yet come to pass.
Chapter 28
K ait knelt in the darkened chapel with Dughall by her side. She wore a simple gray tunic with fitted sleeves and fitted gray suede breeches, and at Dughall's insistence, no shoes. Dughall had told her that she must wear no jewelry, nor any other metal, and that her hair should be bound back in a braided bun that could not move aroundтАФand that she must accomplish that without the use of the silver pins and clips she preferred. She'd wrapped the ends with linen thongs and twisted the long braid around two long wooden sticks, and tried to imagine why it could matter.
Dughall, similarly attired, but wearing shoes, dropped easily into cross-legged repose across from her. "You're certain you want to do this?" She nodded.
He began pulling implements and powders and long, hair-thin silver needles from a rolled kit. He unwrapped a roll of black silk and spread it between the two of them. It had a large divided circle embroidered in silver thread in the center, with a single glyph centered in each section. "The zanda," he said, and passed a handful of heavy silver coins to her. "When I tell you to, drop these into the center, from about here." He held his arms straight out in front of him, pantomiming the motion he wanted.
She nodded again.
He gave her a searching look and said, "If you aren't sure about this, it will just waste your time and mine. You will not become a Falcon unless it is something you truly desire."
"It is something I desire," she said softly.
"But . . . ?"
She clinked the coins from one hand to the other, eyes closed. "He left Calimekka," she said. "He's on a ship headed to the New Territories right now. He's gone, and I've lost him." The coins clinked faster.