"Jean Lorrah - Empire 03 - Captives of the Savage Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lorrah Jean)

The princess was found in the woods nearbyтАФshe claimed to have been raped by the Reader, and nine
months later she bore a son.

The princess ruled the land as her father had before her, for she had his army and she knew his methods.
Her son turned out to be a Reader like his fatherтАж and it is said that all the Readers of what would
become the Aventine Empire are descended from him. His father, however, disappeared without a trace.
Here and there were heard tales of a strange lame man who could tell people's most secret thoughts, but
no warlord ever held him again, and no one knows what finally became of him. Perhaps, bitter and
disillusioned at the fate of his offer of true love, he is wandering still.

Chapter One

Where do I belong? What should I be doing with my life? Certainly not healing!

Magister Jason was wrong to encourage me. He should have let me quit the first time I lost a
patient-then I would not be about to kill my best friend's son!

Looking down at the fretful child, Melissa wished she were anything else but a Reader in the hospital at
Gaeta. Alethia trusted her to cure Primus, but how could she? The boy's appendix was inflamed; all their
herbs, compresses, and cold packs had failedтАФand now she would have to try surgery as a last resort.
What if Primus died?

She Read within the boy's body, wanting to moan with his pain and fever, studying the swollen, throbbing
organ. If this went on, it would burst, spilling poisons throughout the child's system. Then there was no
hope at all of saving him. She had to cut out that infected bit of intestine!

For the first time, she was sorry she and Alethia had been reunited. This was why a Reader still in
training, like Melissa, was discouraged from keeping up associations with childhood friends who had
dropped by the wayside.

Alethia, too, was a Reader, but she now wore the Sign of the Dark Moon, the badge of a Reader who
had failed to achieve one of the two top ranks, and for whom a marriage had been arranged. Alethia and
Melissa had been fast friends at the Academy. Melissa would never forget the day Alethia, aged
seventeen, had been told that her powers had shown no increase in more than a year, and it had been
determined that she would go no further.

Alethia had spent the evening sobbing on Melissa's shoulder. Her life was overтАФboth girls were quite
convinced of it. She would be married off to a similarly failed male Reader, to breed children who might
have the talents they lacked. The loss of her virginity would diminish what powers she had; her badgeтАФa
black circle on a field of whiteтАФwould be the only sign that she was a ReaderтАж a failed Reader.

Melissa had absorbed Alethia's agonized fear that day, and applied herself thereafter with the greatest
diligence. Never, she vowed, would she be taken like Alethia, to spend her life producing the children of
a stranger and using whatever Reading power she retained to show non-readers where to dig wells or
locate their lost sheep.

At eighteen Melissa passed her preliminary examinations and was sent to Gaeta for training in healing.
She had arrived in fear, knowing that more than half the Readers who completed the medical training still
eventually failed and were married off. It would be better to live as a healer than as a message service
and finder of strayed childrenтАФbut Melissa's heart throbbed to the vibrations of the great hospital. There