"George R. R. Martin - Ice Dragon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

charred, and it leaned heavily to one side as it flew. On its back, Hal looked
like one of the tiny toy soldiers he had brought them as a present years
before.
The enemy dragonriders split up and came at him from three sides. Hal
saw what they were doing. He tried to turn, to throw himself at the black
dragon head-on, and flee the other two. His whip flailed angrily, desperately.
His green dragon opened its mouth, and roared a weak challenge, but its flame
was pale and short and did not reach the oncoming enemy.
The others held their fire. Then, on a signal, their dragons all
breathed as one. Hal was wreathed in flames.
His dragon made a high wailing noise, and Adara saw that it was
burning, _he_ was burning, they were all burning, beast and master both. They
fell heavily to the ground, and lay smoking amidst her father's wheat.
The air was full of ashes.
Adara craned her head around in the other direction, and saw a column
of smoke rising from beyond the forest and the river. That was the farm where
Old Laura lived with her grandchildren and _their_ children.
When she looked back, the three dark dragons were circling lower and
lower above her own farm. One by one they landed. She watched the first of the
riders dismount and saunter towards their door.
She was frightened and confused and only seven, after all. And the
heavy air of summer was a weight upon her, and it filled her with a
helplessness and thickened all her fears. So Adara did the only thing she
knew, without thinking, a thing that came naturally to her. She climbed down
from her tree and ran. She ran across the fields and through the woods, away
from the farm and her family and the dragons, away from all of it. She ran
until her legs throbbed with pain, down in the direction of the river. She ran
to the coldest place she knew, to the deep caves underneath the river bluffs,
to chill shelter and darkness and safety.
And there in the cold she hid. Adara was a winter child, and cold did
not bother her. But still, as she hid, she trembled.
Day turned into night. Adara did not leave her cave.
She tried to sleep, but her dreams were full of burning dragons.
She made herself very small as she lay in the darkness, and tried to
count how many days remained until her birthday. The caves were nicely cool;
Adara could almost imagine that it was not summer after all, that it was
winter, or near to winter. Soon her ice dragon would come for her, and she
would ride on its back to the land of always-winter, where great ice castles
and cathedrals of snow stood eternally in endless fields of white, and the
stillness and silence were all.
It almost felt like winter as she lay there. The cave grew colder and
colder, it seemed. It made her feel safe. She napped briefly. When she woke,
it was colder still. A white coating of frost covered the cave walls, and she
was sitting on a bed of ice. Adara jumped to her feet and looked up towards
the mouth of the cave, filled with a wan dawn light. A cold wind caressed her.
But it was coming from outside, from the world of summer, not from the depths
of the cave at all.
She gave a small shout of joy, and climbed and scrambled up the
ice-covered rocks.
Outside, the ice dragon was waiting for her.