"Juliet E. McKenna - Einarinn 5 - The Assassin's Edge" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Juliet E)

centres of aetheric learning in the Old Empire. Resident scholars and
mentors must seek out such valuable lore hidden in our own archives. We can
claim more peripatetic scholars than Vanam and many now tutor the sons
and daughters of Tormalin Houses as well as the scions of Lescari dukes and
Caladhria's barons. All such archives may yield invaluable material for
further study and this prefecture is writing to enlist the aid of all entitled to
wear this university's silver ring.
 Rather than wasting time and effort in vain attempts to prove this
university's supremacy over Vanam through fisticuffs, it is the duty of every
mentor, scholar and student to establish our preeminence through the
ineluctable authority of our scholarship.


Vithrancel, Kellarin,
15th of Aft-Spring, in the Fourth Year of Tadriol
the Provident
In that instant of waking, I had no idea where I was. A crash of something
breaking had stirred me and the muttered curses that followed took my
sleep-mazed mind back to the house of my childhood but as I opened my eyes,
nothing seemed familiar. Insistent daylight was entering unopposed through a
door in an entirely unexpected wall. Come to that, when had I last slept with a
heedlessly open bedroom door?
Wakefulness burned through the mist of sleep. I wasn't back in Ensaimin, for
all that someone outside was muttering in the accents of my childhood. This was
half a world away, clear across an ocean most folk would swear was
impassable. This was Vithrancel, newly named first settlement of Kellarin, a
colony still finding its feet after a year of digging in its heels and setting its
shoulder to hacking a livelihood out of the wilderness.
Well, whatever was going on outside, it could happen without me. I wasn't
getting out of bed for anything short of a full-blown riot. Turning over, I pulled
the linen sheet up around my shoulders, pushing my cheek into the welcoming
down of the pillow, plump with my spoils from the festival slaughter of geese
and hens. How many more days up to my elbows in chicken guts would it take
before I had a feather bed, I wondered idly.
No, it was no good; I was awake. Sighing, I sat up and brushed the hair out of
my eyes to survey the little room. I'd slept in better, in stone-built inns with
drugget laid to mute the scuff of boots on polished floorboards, tapestries on
walls to foil stray draughts and prices just as elaborate, never mind the extra
copper spent to keep the potmen and chambermaids sweet. Then again, I'd slept
in worse, down-at-heel taverns where you were lucky to share a bed with
strangers and picking up whatever vermin they carried was all part of the price
to pay. The most wretched inn was better than a freezing night beneath a market
hall's arches, giving up my last copper to persuade a watchman to look the
other way.
I went to open the shutters to the bright midmorning sun. No, I wasn't about to
complain about a warm, clean room, floor newly strewn with the first herbs of
spring. The breeze was cool on my bare skin and I looked for a clean shirt
among clothes and trifles piled on my fine new clothes press. Ryshad had
bought it for me with three days trading his skills with plumb line, mallet and
chisel to a nearby carpenter. My beloved might have decided against his