"Dennis L. McKiernan - Mithgar - Eye of the Hunter" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKiernan Dennis L)

page. The dam-man took another sip of tea and a bite of bread, though
whether she tasted either is another matter, so absorbed in the reading
was she.
Dappled shadows drifted across the pages as the day passed
through the noontide, Faeril's knives chnking into the log, adding to the
murmur of the woodland: birds calling afar, the faint rustling of leaves in
the wafting air, the occasional hum of a bee hurling past, the burble of
the moss-banked rill tumbling down the nearby slope.
At last Lacey closed the diary upon itself and looked up at her
distant cousin, once again collecting her knives from the fallen tree. "Oh,
Faeril, these old words make me feel as if a doom is soon to fall."
 Faeril stood at the log and slipped the knives back into the leather
sheaths on the two bandolier belts crisscrossing her torso: six scabbards
to a belt, twelve in all, ten now filled with steel, one with silver, one
empty. A determined look on her face, Faeril turned and approached
Lacey.
Lacey glanced from the damman to the diary and back again. "Faeril,
you look positively grim. I think you are about to tell me something that I
do not wish to hear."
Faeril sat at the edge of the picnic cloth. In a ritualistic gesture that
she and Lacey had used since childhood, she reached out and captured
Lacey's right hand between both of hers; then right to right, she pressed
her open palm against Lacey's. "My best friend, I give you a secret to be
held under lock until the time of unlocking."
Slowly Lacey curled her fingers and clenched her fist, as if holding
tightly to something invisible. Then she pressed it to her heart and
opened her fingers one at a time until her hand was hard against her
breast. "My best friend, here it is locked until the time of unlocking."
Faeril took a deep breath. Even so, her voice quavered with
emotion. "I'm leaving the Boskydells, Lacey. And I wanted someone to
know. Someone to tell Mother."
Tears sprang into Lacey's eyes. "Leaving? Leaving the Bosky . . . ?
But why, Faeril? Why?"
Faeril's eyes, too, filled with tears. Yet with her secret told, the
trembling left her breath.
Again Lacey asked, "Why?"
Faeril lifted the crossed bandoliers over her head and held them out
before her, steel and silver glinting. "Because I am the firstborn dammsel
of firstborn dammsels, reaching back through time to Petal herself."
Shaking her head, Lacey blinked away her tears and glanced at the
diary. "Yes, I know. As was your dam and her dam andтАФ But-but,
Faeril, what's that got to do with your leaving the Bosky?"
Faeril lay the belted knives on the cloth. "Tomorrow is my birthday: I
will pass from my maiden years and become a young damman. I will
then be of an age to set forth upon the way charted for me by my
upbringingтАФa path ordained a thousand years ago. A path that only I
can tread."
She reached out and took up the journal. "Lacey, this diary tells a
centuries-past tale of the pursuit of a monsterтАФBaron StokeтАФby four
comrades: Riatha, Elfess of Arden Vale; Urus, a Baeran Man from the