"Robin McKinley - Damar 1 - The Blue Sword" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

His father nodded sadly. "Yes; perhaps it once was; but no more. Luthe knows, if he will tell you, for
he has the old kelar, and who his parents are even he has forgotten; but Luthe is himself. You and I are
of duller blood.
"And it is duller blood that has brought us to what we are, what we remainwhat remains to us. Avoid
the Outlanders, if you can. They can't, or won't, understand us; they don't recognize horses from oxen,
and will try to put the yoke on you that they have hung on the rest of our land. But their strength is the
strength of numbers and of stubbornness and persistence; do not underestimate it."
He could see his father standing in one of the inner courtyards of the City in the mountains, staring at
one of the fountains, water running shining over the colored stones of the Hills, talking half to himself.
Then the picture faded, blotted out in another swift sweep of anger; and he found himself looking at the
girl again, the girl he had seen standing in front of the Outlander house. What had she to do with
anything?
He frowned, and his horse's ears and black mane reappeared before him. He looked up; it was still a
long ride to their camp. He had not, somehow, wished to sleep too near the Outlanders; it was not that
he suspected deliberate treachery, but that the air that hung over an Outlander station sent bad dreams to
Hillfolk.
His anger kicked him again like a spurred heel; he flinched. It had a life of its own, the Gift, damn it.
What indecipherable object did it desire of him this time? He knew by now that the idiosyncrasies of
kings, and others whose blood carried much kelar, were viewed with more alarm by the victims
themselves than by their friends and subjects. Not that the alarm did any good. If one was king, one
could not explain away one's more impenetrable actions by saying that one just couldn't help it.
Woven into his anger there was a pattern. Occasionally he understood it. He waited, gritting his teeth;
and he saw the girl again. This time, as long as she was there, he looked at her.
When he had seen her first, at the foot of the steps, just a few minutes ago, he had been surprised into
looking at her. He knew what his glance could do when he was angry, and tried to be careful about
whom it rested on, and for how long. But this girl had, unfortunately for her, somehow caught his
attention, and he had looked longer than he meant.
She was tall, as tall as most men, tall even by Outlander standards. Her hair was yellow, the color of
sun on sand, and almost as bright. His people, the Hillfolk, were usually smaller than the Outlanders, and
dark of skin and hair. But it wasn't her size or her coloring that held him beyond the first startled flick of
notice; nor was it her beauty. There was too much strength in that face and in the long bones of the body
for beauty. Something about the quietness of her, perhaps? Or her self-contained straightness; something
about the way her eyes met his, with more thought behind them than the usual half-hypnotized, half-fearful
look he had learned to expect if he held anyone's gaze too longeven when his kelar was quiet.
Something, he thought suddenly, like the controlled straightness he himself had learned, knowing well
what could happen if he relaxed. But that was nonsense. She was an Outlander. While there were still
wild sports among his own people, where a few drops of royal blood from many generations past would
suddenly burst into full kelar in the veins of some quiet family's child, there had never yet been an
Outlander with any Gift to contain.
This train of thought took him far enough from the center of anger that he had begun to relax a little;
his hands uncurled, and the black mane swept against his fingers. He looked ahead; he knew, although he
could not yet see it, that his camp lay just beyond this next bit of what looked like flat bare impartial
desert and was in fact a little rise in the land, enough of a buffer from sand and storm to allow a small well
of sweet water, with a little grass and low scrub, to live behind a protecting shoulder.
As he looked out across his desert, almost calm again, or at least finding the beginnings of calm, the
kelar suddenly produced a picture of Sir Charles' foolish white face anxiously saying, "My dear
sirhmmYour Majesty" and explaining why he could not help him. The picture was thrust before his eyes,
and he took his breath in sharply between his teeth. Having caught his attention, the single-minded kelar
snatched Sir Charles away and presented him with the girl again.
What about her? he shouted silently, but there was no answer. It was rare that the Gift ever made it