"Victor Milan - The Nobles 02 - War In Tethys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Milan Victor)

With the silent man at her elbow, Zaranda rode to the barricade and stopped. Goldie tossed her head and
danced a bit to let her rider know she was not happy. Ignoring her, Zaranda dismounted and strode forward,
glad of the chance to stretch her longs legs; unlike most folk who, like Father Pelletyr, favored their ease,
Zaranda preferred to be in motion, working the muscles of her lithe, pantherish body. The tall dark man
fol-lowed, unslinging his longbow.
Zaranda stopped ten feet shy of the abatis and stood to her full height, which was considerableтАФgreater
than that of most human men of Faerun. The wind off the Tethyr plains stirred in her hair, which was dark,
a brown that was almost black save for a blaze of white over her right brow. It was a heavy, unruly mane,
cur-rently caught up in a simple bun in back and hanging square-cut before. The white hairs of the blaze
refused to be tamed and tended to stand up in a lick. She had a long-boned athletic frame that spoke of
power, grace, and resilience, much in the way of the yew longbow her ranger companion carried.
Her face she would have called handsome and most others beautiful despite the broken nose. Her
beauty was of the worn sort that resulted from seeing more of the world than was good for her.
For a span of heartbeats she simply stood. From be-hind the barrier came a twitter of small voices.
With a certain ostentation, she adjusted the saber she wore across her back, hilt projecting above her
right shoulder for easy access, then dropped hands to hips. At last she deigned to speak.
"Who dares impede the return of the Countess Morn-inggold to her home?" she called in a clear voice.
 The whispering from beyond the barricade rose to a crescendo. A commotion came from the branches
of the tree, and with a certain amount of crackling and rustling, a small figure appeared, crawling between
dead branches. Once clear it paused to haul forth a glaive-guisarme fully thrice its own length, then hopped
erect with more swagger than conviction to con-front Zaranda.
"We represent an autonomous collective of demi-humans of diminutive stature," the apparition
an-nounced in the deepest voice it could muster. It was a halfling male, no more than three feet tall,
wearing a morion helmet easily three sizes too large and a brigan-dine corselet that came down almost to
the hair on the tops of his feet. "We demand toll of all who would pass this way."
The morion spoiled the effect by slipping abruptly down, covering his face to his snub nose. Goldie
pawed the earth and whickered laughter. The halfling pushed up the helmet and looked aggrieved.
A half dozen other halflings had clambered up in the branches on the abatis's far side, or onto the piles
of boulders, to observe the proceedings from relative safety. Like the spokesman, they were all got up in a
parody of brigands.
"Do you maintain this road?" Zaranda asked.
Carefully holding his helmet in place, the halfling blinked innocent blue eyes at her. "No," he admitted.
"Then by what right do you demand toll?"
This provoked another flurry of conversation in the piping halfling tongue instead of the accented
Common the spokesman used with Zaranda; though most hu-manoids in Tethyr spoke Common, few would
consent to do so without a heavy dose of regional or racial ac-cent, to prove they weren't that familiar with
it. Zaranda had a smattering of Halfling, and could have followed the conversation had she chosen to do so.
"Because we're an autonomous collective," one of the onlookers finally said. The spokesman turned
back to her with renewed purpose.
"Because we're an autonomous collective," he said.
"So?" Goldie asked.
The halfling goggled at her. "It talks!"
"Bites, too." Goldie stretched her fine arched neck and with a considerable display of teeth pulled up a
clump of tough trail grass . "Best mind your manners," she added, munching significantly.
Zaranda noted that the watchers in the gallery kept casting covert glances to the sheer heights above;
the cliffs dropped a hundred sheer feet before they gave way abruptly to foothills.
One of the spectators, clearly dissatisfied with the spokesman's polemical talents, called out, "This road
belongs to the people."
Zaranda flashed a smile. It was a smile with consid-erable flash to it, too, which smoothed away the
years and the cares and made her seem a maiden girl again. When she wasn't angry.