"Andre Norton & Lackey, Mercedes - Elvenbane 1 -The Elvenbane" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

him with anything other than a challenging stare: Dispute my right to be
here, if you dare! Yes, he had been surprised. Then amused at her audacity,
at her cleverness. Now he depended on her, on her ability to anticipate his
needs, something he'd evidently never had before.

That she could surprise an elven lord was a continual source of self-
satisfaction for her. A lord like Dyran had seen nearly everything in his long
span, and to be able to provide him with the novelty of surprise would make
her the more valuable in his eyes. Or so she hoped.

And I have ample cause for pride, she thought, gliding in his wake, taken for
granted as his shadow. If nothing else, this self-appointed servitude was far
more entertaining than staying in the harem, trying to while away the time
with jewels and dresses and the little intrigues of the secondary concubines.
Today Dyran's errand took him to a part of the manor she'd never visited
before; outside, in fact, to a barnlike outbuilding with whitewashed walls, a
single door, and no windows, just the ubiquitous skylights. She hesitated for
a moment on the threshold; blinked at the unaccustomed raw sunlight in her
eyes; felt it like a kind of pressure against her fair skin, and wondered faintly
how the field-workers ever stood it. She had been outside perhaps a handful
of times in her life--when she was taken from her parents and the training
building and barracks and moved to the facility for training concubines,
again when she became a concubine and was taken to the manor itself--and
most of those times she had been hurried along in a mob of others, with no
time to look around. She found herself shrinking inside herself at the
openness of it all. And the sky--she hadn't seen open sky since she was a
child. There was just--so much of it. So far away--no walls to hold it in--

She fought down panic, a hollow feeling of fear as she gazed up, and up, and
up--

She closed her eyes for a moment to steady herself, then hurried after Dyran.
She wasn't certain how much more of this she was going to be able to bear...

But they were back under a roof soon enough. She paused behind Dyran as
he waited for a moment in the entry. She welcomed the sight of the familiar
beams and skylight--the gentle, milky light--feeling faint with relief. So
much so, that she did not notice, at first, what it was that Dyran had come to
inspect, not until Dyran cleared the doorway and she got a clear view of the
room beyond.

Children? Why would he need to see children?

There were at least a hundred children of both sexes, mostly aged about six
or thereabouts. All of them wore the standard short tunic and baggy pants of
unbleached cloth, the garb of unassigned slaves, the same clothing Serina
had worn until she was taken to be trained at age ten. The elven overseer had
ordered them in ragged lines of ten, and they stood quite still, in a silence
unusual for children of that age. Some looked bewildered; some still showed
traces of tears on their chubby cheeks, some simply looked resigned. But all