"Andre Norton - Witch World - Lore of the Witch World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

There was a hatch well tamped down, roped shut. He drew belt knife to
slash the fastening.

"Ho!" His voice rolled hollowly into the dark beneath him. "Anyone
below?"

A thin cry answered, one which might issue from the throat of a
seabird such as already coasted over the subsiding surface of the sea on
hunt for the bounty of the storm. Yet he thought not. Gingerly, favoring
his stiff leg, the smith lowered himself into the stinking hold. What he
found there made him retch, and then heated in him dull anger against
those who had mastered this vessel. She had been a slaver, such as
Rannock's men had heard tell ofтАФdealing in live cargo.

Of that cargo, only one survived. Her, Herdrek carried gently from the
horror of that prison. A little maid, her small arms no more than skin
slipped glovelike on bones, her eyes great, gray and blankly open. Ingvarna
took the strange child from the smith as one who had the authority of clan
and home hearth, wrapping the little one's thin, shivering body in her own
warm cloak.

From whence Dairine came those of Rannock never learned. That
slavers raided far was no secret Also, the villagers soon discovered the
child was blind. Ingvarna, though she was a Wise One, greatly learned in
herbs and spells, the setting of bones, the curing of wounds, shook her
head sadly over that discovery, saying that the child's blindness came from
no hurt of body. Rather, she must have looked upon some things so
horrible that thereafter her mind closed and refused all sight.

Though she might have been six or seven winters old, yet speech also
seemed riven from her, and only fear was left to be her portion. The
women of Rannock would have tried to comfort her, but secretly in their
hearts they were willing that she bide with Ingvarna, who treated her
oddly, they thought For the Wise Woman did not strive to make life easier
in any way for the child. Rather, from the first, Ingvarna treated the sea
waif not as one maimed in body, and perhaps in mind, but rather as she
might some daughter of the village whom she had chosen to be her
apprentice in the harsh school of her own learning.

These years were bleak for Rannock. Full half the fleet did not return
from out of the maw of that storm. Nor did any of the coastwise traders
come. The following winter was a lean one. But in those dark days, Dairine
showed first her skill. Her eyes might not see what her fingers wrought yet
she could mend fishing nets with such cleverness that even the
experienced women marveled.

And in the following spring, when the villagers husked the loquth balls
to free their seeds for new plantings, Dairine busied herself with the silken
inner fibers, twisting and turning those. Ingvarna had Herdrek make a
small spindle and showed the child how this tool might be best put to