"Over_9780307446138_oeb_c15_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeffrey Overstreet - Cynderes Midnight)

Hours later, near midnight, the ale boy found himself sitting on a tall kitchen stool at the edge of the long, blue-tiled counter, swinging his feet, chewing on strips of dried fish, and watching the heiress of Bel Amica pretend to be one of her own attendants. He wore a long green coat, made of such cushiony cloth that he suspected he could survive a fall from the Cliffs of Barnashum. It had a fur-lined hood that he pulled up as soon as the heiress dressed him for the journey. He had never worn such a thing. After fetching a vawn whistle from the supply room below, Cyndere stuffed it into one of the coat’s deep pockets.

The ale boy watched the corner washbasin warily. The dishes were still. But he kept checking, just in case.

The frantic search for the beastman had calmed to an organized investigation. Teams of soldiers continued to scour the yard, searching for clues, while the bastion guards, helped by Emeriene and a team of sisterlies, made a thorough inventory of the towerhouse chambers. Ryllion remained in the healers’ care, apparently sedated by their potions, for the distant echoes of his curses had gone silent.

But this did nothing to calm the heiress, and her anxiety was contagious. Dressed in a sisterly’s gown, the hood pulled over her head, Cyndere hastened about the kitchen in half a panic, glancing up whenever she heard a soldier patrolling the corridor and turning her back when that soldier paused to investigate the late-night activity. The boy swung his legs and leaned back, watching for any suspicious approach.

“Have you had enough to eat?”

He nodded, holding up the empty plate.

In House Abascar the ale boy had watched as soldiers, servants, and errand-runners came down to the kitchens of the Underkeep for food. Nothing had ever been prepared especially for him. He ate what he could grab during his errands and sometimes happened to be in the right place to sit down with other errand-runners—the news girl, the leaf bagger, the cracker kid, the kindling hauler, the soot sweeper, and the washers—and eat simple meals of peppered vegetable broth, hard cheese, and crusty leftover bread. Sometimes he had lingered outside the king’s kitchen, listening to the din of the clattering dishes. Occasionally a cook’s boy would see him there and toss him a dry roll, a few strips of fatty bacon, or dried berries.

But he had never been served by royalty.

Cyndere murmured to herself as she cradled globefruit in a towel, then scooped up crackleseeds combed from the thick stands of whipgrass and popnuts plucked from the yellowskin trees. She tied each of these into separate cloth pouches and then wrapped wedges of three different cake-sized cheeses in starflower leaves.

“Red plums. Dried red plums. Now, where have the sisterlies stashed them?” She dropped the pouches into a brown bag woven from reeds, then tied off that bag with a strand of twine. “And there it is. But be careful. Predators can smell the food. Best to drop the bag in a stream or bury it somewhere when you’re finished.”

The wall of shelves sprang away from the wall, pivoting on a concealed hinge. The ale boy dropped to his feet and walked into the cool breeze wafting up from the darkness.

Cyndere pulled on a heavy woodscloak hanging on the back of the secret door and lifted a woven basket. “Emeriene’s going to notice that I’m gone anytime now. She won’t be happy. We’d better go.”

There was something new in her voice, an eager mischief beyond her interest in sending a message to Cal-raven. He hesitated, sensing her desire to steal away. Suddenly this venture seemed more dangerous than before.

Glowstones pressed into the steps of the long descending stair glimmered, flickering along the winding way that opened through a maze of massive subterranean boulders and ridges of stone.

The earth seemed a living thing here. Rocks and roots and the dripping damp—it was so unlike the dry husk of Abascar’s labyrinth. The Underkeep had been hollowed out of stone and dust, a complex network of forgotten empty waterways in the rock, but this was ground that breathed, restless, supporting grand old trees on its shoulders.

In one hand Cyndere carried the basket and in the other a rain canopy, its broad canvas folded around the long wooden handle. She used its tip to sweep the space before them and knock away cobwebs that had crossed the tunnel since the last travelers.

Not even Ryllion knew of this passage, she explained. King Helpryn, a man whose ambition left no room for fear, had found little use for secret escapes. But earlier generations of Bel Amican royalty, going back to the days of the beastman wars and even before, had installed escapes within escapes. Their existence was just one of many secrets preserved by the descendants of Tammos Raak. Not even the Seers could gain access. False escapes were designed as bait for traitors who would stumble into traps. Cyndere would not tell the ale boy how she had opened the door, and she would never bring him back this way. She was breaking ancient laws, she said, by bringing him along.

Even as Cyndere narrated the history of this bastion, the ale boy pushed the fur-framed hood back so he could better attend to the whispers of the earth around him, the bubble and ooze, the grinding of burrow-worm teeth, the scuttle of rats. He shoved his hands deep in the pockets of the long green coat, clutched the vawn-whistle, and shuddered. He did not want to worry the heiress by suggesting that someone might be following them. When he paused, the faint footfalls behind him ceased, and he wondered whether they might just be echoes.

“Why,” he asked, “would Emeriene try to stop you from going this way?”

“Emeriene thinks I’m being reckless.” Cyndere glanced back at the boy. “But Em keeps some rather scandalous secrets all her own. Or at least she thinks they’re secrets. But she has no idea why I’m going back to the forest.”

“Neither do I,” the boy said quietly, but she did not hear him. He could almost believe she’d forgotten him as she all but ran into the tunnel ahead.

They sped along through the silences, arriving at another long stair, a chain of dim glowstones. Cyndere led the way, her woodscloak sweeping each stair and brushing up clouds of dust.

A muckmoth bumped its cold belly against his face, and he batted it away. Just ahead of him, Cyndere had parted a curtain of vines and was motioning for him to step through into the snowy woods.

“Take this.” She gave him a glowstone the size of an apple. “It will help you find your way in the dark.” He tucked it into a pocket, and then she opened his hand and pressed pale blue flower petals into his palm. “And take these. They’ll bring you comfort when you’re lost. Breathe in their perfumes. There’s something to them, these blue flowers. I’m going to gather more tonight, before I return.”

“You’re going flower picking? Tonight?”

“Yes. Only for a short while. It’s nothing I haven’t done before.” So this was what drove her, these mysterious flowers. “But mind the path. Traps. Ryllion set them to catch beastmen. I’ll test each step before I take it, and you should follow me closely until we get as far as the perimeter guard.”

“Then what?”

“I’ll figure something out.”

After a few steps he paused. Something moved in the trees alongside them. He was sure of it. It ducked behind trees. It whispered to itself. With every fleeting glimpse, he became more certain that a Northchild was tracking their passage. It was all he could do to keep himself from calling Auralia’s name.

He stumbled into a depression in the earth. He stopped to trace its shape, hands shaking. He could not be sure, but it might be one of the Keeper’s tracks.

“Please,” he whispered. “Show me where to go.” He heard the heiress’s footsteps and saw her shadow climbing to the top of the next rise and standing against a soft blue glow. In her eagerness she had not noticed him falling behind.

A few frantic moments of searching, and he found a similar print in the wide space between two towering cloudgrasper trees. “I don’t want to leave the heiress alone,” he whispered. “But this is what I’ve wanted. A sign. A direction.” He addressed the treetops around him. “I will follow. But please, watch over the heiress.”

And so the ale boy followed the rugged ground through the freezing woods, out of the trees, and up through the snow-covered field of whitegrass. As he did, he gained confidence that these were indeed the Keeper’s tracks, and he forgot the heiress’s instruction to test every step.

The tracks led him safely to the edge of a camp where Bel Amican guards talked excitedly among themselves and crowded together with torches. He saw that a team of vawns, saddled and restless, stood ready and facing the slope down toward Tilianpurth. The largest vawn bore a giant of a man in long robes and a magnificent green headdress.

The boy did not stay to learn more.

A creature of ice crystals and fog, he moved back into the Cragavar woods, where he hoped his vawn, Rumpa, was waiting for him.

Emeriene limped from Tilianpurth’s kitchen, down the corridor, to the lift. Fuming over the second mess she had found in the kitchen tonight, she pulled the cord and set the lift to rising. This night had been the worst since her arrival. So many interruptions. So many crises. It was time to make her way back to Cyndere, to muster an apology for her angry departure. Maybe this time she would, at last, confess the details of that night, years ago, when she had slipped out the window and run into the arms of a secret admirer.

She found Cyndere’s door unlatched and pushed it open with her shoulder. “We’ve got to talk, my lady,” she declared, stepping inside. “I’ve just received word that the Seer has arrived at the edge of the valley. And—by the bones of Tammos Raak!”

The floor was strewn with ashes and soot. One of the heiress’s towels lay twisted and soiled on the floor.

“What happened here?” she asked, calling toward the steaming tub.

Cyndere’s gown lay on the bed. And the headdress waited there as well.

Emeriene turned, looked at the hooks made from pronged seashells on the wall. Cyndere’s woodscloak was gone, her slippers missing.

Emeriene ran to the window. “No,” she said, her voice breaking. “Not tonight.”

She grasped the window ledge and stared up at the breaking storm. Then slowly she sank down into a chair. Sunrise was still hours away. No, sunrise would not come at all, not so long as this storm lasted.

“Everybody,” she shouted at the window into the flurry. “Everybody leaves me.”

Partayn. Cesylle. Even the one I loved in secret ran away. If you go, what remains?

Winter reached in through the window, clutched her in its cold hands.

“I’ve pledged to protect you, so you’re leaving me no choice.”

She walked out of the chamber, each step heavier than the last. She chose the stairs instead of the lift. It seemed the stairwell was darker than before.