"Pierce, Tamora - The Circle Opens 01 - Magic Steps" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pierce Tamora)

Once in the saddle, there was a delay while the duke spoke to their guard
sergeant. The knowledge of what she'd seen in that building hit Sandry without
warning. The copper stink of blood returned to her nose; the sight of a man
she'd met with his head cut off lingered in her mind's eye. She gripped her
saddle horn with hands that trembled. For once in her life she wished
passionately that she carried smelling salts, or even a scented ball as some
nobles did, to clear her nose and chase off the shudders.
A brown hand wrapped around an open water bottle entered her vision. Oama had
brought her mount up close to Sandry's. "It's all right," she told the girl
quietly. "It's just water with a bit of lemon for cleaning out the mouth."
Sandry drank and returned the bottle with a shaky smile.
"Was it bad?" Oama asked softly.
Sandry nodded.
"We reap what we sow," murmured the duke. He had finished his conversation with
the sergeant. "It sounds cold," he told Oama and Sandry, "but Jamar Rokat sent
enough people into the next world before their rightful time that he must have
known someone might grant him the same." The duke patted Sandry's arm. "Ready to
go?"
She nodded.
* * *
The moment they clattered into the inner courtyard of Duke's Citadel, the
seneschal, Baron Erdogun fer Baigh, walked briskly out of the duke's residence
and down the steps. He was a whippet-lean man with light brown skin and brown
eyes set under a cliff of forehead. Above that he was as bald as an egg; what
little black hair remained on the sides of his head was cropped painfully short.
He was fussy, precise, and arrogant, but he was devoted to Vedris, which
countered his flaws as far as Sandry was concerned.
"Your grace, I had begun to worry if some accident had befallen you," he said,
bowing. He hovered as Vedris dismounted, but like Sandry, he had learned not to
help.
"We would have sent word of an accident, Erdo," replied the duke. "There was a
problem, of course. Jamar Rokat was murdered this morning."
"Good riddance to bad rubbish," the baron said crisply. He fell in half a step
behind the duke as Vedris began to climb the residence steps.
"I need to return to the fishing village this afternoon," Sandry told Oama and
Kwaben. "Meet me here at three?"
They bowed to her from the saddle and took the reins of her mare. Sandry ran to
catch up with the duke and Baron Erdogun. The baron was saying, "Чand your
plans; for the remainder of the morning?"
The duke sighed. "I believe I will lie down until lunch."
Two weeks before, when he was allowed to leave his quarters and go downstairs,
they had set up a couch for him in one of the parlors opening into the entrance
hall. It said a good deal for how tired he was that he simply walked into the
ground floor parlor and shut the door.
Erdogun turned on Sandry, his hands on his hips. "He just happened to stop by a
murder?" he asked tardy.
"There was nothing I could do about that," Sandry informed him. "You know how he
is."
Erdogun sighed and rubbed his bald crown. "The mail's arrived," he said. It
wasn't his nature to apologize for being sharp, as Sandry had already found. "I