"Tamora Pierce - Circle Opens 3 - Cold Fire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pierce Tamora)

THE CIRCLE OPENS
COLD FIRE
TAMORA PIERCE
BOOK THREE OF THE CIRCLE OPENS QUARTET
Chapter 1

In the city of Kugisko, in Namorn:
Niamara Bancanor, twelve and sometimes too helpful in Daja
Kisubo's opinion, gripped Daja's left hand and elbow. They stood on
one edge of a broad circle of ice where the Bancanors docked their
household boats in the summer. Now, in the month of Snow Moon,
eight weeks before the solstice holiday called Longnight, it was a
place to skate, with benches and heaped banks of snow at the sides to
protect those less able to stop than experts like Nia. For all her
fourteen years, Daja was as much a beginner at this as any three-year-
old. She wouldn't have agreed to these lessons, wanting to protect her
dignity, but after three weeks of watching the Namornese zip up and
down the city's frozen canals, she had realized it was time to learn
how to skate, dignity or no.
"Are you ready?" asked Nia. The cold air made dark roses bloom on
her creamy brown cheeks and lent extra sparkle to her brown eyes.
Daja took a deep breath. "Not really," she said with resignation.
"Let's go."
"One," counted Nia, "two, three."
On three Nia and Daja thrust with their left legs against ice
smoothed each night by convict crews who performed that service for
the entire city. Daja glided forward, knees wobbling, ankles wobbling,
belly wobbling.
"Right, push!" cried Nia, gripping Daja's arm. Two right skates
thrust against the ice. Left and right, left and right, they maneuvered
across the length of the boat basin. Daja fought to stay upright. She
knew her body was set wrong: while she didn't skate, years of training
in staff combat told her that she was not at all centered. It was like
trying to balance on a pair of knife blades. Who thought of this mad
form of travel in the first place? And why had no one locked them up
before they passed their dangerous ideas on to others?
 She didn't want to think of the picture she made, though she'd bet it
was hilarious. Five feet, eight inches tall, she towered over Nia by
four inches. Where Nia was slender, Daja was big-shouldered and
blocky, muscled from years of work as a metalsmith. She was a much
darker brown than Nia and the other Bancanor children, whose mother
was light brown and whose father was white. Daja's face and mouth
were broad. Her large brown eyes тАУ when she was not trying to learn
to skate тАУ were steady. She wore her springy black hair in a multitude
of long, thin braids. Today she had pulled them into a horse-tail tied
with an orange scarf; she wore no fur-lined hat as Nia did, because she
had her own way to keep her head warm. Her clothes were in the style
worn by Namornese men: a long-skirted coat of heavy wool over a
slightly shorter indoor coat, a full-sleeved and high-collared shirt,
baggy trousers, and calf-high boots to which the skates were strapped.