"Melanie Rawn - Exiles 1 - The Ruins of Ambrai" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rawn Melanie)

Part One

942-967

He remembered the wind.

Skittering in the far reaches of his mind were other memories: warmth, and light, and snug
belonging in some cheerful firelit room where a woman sang. Had these images been useful,
he would have remembered them more clearly. What he knew in this life, he knew because it
helped him survive.

Thus the wind. Sudden and brutal, it shoved him down an embankment into a muddy ditch,
where he lay bruised and stunned while it howled down the gorge like a wounded wild
animal. He tried to move, to get up and run, but was helplessly pinned. When the wind died
as quickly as it had been born, he crawled out of the ditch bleeding.

Years after, he learned that while he sprawled in the mud, flattened by the wind, brigands set
fire to his mother's house. She died along with whoever else had been withinтАФ his sisters and
brothers, perhaps. He didn't remember.

More years passed before he learned that no one else had felt the wind.

He went back a long time later, and saw how it might have happened. Maslach Gorge
formed a natural funnel and some freakish shift in pressure could have forced air down it. As
he walked back to where another house was built around the stern chimney and another
woman lived with her children, he wondered why he remembered no root-torn trees, no
leaf-stripped bushes. Surely so amazingly powerful a wind had felled other things besides
him.

Well, a child that age would not have noticed. He could not have said exactly how old he was
when it happened. Four, he guessedтАФperhaps a little less, certainly no more. Eventually he
chose the Feast of St. Lirance, first day and first full moon of the year, as his Birthingday. The
Lady of the Winds had saved his life.

He didn't remember why he'd wandered so far from the house. Neither did he remember the
winter cold that must have been, or the time he certainly spent stumbling across ice-crusted
grainfields into the forest. He had a clear memory of the cartroad, however, for it, too, had
been of use to him. The rutted track had led him to where people were: people who fed him,
warmed him, kept him alive, and at length sold him as a slave.

Groggy with cold and exposure, he went to the people willingly. One of them picked him up
from the dirt road and i settled him on her hip. She wore a plain silver bracelet set
with blue onyx. If he squinted through his lashes, the pale gold sliver in the stone looked like a
candle flame. He trusted the wearer because he recognized the bracelet: it had been worn by
the singer beside the fire. He snuggled against the woman wearing silver and onyx, and fell
asleep. It was only when he woke the next morning inside an iron cage within a dark wagon
that he began to be afraid.

They fed him, tended his cuts and bruises and frostbitten toes, and kept him in the cage as
they traveled. He was given clean if threadbare clothes, woolen socks too big for his feet, and