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

a chipped clay jug to relieve himself in. The outside world vanished for him. He knew only
the wooden slats of the rocking wagon, the crates and carpets piled within, and the cold iron
cage.

It had been made for an animalтАФbarely big enough to crouch in, or sit in with knees to chin.
Tufts of fur snarled in the hinges. He plucked them out carefully and rolled them into a ball to
feel the softness. The bronze fur smelled of cat, and for some reason that comforted him. A
shred of silvery claw had been left behind as well, torn on a hinge. He remembered the fur
and the claw because they'd told him something important. No feline, for all its strength and
cunning, could reason even as simply as a four-year-old child. Hinges went with doors. Doors
had latches that made them open. The cage had hinges, so there must be a door with a
latchтАФand he could open it.

So he did.

The hinges squealed betrayal. The wagon jerked to a stop. He tumbled through the cage door
just as the woman wearing the armlet appeared in a sudden sun-blaze rectangle at the back
of the wagon. She slapped him hard enough to split his lip, stuffed him back into the cage,
and tied his ankles to the iron with thick, prickly twine.

The people never talked to him. To each other, yes, and they even sang sometimes after the
wagon had stopped and it got colder and darker. But they never talked to him. He wondered,
years later, why they'd been so circumspect around so small a child. Surely they couldn't
have feared he would identify them to the authorities. There were no authorities in the
Tillinshir backlands where brigand wagons rolled. He didn't understand about the cage,
either. How far could a little boy run before they caught him?

He was halfway through his life before he knew the reason for the cage was the armlet, and
what it had told the brigands about the woman they'd killed, the woman who had been his
mother.

He never knew how many days he spent in the cage. Forty, perhaps fifty, to judge by the
distance from Maslach Gorge to Scraller's Fief. One day he was dragged out by the scruff to
stand on shaky legs before a tall, skeletal man whose black eyes were the coldest he had ever
seenтАФbut not the coldest he would ever see in his life.

He remembered how Flornat the Slavemaster had looked him over with those eyes like chips
of ice-sheened obsidian, and paid for his new acquisition in real gold. This memory had
nothing to do with survival; it burned with shame in his mind. Even at four years old, he
understood that the man had traded a shiny yellow circle for him, the way he'd once seen
someoneтАФhe didn't know whoтАФtrade a brass cutpiece for a copper kettle. A price had been
put on him: a cost for a commodity, a statement of his worth, a definition of his value by
someone who saw him only as a live, healthy, usable item for sale.

He told her about it once, about how it had made him feel like a thing instead of a person.
The revelation came after a shouting match caused by the innocent gift of a silver earring.
She hadn't been trying to buy himтАФbut she hadn't understood his revulsion, either. After he
calmed to rationality, he realized it was probably the blue onyx dangling from the silver circle
that had ignited memory and temper. She'd done her best to make it up to him, but how
could a Lady of Blood, born to pride and privilege, understand the unique humiliation of