"Katya Reimann - Tielmaran 01 - Wind from a Foreign Sky" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reimann Katya)

womanhood holding a small but comfortable place within it. In all her young life, she
had never knowingly been exposed to danger.
It was a bare four months since her husband had come into his father's estate.
Only two months since she had offered Mervion, her husband's half-sister, a place in
their new household. Two days short of a week since she and Mervion together had
been torn from that life, with no explanations given, save for a paper order
authorizing her marriage-sister's seizure and transport to Princeport.
Anisia closed her eyes, wishing that they had other news to give her. She was still
in the Keyhole Chamber, still in the Prince of Tiel-mark's palace, still in mad
Chancellor Heiratikus's power. Still in the nightmare.
"Put her down." Chancellor Heiratikus was a tall, rail-thin man with a cascade of
silver hair and a commanding mannerтАФa man whose public face gave every
assurance of composure and deliberation. When Anisia had first been brought
before him, she had been certain that everything would be made right. He would see
the mistake; he would let her and Mervion return home to Arleon Forest. Looking
into Heiratikus's noble face, the young country-wife had thought that her world was
returning to sanity, that the ordeal of their forced travel north from her husband's
holding was finally at its end.
That had been before she had seen Heiratikus lose his temper, or heard his voice
raised in anger.
Anisia coughed. Her mouth was bitter with bile. She was groggy from the spell,
from the unfamiliar clutch of magic in her throat. The Chancellor drifted out of
shadows into her field of vision. Happily, his attention was not directed at her. "You
look a fool standing there," he said, his voice at once rough and mocking. "Put her
down."
Thank the gods he wasn't talking to her.
The object of his hard words, Lord Issachar Dan, stood, stiffly poised, on the
massive stone altar at the center of the room. The Chancellor's military officer was a
giant of a man: a shadowy, sweat-glistening monster with ritual scars cicatrized on
his cheeks. With his blue-black hair and pale skin, Lord Dan was clearly not
Tiel-maran-born. He was pure-blood Bissanty, a native of the ancient empire to
Tielmark's north.
Three hundred years past, Tielmark had been a slave state to the Bissanty Empire.
Relations between the two countries had never been anything other than strained.
What was the terrifying dark warrior doing in service to the High Chancellor of all
Tielmark? Even a provincial woman like Anisia could see that was wrong.
Anisia and Mervion had suffered under a series of hard keepers since they had
been presented with the letter of confinement, but Lord Issachar Dan, with his
strange looks and overt, almost careless air of brutality, was the keeper Anisia found
most threatening. For the casting of the great spell, he had forced Mervion onto the
altar. Anisia hadn't been conscious long enough to follow much of what had passed.
It was a small mercy.
When Anisia had invited Mervion to join her household, her husband had
cautioned her that his half-sister was a spell-caster, a witch who called her power
from Eliant├й and Emiera, the patron goddesses of Tielmark. Mervion had made a
display for Anisia of some of her prettier magicтАФvividly colored weavings and
gentle charm-songs. This was magic that could brighten a long winter evening, and
Anisia, disarmed and pleased, had welcomed Mervion for it. She hadn't imagined
that her marriage-sister could turn these frivolous castings to her own protection.
Indeed, Mervion's small arsenal of womanly spells should have been pitifully