"Jennifer Roberson - Sword Dancer 5 - Sword Born" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Jennifer)

height (or in skill and spirit); but then, neither am I a small man. The wrist fit
nicely. "I dreamed about you," I said. "And the dance. On Staal-Ysta."

Del went very still. Then, eloquently, she took my hand and carried it to her ribs,
where she opened it and flattened the palm against the thin leather of her tunic.
"I'm whole," she said. "Alive."

I shivered. Felt older still than thirty-eight years. Or possibly thirty-nine. "You
don't know what it was like. You were dead, bascha--"

"No. Nearly so. But not dead, Tiger. You stopped the blow in time. Remember?"

I hadn't stopped the blow in time. I managed only to slow it, to keep myself--
barely--from shearing her into two pieces.

"I remember being helpless. I remember not wanting to dance with you in the
first place, and that cursed magicked sword making me fight you anyway. And I
remember cutting you." Beneath my palm I felt the warmth of flesh, the steady
beating of her heart. And the corroded crust of scar tissue mounded permanently
in the skin beneath her left breast. "I remember leaving--no, running--because I
thought you would die. I was sure of it... and I couldn't bear to see it, to watch
it--" I levered myself up on one elbow, reached out, and slid my free hand to the
back of her skull, urging her down with me. "Oh, bascha, you don't know what it
felt like, that morning on the cliff as I rode away from the island. From you." But
not from guilt and self-recrimination; I was sure she had only hours. While I'd
have years to remember, to wish myself dead.

I shifted again as she settled; it was too small, too cramped, for anything more
than the knotting of bodies one upon the other. "And then when you found me
later, me with that thrice-cursed sword--"

"It's over," she said; and so it was, by nearly two years. "All of it is over. I'm
alive and so are you. And neither of us has a sword that is anything but a
sword." She paused. "Now."

Now. Boreal, Del's jivatma, she had broken to free me from ensorcellment. My
own sword, the one I myself had forged, folded, blooded, and named on the icy
island called Staal-Ysta, lay buried beneath tons of fallen rock. We were nothing
but people again: the sword-singer from the North, and the sword-dancer from
the South.

I flinched as she put her hand to the scar I bore in my own flesh, as gnarled and
angry as hers over ribs now healed. She'd nearly killed me in that same circle.
But it wasn't her touch that provoked the visceral response. The truth of it was, I
wasn't even a sword-dancer any more, not a proper one. The Sandtiger was now
borjuni, a "sword without a name." And no more proud--and proudly defended--
title won in apprenticeship and mastery through the system that ruled the
ritualized combat of the South, the oaths and honor codes of men who danced
with swords within the circle and settled the wars of the tanzeers, princes of the
Punja, the South's merciless desert.