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

Deserted at birth, then taken in as a slave; freed of that by oaths sworn to the
man, the shodo, who taught me how to fight, to dance according to the codes;
and now deserted by others who swore the same oaths and thus had to kill me,
because I'd broken those codes.

Yet despite the price it had been easy to break them, because it was for Delilah.
For her oaths and honor.

And so in the South, my homeland, I was prey to be hunted by any sword-
dancer alive, to be killed without honor outside of the circle because I wasn't
part of it any more. In the North, Del's homeland, I was a man who had turned
his back on the glory of Staal-Ysta, the Place of Swords, and the sword-singers
who danced in the circle with enchanted blades.

But here, now, with her, I was just me. Sometimes, that's enough.



ONE
WE LEFT the North because Del agreed to go, if only because I forced her hand
by winning a dance in the circle according to Northern rites. But I'd forced their
hands, too, those blond and bitter people who'd sooner see Delilah dead even by
deception because of broken oaths; once healed, once reunited, once free of
Staal-Ysta and Dragon Mountain with its demon-made hounds of hoolies, we had
eventually headed South--where within a year I'd broken the oaths I'd sworn to
my people.
Now both of us were nameless, homeless, lacking songs and honor, abandoning
our pasts in the search for a new present, but one linked uncannily to a past
older than either of us knew: a baby's begetting, a boy's birth. The woman who
had whelped me there on the Punja's crystal sands, and the man who had sired
me far away in foreign lands.

Skandi. Or so we thought. So Del thought, and declared; I was less certain. She
said it was only because I was a self-made man and didn't want to know the
truth of my presence in the world, for fear I was lesser or greater than what I'd
become.

Me, I said little enough about it. Mild curiosity and the dictates of the moment--
the need to retreat, rethink, escape--had been diluted beneath the uncertainties
of sailing, of odd, misplaced regrets, and something akin to confusion. Even
homesickness. Except it was all very complicated, that. Because the South
maybe wasn't my home at all. My birthplace, yes. That much I knew. Southron-
born, Southron-reared. But not, we now believed, Southron-begotten. Which is
one of the reasons we were on this thrice-cursed boat, sailing to a place where I
could have been conceived.

Or not.

Someone might have told me, once. Sula. A woman of the tribes, of the Salset,