"Christopher Rowley - Bazil 01 - Bazil Broketail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rowley Christopher)

sounds, the echoes of the distant fun made young Lagdalen of the TarchoтАЩs
heart feel hard and heavy in her chest. Sometimes it was awful to be
well-born, a member of a High House, with all the privileges of that
station and all the responsibilities.

The drums and fifes died down, and it grew quiet once more except for
the sounds of contented horses. Lagdalen bent to her task again, mucking
out the stables.

No matter how she looked at it, it still seemed enormously unfair. As if
all the world were arrayed against her, from the Lady Flavia and the
officers of the Novitiate to her own family. She was simply a young girl
who had fallen in love, and as a result here she was muckraking on
Fundament Day. While all the city was dancing on the green, she would be
laboring for hours on this punishment detail which would take all day.
And by the time it was done, and the feasting had begun, Lagdalen would
be too exhausted to do more than bathe and go to sleep on her cot in the
Novitiate.

Fundament was ruined, and all because of a mad infatuation with a
boy, a silly boy, a boy she still ached for. A boy with the tiny green,
triangular freckles on his skin that marked a bastard of the tree, an
elfchild.
 A boy named Werri, a boy from the тАЬElvishтАЭ race, who grew from trees
in the sacred glades and loaned their skills to the aid of the people of
Marneri and all the Empire of the Rose. A boy who worked in the foundry,
forging steel by day, and who stayed in the elf quarter by night, caught up
in their mysterious world of ritual and trance. A boy she had seen only a
handful of times, a boy that she barely knew in fact; although this
realization was new to her, and she had only come to it in the last few
days.

The news of her downfall had brought no response from Werri. No
romantic invitation to leave her life in the Tower of Guard and join him as
an elf-wife in the quarter with its funny, narrow streets and crowded
tenements.

Werri had behaved just as her father had predicted.

тАЬYouтАЩll see,тАЭ heтАЩd said with the contemptuous foreknowledge of an
adult. тАЬHeтАЩs only interested in wenching with normal folk. To him youтАЩre
no more real than a phantom.тАЭ

She burned with embarrassment now, for she knew in her heart that
her father had been right. Even after the love sheтАЩd imagined between
them when sheтАЩd gone to him, heтАЩd barely acknowledged her, barely taken
the time to say goodbye, before slouching off with his friends clothed in elf
green to the quarter and the ale house.

In tears of bitter humiliation sheтАЩd gone back to the Novitiate with her