"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Fey 02 - The Rival" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

The Hawk Riders' angle grew steeper. The harness swung back, making him
giddy. The mountains were close now. Their sides no longer appeared smooth.
They were made of volcanic rock, polished by the elements, with cracks and
crevices, and broken edges all along the face. Nothing grew on the ocean
side, no scraggly trees, no windswept bushes struggling to survive. There
was no soil here, and probably hadn't been since the mountains rose out of
the sea, thousands of years before.

His grin grew. The sheer cliff faces of legend were not smooth as tempered
glass. They had flaws. Imperfections.

Handholds.

Then the Riders pulled him over the top of the mountain, and his breath
caught in his throat. The mountains still rose beside him, but underneath
him was a plateau, and through it, a long narrow crevice.

If he squinted, he could see blue sky through that crevice.

The Gull Riders and Scouts had been right. A concealed
A lower torso
subsumed into the bird's form. The only danger they posed in bird form was
that they had two brains and sometimes the bird's instinctual one took over.

Rugad hoped that wouldn't happen here. He had wanted the Domestics to create
a rope that the human part of the bird could hold in its hands. But the
hands were too little. They couldn't carry anything of substance.

They needed a strong, magicked fiber to lift him from the ship to the top of
those peaks. Rugad swallowed, glad he swung from the harness alone. He
wasn't certain he could mask his nervousness. His feet dangled over the
ocean. He was flying higher than he had ever been in his life, and he would
have to go higher still.

He had sent a scouting party to the top of those mountains. They had
reported a small level landing area, but he couldn't see it from here. From
here, the mountains looked as if they rose to jagged points, sharp as the
teeth of a young lion.

The birds changed their angle of flight, ana his harness swung backward,
making his breath catch in his throat. He gripped tighter, remembering the
Domestics' admonition not to pull on the ropes. An exhilaration rose in his
stomach, a lightness that he almost didn't recognize, f ' He was frightened.
; He hadn't been frightened in over seventy years, not since his first battle
as a teenage boy before he came into his Visions, when his youth and lack of
magick forced him into the Infantry.

Frightened.

He grinned. Somehow the feeling relieved him. He had thought that part of