"Mitchell Smith - Moonrise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Mitchell)

himself.

** *

He was walking, hurrying, hooded cloak wrapped tight against the wind, before he was clear in his
purpose. Still, it seemed certain the way he'd come was the way to go... go quickly as he could, back
through frozen tangle as darkness began to grow deeper.
Gareth Cooper тАФ no doubt swiftly crowned King Gareth now тАФ was a tall, slender man, as his
father had been, stooped, prone to illness and not strong, though Coopers had always been strong enough in
purpose. A reedy man, whose wife had died of crab-cancer years before.... Now, a new king тАФ by
treachery тАФ and with only one child. One son and heir to prove a dynasty to the river lords and other
magnates of the Great Rule along the Mississippi, south into North Map-Mexico, and west to the Ocean
Pacific.
Bajazet, barely twenty years old and an improbable successor, would not have been important
enough for the king to come kill him... but perhaps slightly too important for some liveried captain's
responsibility. Who better, then, to deal with the last of family business, than the king's only son?
It certainly seemed possible, even likely. Bajazet, trusting in the first hints of cloudy moonlight for his
footing, trotted back through the woods as if cold and hunger were sufficient sustenence. He traveled as
certain of direction as if back-tracking the lingering scent of his own terror the day before. Moving fast,
ducking through tangles, then running full out where occasional clearings widened to shallow snow and
wind-burned grasses, he traveled due west through evening into deeper night, short-cutting all the
meandering ways he'd fled тАФ and cowered here and there to hide.
In this forest, standing back from the river's east bank, there was only one place тАФ the Lodge тАФ
suited to house a new Prince of the Rule as he directed a hunt.... No doubt young Mark Cooper's people
had scrubbed the blood from the dining-room flooring, washed it off white plaster walls, mopped it from the
stair risers where Purse's men had stood and died to give Bajazet his moments running.
Mark Cooper тАФ a playmate since childhood, plumper than most of his family, lazy, and amiable even
as a little boy. Seeming lazy and amiable, cautious of a fierce father... an even fiercer grandfather while
that unpleasant old man had lived.
Could Mark have always been called a friend? Yes.

***

After what must have been at least six glass-hours of woods-running, of dodging sudden trees,
scrambling over fallen logs... of exhausted stumbles, scrapes and scratches from frozen branches as he'd
shoved and wrestled through to the next clearing, Bajazet smelled at last the smoke of camp.
And as he came nearer, heard horses whinny... heard the quieting noise and banter of troopers тАФ
the last of their patrols long since ridden in, their mounts grained and tended. The men, now also fed, would
be settling into sleep at the fires, weary after riding the long day, and into night.
Bajazet paused at the edge of the lodge clearing, stood shadowed under the branch-broken crescent
moon, and took deep recovering breaths. He was shivering with weariness and cold.... There seemed to be
no sentries posted, except for two men standing a distance to the left, talking, by the lodge front's wide
half-log steps. No reason for many guards to be posted, after allтАж. A hound was yodeling in the kennels,
interested in these stranger cavalrymen come to camp.
The hounds hadn't been set after him, the whole chase. It must have been thought they weren't to be
trusted to track and pull down one of their accustomed masters. And true, there wasn't a soft-eyed
scent-hound or brute mastiff there that Bajazet hadn't played with as a puppy. Even more than Newton,
he'd had a way with them.
"You don't respect him," he'd said once to his brother, concerning a hound's stubborn disobedience.
Newton had smiled. "I find men difficult enough to respect, Baj. I don't have enough left for even an