"Michelle West - Winter Death" - читать интересную книгу автора (West Michelle)

Because Riverend was her home, and she wanted to leave.

He came to her often in her dreams after that, and she spoke with him, he with
her. But his was not the only dream which changed.
For one night, huddled alone in the cold, she dreamed the black dream, and it was
different: The dragon took flight. It searched; it searched for her. She could hear it
roar when it opened its lips, and its voice was a song of death and desire.
And when it sang, she heard over voices as well, thin and terrible, the wailing of
children, of grown men reduced to that earlier state, of women whose losses were
so profound that silenceтАФeven the silence of the graveтАФ seemed to offer mercy.
They were lost, these voices; she knew it. They were lost to the devourer, the
shadow, the dragon.
And if she were not careful, if she were not silent as mouse, and hidden in the
darkness of a hold's small room, it would find her, it would consume her, and it
would add her voice to its song.
She woke, sweating, her voice raw; the walls of the hold were solid, but she
could hear footsteps in the halls beyond her room. They paused a moment outside
her door, but no one knocked; no one entered. Her mother was gone.

After that, she dreamed of the darkness often. It grew stronger and stronger, and
she, weaker.
On the morning of the worst of these dreams, the Heralds had come with their
ominous gifts, and she had left them with Widow Davis.
Tonight, the darkness had not yet fallen across the field of her vision. He was
waiting for her, cold beauty.
 She felt the howl of winter wind through passes closed by snow and storm;
memory of spring and summer faded until only the cold remained, essential and
eternal. The ice glittered from the heights of the mountains' peaks; caught light in a
skirt around the fringes of the evergreens that stretched a hundred feet in height to
the edge of her vision.
The snow did not swallow him; is weight did not bear him down, down through
the thin crust of snow. Silent, he waited for her.
As he always waited.
But it was different, tonight, and she knew it.
She said, "You cannot carry an Oathbreaker."
He met her gaze and held it, but she heard no voice, and she found the absence
unsettling, for in dreams like these, she had spoken to him for much of her life.
"Did you send the Heralds? Did they bring gifts that were meant to take my
place?"
He offered no reply.
And she was afraid. Her arms were cold; the day was fading. Night in the
mountains was bright, if not brighter, by moonlight, but the colorsтАФwinter colors,
to be sureтАФwere leached from the landscape until only shades of gray remained
beneath the black and white of sky and star.
"This is no dream," she said quietly, the question a shadow across the words.
He nodded.
She did not know what to feel; the winter had settled deep within her.

In the morning, he came. He came after breakfast had been prepared, but before
the miners had gathered in the hold; the sun cut crisp, long shadows against the