"Janny Wurts - Wayfinder(2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wurts Janny)

Wayfinder
By: Janny Wurts
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In heroic and high fantasy, the questing hero has a counterpart--the questing
heroine, who seeks not only help for her people, but a value for herself. Tough,
unselfish Sabin, apprentice to a hard life, is an excellent example of the breed. But,
as you might expect, having set up that pattern, author Janny Wurts transcends it,
liberating Sabin to find her own way.
****
Ciondo had blown out the lanterns for the night when Sabin remembered her
mistake. Lately arrived to help out on the sloop for the summer, she had forgotten to
bring in her jacket. It lay where it had been left, draped over the upturned keel of the
dory; wet by now in the fog, and growing redolent of the mildew that would speckle
its patched, sun-faded shoulders if someone did not crawl out of warm blankets and
fetch it up from the beach.
The wind had risen. Gusts slammed and whined across the eaves, and
moaned through the windbreak of pines that lined the cliffs. Winter had revisited
since sundown; the drafts through the chinks held the scent of northern snow. The
floorboards, too, were cold under Sabin's bare feet. She looked out through the
crack in the shutter, dressing quickly as she did so. The sky had given her a moon,
but a thin, ragged cloud cover sent shadows chasing in ink and silver across the sea.
The path to the harborside was steep, even dangerous, all rocks and twined roots
that could trip the unwary even in brightest sunlight.
Stupid, she had been, and ever a fool for letting her mind stray in daydreams.
She longed to curse in irritation as her uncle did when his hands slipped on a net, but
she dreaded to raise a disturbance. The household was sleeping. Even her aunt who
wept in her pillow each night for the son just lost to the sea; Sabin's cousin, who
was four years older than her undersized fourteen, and whose boots she could never
grow to fill.
"A girl can work hard and master a boy's chores," Uncle Ciondo had
summed up gruffly. "But you will never be strong enough to take the place of a
man."
Yet the nets were heavy and the sloop was old, its scarred, patched planking
in constant need of repairs. A girl's hands were better than going without, or so her
mother insisted. Grudgingly, Uncle Ciondo agreed that Aunt Kala would do better if
an empty chair no longer faced her through mealtimes. Sabin was given blankets and
a lumpy cot in the loft, and cast-off sailor's clothing that smelled of cod and oakum,
poor gifts, but precious for the fact they could ill be spared.
 Her lapse over the jacket could not go unremedied.
She fumbled and found her damp boots in the dark. Too lazy to bother with
trousers, she pulled on the man-size fisher's smock that hung halfway to her knees.
The loose cuffs had to be rolled to free her hands. She knotted the waist with rope
to hold it from billowing in the wind, although in the deeps of the night, no one was
abroad to care if she ran outside half-clothed.
The board floor squeaked to her step, and the outer latch clanged down as
she shut the weathered plank door. "Sabin," she admonished as she hooked a heel
on the door stoop and caught herself short of a stumble, "Don't you go tripping and
banging, or someone will mistake you for trouble and shoot you in the back for a
troll."
Except that no one in her village kept so much as a bow. The fisherfolk had