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

"Don't do that. I'm not a little girl anymore."
Tebald ignored her as if she were a bothersome younger sister. To Ciondo he
said, "The wager's won, I'd say. Your in'am shealdi should take off his blindfold.
It's probably making him sweat."
"I said so," Ciondo admitted. With one hand fastened to the head stay, he
kept his eyes trained on the rock that jutted like a spindle from the sea. "Tell him
again if you want."
But with the arcane powers of the helmsman now proven, no one seemed
anxious to speak. Sun glared like molten brass off the wet shine of the deck, and the
sheet lines creaked under their burden of sail. The pitiless isolation of the sea seemed
to amplify the wind and the mingled cries of seabirds that squabbled and flew above
the rock. The deeper shout that was human seemed to rend the day's peace like a
mortal blow to the heart.
On that gale-carved, desolate spit, splashing in sea-water to the knees, a
raggedy figure ran, dancing and gyrating to a paean of reborn hope.
"It's Juard!" Darru gasped. He glanced nervously back at the Wayfinder,
ashamed for his unkind threats. Tebald at his side held his breath in wordless shock,
and Ciondo just buried his face in his hands and let the tears spill through his fingers.
It was Sabin who moved to free sheetlines when the Wayfinder threw up the
helm. While Tebald and Darru roused belatedly to set the anchor, the girl un-lashed
an empty bait barrel. She stood it on end by the sternpost, climbed up, and as the
Wayfinder bent his head to receive her touch, she picked out the knots of his
blindfold. The cloth fell away. Hair bleached like bone tumbled free in the breeze,
and she confronted a face set level with hers that had been battered into pallor by
exhaustion. The eyes no longer burned, but seemed wide and drugged as a
dreamer's. Almost, she could plumb their depths, and sense the echoes of the spirits
whose guidance had led without charts.
"You could hear them yourself, were you taught," the Wayfinder murmured in
his grainy bass. Yet before those eyes could brighten and tempt her irrevocably to
sacrifice the reality she understood, she retreated to a braced stance behind the
barrel.
"The moment Juard can sail with his father, I'll be sent back home. Whether
or not there are horses in the sea, I shan't be getting lost behind a loom." Her bare
feet made no sound as she whirled and bounded off to help Ciondo, who was
struggling in feverish eagerness to launch the tender by himself.
The sloop was met on her return by men with streaming torches. Juard's
reappearance from the lost brought cries of joy and disbelief. Kala was fetched from
her bed for a tearful reunion with the son miraculously restored to her. For Juard was
alive; starved thin, his hair matted in tangles so thick they could only be shorn, and
his skin marred everywhere with festering scratches that needed immediate care. The
greedy sea had been forced to give back its plunder, and the news swept like fire
through the village.
A crowd gathered. Children in nightshirts gamboled on the fringes, while their
parents jabbered in amazement. The Wayfinder, whose feat had engineered the
commotion, stood aloof, his weight braced against the stempost of a dry dory, as if
he needed help to stand up. From farther back in the shadows, outside the ring of
torchlight, Sabin watched him. She listened, as he did, to the noise and the
happiness, and she alone saw him shiver and stiffen and suddenly stride into the
press with his light eyes hardened to purpose.
He set a hand marked as Juard's on Ciondo's arm, and said, "No, I forbid