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

only rigging knives and cutlery for the kitchen, and those were risky things to be
throwing at trolls in the dark. Given any metal at all, and a troll will someday do
murder with it; or so her mother used to threaten to scare out her habit of mislaying
things. Sabin sighed at her failure, since her jacket was not hanging as it should to
dry on the hook by the hearth.
Cloud cover smothered the moon. Past the garden gate, the trail to the sea
plunged deep into shadow. She stubbed her toes on corners of slate, and cursed like
a fishwife, since her uncle was not there to scold. The path switched back once,
twice, in tortuous descent. Westward it was faced by sheer rock cliffs, moss-grown,
and stuffed with old bird nests in the niches. The moon reemerged. The pines that
clawed foothold in on the lower slope moaned in the lash of the winds, their trunks
in stark silhouette against silver-lace sheets of spent breakers as they slid in fan
curves back to sea. Sabin tossed tangled hair from her eyes. The night was wild
around her. She could feel the great waves thud and boom over the barrier reefs
even through the leather of her bootsoles.
A night to bring boat wrecks, she knew, the sea in her blood enough now that
her ear had attuned to its moods. She hurried as the slate path leveled out and gave
way at last to sand, ground of the same black stone, and unpleasant with chill in the
dark. The last fringe of trees passed behind, and she started across the crescent
beach. The moon went and came again. Out on the reefs, the high-flying spindrift
carved up by the rocks tossed like the manes of white horses; great herds there
seemed to be, galloping with arched necks, the surf roll became the thunder of
churning hooves. Sabin forgot the folly of the daydreams that had forced her out of
bed. As if someone's voice had addressed her, she stopped very still and stared.
For a second the horses seemed real. There, the red flare of nostrils in the
moon-whitened planes of wedged faces, and now, a ringing neigh on the wind that
tore past her ears.
Impossible, she insisted, and yet--
 A cloud scudded over the moon. Her wonder vanished, and she chided
herself. There was nothing. Only the tide-swept sand of the beach and herself, a
scarecrow figure of a girl with mussed hair and no sense, gawping at a span of wild
waters. The village idiot knew horses did not run in the sea. Sabin shivered and felt
cold. The dory lay beached above the tide-line, a brisk walk distant up the beach.
She turned that way, determined to fetch back her jacket without another lapse into
silliness.
But before she had gone half the distance, something else caught her eye in the
surf. Not a horse, but a dark clot of rags that at first she mistook for flotsam. Then
the crest of a wave rolled it over, and she saw a man. He was floundering to keep his
face above water, and only a hairsbreadth from drowning.
Fear and memory drove her. She spun and plunged into the sea. Cousin Juard
had been lost to the waves, ripped from the decks of her uncle's boat during the
fury of a storm. As the racking, retching coughs of the man who struggled reached
her, she wondered if Juard had died as miserably, his body bent into spasms as the
cold salt water stung his lungs.
Then the swirl of a comber cascaded over her boot-tops and foamed up
around her chest, and her gasping shudder killed thought. The castaway born along
by the tide tumbled under, and the weight of him slammed her in the knees.
She dropped, clutching at a shoulder whose shirt was all tatters, and skin
underneath that was ice. As the rough sands scoured under her shins, she hooked
his elbow, and braced against the drag of the ebb.