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

Her head broke water. Through a plastering of hair, Sabin huffed what she
hoped was encouragement. "This way. The beach."
His struggles were clumsy. She labored to raise him, distracted by a chink of
metal: iron, she saw in the flash of bared moonlight. He was fettered in rusted chains,
the skin of both wrists torn raw from their chafing.
"Mother of mercy," she blasphemed. He had found his knees, an old man,
white-haired and wasted of body. His head dangled with fatigue. She said, "Nobody
could swim pulled down by all this chain!"
"Didn't," he husked; he had no breath to speak. He thrashed in attempt to
rise, and fell again as the water hit and dashed in fountains around his chin.
She gripped him under his flaccid arms and dragged mightily. Despite her best
effort, his head dipped under the flood. He swallowed a mouthful, gagging on salt,
while she grunted in tearful frustration. The wave sucked back. He dragged his face
free of its deadly, clinging currents with the dregs of his failing strength. His feet
seemed fastened to the shoaling sands as if they were moored in place.
Belatedly suspicious, Sabin kept tugging. "Your ankles. Are they in irons
also?"
He made a sound between a laugh, a sob, and a cough. "Always."
His floundering efforts managed to coordinate for a moment with hers.
Together they stumbled a few yards shoreward, harried on by flooding water. Again
the wave ebbed, and he sank and bumped against the sand. Panting, Sabin locked
her fingers in his shirt. She held him braced against the hungry drag of the sea,
desperate, while her heart raced drumrolls with the surf. Something was not quite
right, she thought, her stressed mind sluggish to reason. The incoming tide carried
no flotsam, not a stick or a plank that a shipwrecked man might have used to float
his way ashore. "You never swam," she accused again, as he regained the surface
and sputtered.
Weak as he was, her sharpness stung him. He raised his chin, and eyes that
were piercingly clear met hers, lit by the uncertain moonlight. "I didn't." His voice
held a roughness like harpstrings slackened out of tune. "I begged help from the
seaborne spirits that can be called to take the shape of horses. They answered and
drew me to land, but they could not see me safe. To lead one even once from the
water dooms it to mortal life ashore."
The interval between waves seemed drawn out, an unnatural interruption of
rhythm like a breath too long held suspended. Even disallowing for chains, his
weight was too much for a girl; but it was a spasm of recognition like fear that
locked Sabin's limbs and tongue--until those cut-crystal eyes looked down. As if
released from bewitchment, she blurted, "Who are you?"
She thought the wind took her words. Or that they were lost in the grinding
thunder of the sea as she scrabbled the last yards to dry sand. But when, safe at last,
he collapsed in bruised exhaustion, he answered. "I am a wayfinder, and the son of a
way-finder." His cracked tone broke to a whisper. "And I was a slave for more time
than I care to remember." He spoke nonsense, she determined, and said so. He was
a madman and no doubt a convict who had fled in the shallows to hide his tracks
from dogs. A denial she did not understand closed her eyes and her heart against the
logic that argued for him: that the road ran high above the cliffs, and those few paths
that turned shoreward were much too steep for a captive to negotiate in chains. Had
he come that way, he should have fallen, and broken his legs or his neck. Through
teeth that chattered, Sabin waited. Yet the refugee stayed silent. She poked him in the
ribs with her toe and found he had succumbed at last to the beating the sea had given