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

sun threw slanting bars of yellow through gently tossing pines. Yet if the vicious,
tearing winds had quieted, the sea mirrored no such calm. Beyond the spit off the
point, the breakers still reared on the reefs, booming down in tall geysers of spray.
The surge rushed on untamed, through the harbor gates where the round-bottomed
boats rolled at anchor, an ominous sign. Sabin bit her lip. She squinted against the
scintillant brightness of reflections and saw wreckage scattered amid the foam: the
sundered masts and planking of ships gutted wholesale by the reefs.
No one had shaken her awake at dawn because today the twine would not be
cast out for fish. When the wrecks littered the beach, men plied their nets to glean a
storm's harvest from the waves. Custom barred girls and women from such labor,
lest the nets bring up dead bodies, and the sight of drowned flesh sour the luck of
their sons, born and unborn, and curse them to the horror that had befallen cousin
Juard, to be taken alive by the sea.
The man on the bed had escaped that fate, just barely. He had come in on a
ship that was now ripped to fragments, Sabin knew for a surety. He had not swam;
not in chains. And horses did not run in the sea. Unwilling to risk misfortune by
looking too closely at the waves, or what tossed and surfaced in the whitening
tumble of foam, Sabin spun away from the window. She shivered in the sun that fell
on her back, and shivered again as she saw that the man on the bed had awakened.
He studied her, his eyes like fine flawed crystal broken to a razor's edge.
"You do not trust me," he said in his rusty whisper. He flexed one wrist, and
immediately grimaced in pain.
"My uncle thinks you're a murderer."
He ground out a bitter, silent laugh. "Oh, but I am, though my hand has never
taken life."
She frowned, a plain-spoken girl who dreamed, but had always hated riddles.
"What is a wayfinder?"
Riddles came back in answer, as he regarded the beams of the ceiling. "One
who hears the sea. One who can read the earth. One who can travel and never be
lost."
"I don't understand." She stepped back, and sat on the clothes chest that had
once held the shirt she was wearing, when it had been Juard's, and she had spent
days spinning thread for her father's loom. Now her hands had grown horny and
tough, and fine wool would catch on the callus. But the incessant lapses of attention
had not left her; she forgot to mind sheet lines as readily as she had faltered at
spindle and wheel. She curled her knees up and clasped her hands to bury that
recognition. "Anyone can be lost."
He stirred in the faintest impatience, jerked back by the cut of his chains.
"Inland to the east, there is a road, a very dusty road with stone markers that winds
through a forest. Beyond lie farmlands, and three villages, and lastly a trader's town.
Beyond brick walls are wide sands, called by the desert people who live there
Dei'eh'vikia." His head tipped sideways toward Sabin. His eyes now were darkened
as gray sapphires, and he considered her as though she should be awed.
She was not. "You could have spoken to someone who passed that way," she
accused. "Perhaps you lived there yourself." But she knew as she spoke that he did
not. His vessel had broken on the reef, and never sought harbor in these isles. Few
ships did, for the rocks gave hostile greeting to mariners from afar.
He looked at her in sadness or maybe pain, as if he had offered riches to the
village halfwit who had use for no coin at all. He kept staring until she twisted her
fingers together, embarrassed as if caught at a lie. For all his foreign accent, he had