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

pronounced the place-name as crisply as the nomads who made the desert their
home. Townsmen and traders slurred over the vowels and called it Daaviki, in
contempt for the troublesome native speech.
He perceived that she knew this. He saw also that stubbornness kept her
silent.
He looked at her still, his gaze heavylidded, almost glazed as a drunk's. The
angle of his neck must have pulled at his shoulders and wrists, but he shed any sign
of discomfort as he said, "Sabin, outside this room, there is a passage covered with
braided rugs. It leads to a stairway that winds around itself twice. Downstairs, to the
right of the kitchen lies a door that leads to a springhouse. Purple flowers grow by
the path, and seven steps to the left lead to the sea cliff where there is a little slate
ledge. You like to sit there on sunny mornings, in what you call your chair seat. But
the people who inhabited these coasts before yours used the site as a shrine." His
grainy voice was almost gentle as he finished. "They left carvings. You have seen
them, when you scratched at the moss."
Sabin jumped up with her mouth opened like a fish's. He had been carried
into this house, unconscious. Ciondo had brought him through the front door.
Someone might have mentioned her name in his hearing, but there was no way he
could have seen the springhouse, or have known of her fondness for that ledge. Her
aunt and uncle did not know, nor her own mother and father.
"I am a wayfinder," he said simply, as if that sealed a truth that she realized,
shivering, could not be other than magic. Her need to escape that room, and that
compelling, mesmerizing gaze came out in a rush of speech. "I have to go, now."
The Wayfinder let his head fall back on the pillow. At a word from him, she
would have fled; she waited, tautly poised on one foot. But he made no sound. He
closed his eyes, and curiosity welled over her fear and held her rooted. "Still there?"
he murmured after a while.
"Maybe." Sabin put her foot down, but quietly.
He did not open his eyes. "You have a piece of the gift yourself, you know,
Sabin."
She quivered again, as much from anger. "What gift!"
His hands were not relaxed now, but bunched into white-knuckled fists. One
of his sores had begun to bleed from the pressure; he was trying her uncle's knots,
and finding them dishearteningly firm. "You came to the beach at my call."
She stamped her foot, as much to drive off uneasiness. "You called nothing! I
forgot my jacket. That was all."
"No." His hands gave up their fretting. "You have given your jacket as the
reason. But it was my call that caused you to forget it in the first place. When I
asked the spirits for their help, you heard also. That was the true cause of the
forgetfulness that drew you outside in the night."
"I've been scolded for carelessness all my life," she protested, "and my jacket
was forgotten at twilight!"
"And so at that hour I called." He was smiling.
She wanted to curse him, for that. He seemed so smug. Like Juard had been
when he teased her; and that remembrance called up tears. Sabin whirled violently
toward the doorway and collided headlong with her aunt.
"Sabin! Merciful god, you've spilled the soup." Kala raised the wooden tray
to keep it beyond reach of calamity, and her plump face dimpled into a frown.
"What are you doing here anyway? A sick man has no need for prying girls."
"Talk to him," Sabin snapped back. "He's the one who pries."