"Terry Goodkind. Faith of the Fallen (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

"Cara," Richard said, "get the horses hitched to the carnage. I'm
going to scout a circle to make sure we don't have any surprises."

"I will scout while you hitch the horses. I am your guard."

"You're my friend, too. I know this land better than you. Hitch
the horses and don't give me any trouble about it."

Cara rolled her eyes and huffed, but marched off to do his bidding.

The room rang with silence. Richard's shadow slipped off the
blanket. When Kahlan whispered her love to him, he paused and looked back.
His shoulders seemed to betray the weight he carried.

"I wish I could, but I can't make people understand freedom. I'm
sorry."

From somewhere inside, Kahlan found a smile for him. "Maybe it
isn't so hard." She gestured toward the bird he had carved in the wall.
"Just show them that, and they will understand what freedom really means:
to soar on your own wings."

Richard smiled, she thought gratefully, before he vanished through
the doorway.

26

Chapter 3

All the troubling thoughts tumbling through her mind kept Kahlan
from falling back to sleep. She tried not to think about Richard's vision
of the future. As exhausted as she was by pain, his words were too
troubling to contemplate, and besides, there was nothing she could do
about it right then. But she was determined to help him get over the loss
of Anderith and focus on stopping the Imperial Order.

It was more difficult to shake her thoughts about the men who had
been outside, men Richard had grown up with. The haunting memory of their
angry threats echoed in her mind. She knew that ordinary men who had never
before acted violently, could, in the right circumstances, be incited to
great brutality. With the way they viewed mankind as sinful, wretched, and
evil, it was only a small step more to actually doing evil. After all, any
evil they might do, they had already rationalized as being predestined by
what they viewed as man's inescapable nature.

It was unnerving to contemplate an attack by such men when she
could do nothing but lie there waiting to be killed. Kahlan envisioned a
grinning, toothless Tommy Lancaster leaning over her to cut her throat
while all she could do was stare helplessly up at him. She had often been
afraid in battle, but at least then she could fight with all her strength