"Tom Deitz - Bloodwinter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Deitz Tom)

drifts had made a fabulous backdrop for the statuary in the forecourt: warriors this rotation, carved in ruddy catlinite
that contrasted nicely with the dark green hollies. Still, the cliffs and crags so prevalent thereabouts were harsh, naked
rock that had as its primary virtue its many grades and colors, most of which were good for carving - which Amalian
had spent all winter doing, and which was another thing she wouldn't miss with the turning of the year.

At least she hadn't been cold. Some of the winter holds were absolutely frigid, in spite of the steam-springs with which
they were heated. Besides, Gory had been posted with her, and he was furry enough to keep several people warm -
even through those wild solstice storms when three strong sets of walls and doors between living quarters and the
cold without failed to stave off winter's fingers.

But she'd missed people, curse it! People in all their variety - any people beyond the same double-hundred-odd she'd
seen day in and day out at the hold. And over half of those were her kin, whom she saw most of the year anyway.
Which was why, when Stone-Hold's weather-witch predicted an early spring and the Ekkon River broke through its ice
a whole eight-day sooner than expected, she'd determined to take the risk.

So far it had been worth it, with far more color in the first-blooms than usual. Why, the gold stars that named this place
almost glowed, and the ferns and bracken were particularly bright and frothy in the hollows among the pines. And the
skies! Clear for days (yester morn notwithstanding) and so blue she wanted to reach up and chip away a chunk to
carve into something precious.

Something for the twins, perhaps. Carmil and Egin: girl and boy. Thirteen now, and poised on the chisel blade between
the children they'd been last Sundeath, when the journey north had begun, and the adults they were fast becoming.
Both were a hand taller than when they'd left the lowlands, and Carmil had breasts and a woman's bleeding. Egin's
voice was shifting so that his singing, which had been so sweet, was now rather more like croaking. And Gory, who'd
seen him daily in the baths, had confided that their little boy now had hair in all men's places - matching that on his
head, which was the same red-lit black as his sire's. Carmil's mirrored Amalian's own rare tawny gold.

She wondered where they were now. Riding ahead with Gory, perhaps? Or back swapping tales with the braver folk
from Oak, who'd swelled their ranks that morning? She envied them - the children their freedom, the Oak folk their
proximity to the northmost of the gorges where the bulk of clan, craft, and kin spent Eron's too-brief summers. It was to
that cleft in the coastal plateau that Amalian led the trek now, through melting drifts of knee-deep snow. If luck rode
with them, some of them would sleep in their own beds tonight, which would be change enough from the crowded
chaos of the way stations that marked the nights between holds, halls, and gorges.

Sighing, she reached back to flip up her cloak's fur-lined hood. A breeze had come whipping out of the gap ahead, and
she wondered if the twinge troubling her knees as she resettled them was merely token of a winter's inaction or the first
insidious gnawings of old age.

Not the latter, she prayed. She wasn't far past thirty, and the sixty more years she expected to attain would be no great
joy if her joints chose to ache through most of them.

And then the wind shifted, riding in from the south, bringing with it a hint of warmth that stirred her heart out of all
proportion to its intensity.

But it brought other things as well: the scent of death, and, so faint as to be barely discernible, the scent of burning.

"I smell death," Amalian informed her husband, reining back the team: golds from Arsten, which had been part of her
wedding dower from Gory's clan, who bred them.

Gory slapped his fractious gray gelding and nodded, his breath making blizzards in the air, riming the beard that framed