"Sara Douglass - Redemption 3 - Crusader" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

beat for beat
— that of her child's.
"What are you telling me?" she whispered, and then cried with utter rapture as the pebbles
explained it to her.

Leagh raised her head and stared at the others. A hand rested on her belly, and a strange, powerful light
shone from her eyes. "Faraday," she said.

Faraday knew what it was she would confront, but her prior knowledge did not comfort her at all within
the reality of her vision.
She was trapped, as she had always been trapped (time after time after time). She had trusted
— the trees this time — and they had turned their backs on her and left her to this.
A thicket of thorns.
 Bands of thornbush enveloped her, pressing into the white flesh of arm and breast and belly
and creeping between her legs and binding her to their own cruel purpose.
Thorns studded her throat and cheek so that whenever she breathed, blood spurted and the
thorns dug deeper.
Must I always bleed, she thought, and must I always suffer the despair of entrapment?
"It's a bitch of a job," muttered a thorn close to her ear, "but someone's got to do it."
Yes, yes, Faraday thought, someone has got to do it. She had been so sure that she'd not
succumb to the temptation of sacrifice any more, but here she was, embracing it again.
Someone would surely have to die if Tencendor was to be saved, and Faraday supposed she'd
have to do it all over again.
Painfully.
Trapped, trapped by the land. Trapped by its need to live at her expense.
The thorns twisted and roped, and Faraday screamed.
It seemed the right thing to do, somehow.
"You have a choice," said the thorns. "You can succumb and the pain will end ... reasonably
fast. Or you can fight and tear yourself apart in the effort to free yourself. Which will it be?"
"I. . . I . . . "
"Quick! The decision cannot take forever, you know!"
"I. . . . "
"Quick! Quick! Time is running out!"
Faraday panicked. She opened her mouth to scream — and then stopped, very suddenly
calm.
"You choose for me," she said. "I trust you to choose for me."
"Good girl," said the land, approvingly, and Faraday found herself rising slowly through a
lake of emerald water, rising, rising towards the surface.
She broke through the surface and shook the water from her hair, and laughed.

"DareWing," she said, and her hand gripped his shoulder more strongly. "We will be here for you."

DareWing spiralled through the air, more determined than at any time in his life.
The ground was not going to get him.
He was an Icarii! A birdman! The ground held nothing for him, nothing.
Then why did he feel the tug on his wings so painfully? Why did the weight of his body
seemingly grow with each breath so that now he found it almost impossible to stay aloft?
The ground called him: "Walk on me, be my lover, bind yourself to me."
No!
"Bind yourself forever."