"Sara Douglass - The Axis Trilogy 1 - BattleAxe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Douglass Sara)

people with most of their winter sustenance. She had been forced to go without,
and fears of what malnourishment might do to her and the child kept her awake
at nights. The remains of a few scrawny rabbits, dried into leathery strips, were
all she had for meat. She sighed and absently rubbed her belly, trying to ignore
the fiery ache in her legs and pelvis, desperately wishing for a few chickens or a
goat to supplement her diet.
She should never have tried to carry this child to term. Had she remained
with her people she would not have been allowed to. It was a Beltide child,
conceived during the drunken revelry of the spring rites, a time when her people,
the forest dwellers, and the people of the Icescarp Alps assembled in the groves
where mountain and forest met. There they celebrated the renewal of life in the
thawing land with religious rites, followed, invariably, by an enthusiastic excess
of whatever wine was left over from long winter nights huddled by home fires.
Beltide was the one night of the year when both peoples relaxed sufficiently to
carry interracial relations to extremes never practised throughout the rest of the
year.
Every Beltide night for the past three years she had watched him, wanted
him. He came down to the groves with his people, his skin as pale and fine as
the ice vaults of his home, his hair the fine summer gold of the life-giving sun
that both their peoples worshipped. As the most powerful Enchanter of his kind
he led the Beltide rites with the leading Banes of her own people; his power and
magic awed and frightened her yet she craved his skill, beauty and grace. This
last Beltide night past, eight months ago now, she had drunk enough wine to
loosen her inhibitions and buttress her courage. She was a striking woman, at
the peak of her beauty and fitness, her nut-brown hair waving thick down her
back. When he'd seen her striding across the clearing of the grove towards him
his eyes had crinkled and then widened, and he had smiled and held his hand
out to her. Eyes trapped by his, she had taken his outstretched fingers,
marvelling at the feel of his silken skin against her own work-callused palm. He
was kind for an Enchanter, and had murmured gentle words before leading her
to a secluded spot beneath the spinning stars.
"StarDrifter," she whispered, running her tongue along the split skin of her
lips.
The snow that had been drifting down for the past few hours was now
falling heavily, and she roused from her reverie to find she could hardly see the
tree line through the driving snow. She must hurry. His child dragging her down,
she stumbled a little as she tried to move faster.
His hands had been strong and confident on her body, and she was not
surprised that her womb had quickened with his child. A child of his would be so
amazing, so exceptional. But although both peoples accepted the excesses and
the drunken unions between the races on Beltide night, both also insisted that
any child conceived of such a union was an abomination. For most of her life she
had been aware of the women who, some four to six weeks after Beltide, went
out of their way along the dim forest paths to collect the herbs necessary to rid
their bodies of any child conceived that night.
Somehow she had not been able to force herself to swallow the steaming
concoction she brewed herself time and time again. And finally she had decided
that she would carry the child to term. Once the child was born, once her people
could see that it was a babe like any other (except more beautiful, more
powerful, as any child of an Enchanter would be), they would accept it. No child