"Kate Elliott - Jaran 4 - The Law of Becoming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elliott Kate)

more than to go. No one came to see him off. That quickly, they rid themselves of him and went back
to their lives, free of the burden of his presence.

They rode out in silence, he and Bakhtiian's niece. He concentrated on his riding, and on keeping
his hands steady and his mind clear, because fear threatened to engulf him, fear and excitement
together.

Finally, she spoke. "How old are you, Vasha?"

He took heart at her straightforward question. "I was born in the Year of the Hawk."

"Oh, gods," she murmured, as if she was talking to someone else. "Eleven years old. Eleven years
old."

"Is it true?" he asked. "Is he really my father? My mama always said so, but ... but she lied,
sometimes, when it suited her. She said he would have married her, but she never said why he didn't,
so I don't think he ever would have. Only that she wanted him to." He knew that, like Mother
Kireyevsky, he was babbling out of desperation, but he couldn't stop himself. He recalled his mother
so clearly, her pretty face, her warmth, her scent, her cutting words to her cousins and the others in
the tribe, to men who courted her, to women who tried to befriend her; her constant harping on the
man she had loved and borne a child to—a man who had never in all the years afterward returned or
even sent a message. "Every tribe we came to, she asked if they'd news, if he'd married. He never
had, so she said he still meant to come back for her. Then after my grandmother died, the next
summer we heard that he'd married a khaja princess. Mama fell sick and died. Both the healer and a
Singer said she'd poisoned herself in her heart and the gods had been angry and made her die of it."
He gulped in air, it hurt so badly to think of her, of her dead, of being alone. "No one wanted me after
that."

And why should the Orzhekov tribe want him? Why should Nadine Orzhekov take responsibility
for him? Perhaps she needed another servant in her camp. Better to know the worst now.

"I think you're his son," she said so calmly he thought at first he had heard her wrong.
 "But how can I be?" he demanded. "He wasn't married to my mother."

She sighed. "I'll let him explain that."

Him. It hung before him like a talisman, and though their journey was a strange one for a boy who
had never before traveled outside of his tribe, that him hung before Vasha as a fog disguises the land,
all through the days that they rode, with strange companions and into khaja lands, toward him.

Their party came at last to a vast army camped before a huge, gleaming khaja city, and Nadine
took Vasha beside her, riding forward alone to come into camp at sunset. He had never seen so many
tents, so many horses, so many people—women and children and countless men armed for war—all
in one place. They dismounted at the very center of camp, and two men led their horses away. Nadine
herded him forward toward the great tent that loomed before them. Terror clutched hold of him, and
he slunk back behind Nadine when she stopped under the awning of the tent. She greeted the two
guards and rang a little bell three times. The guards eyed him curiously but said nothing.

A cool, commanding voice answered from inside the tent. "Send them in."