"David Farland - Runelords 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farland David)

turn and run. His legs felt as weak as a kitten's. He stumbled. The assassin grabbed Dreys' hair from behind, yanking his chin
up to expose his throat.
Damn you, Dreys thought, haven't you killed me enough? In one final desperate act, he yanked the book from his pocket,
hurled it across the Butterwalk.
There on the far side of the street a rosebush struggled up an arbor near a pile of barrels. Dreys knew this place well, could
barely see the yellow roses on dark vines. The book skidded toward them.
The assassin cursed in his own tongue, tossing Dreys aside, and limped after the book.
Dreys could hear nothing but a dull buzz as he struggled to his knees. He glimpsed movement at the edge of the street--the
assassin groping among the roses. Three larger shadows came rushing down the road from the left. The flash of drawn swords,
starlight glinting off iron caps. The City Guard.
Dreys pitched forward onto the cobblestones.
In the predawn, a flock of geese honked as it made its way south through the silvery starlight, the voices sounding to him for
all the world like the barking of a distant pack of dogs.

Chapter 2
THOSE WHO LOVE THE LAND

That morning a few hours after the attack on Dreys and a hundred or so miles south of Castle Sylvarresta, Prince Gaborn Val
Orden faced troubles that were not so harrowing. Yet none of his lessons in the House of Understanding could have prepared
the eighteen-year-old prince for his encounter with a mysterious young woman in the grand marketplace at Bannisferre.
He'd been lost in thought at a vendor's stall in the south market, studying wine chillers of polished silver. The vendor had
many fine iron brewing pots, but his prize was the three wine chillers--large bowls for ice with complementing smaller pitchers
that fit inside. The bowls were of such high quality that they looked to be of ancient duskin workmanship. But no duskin had
walked the earth in a thousand years, and these howls could not have been that old. Each bowl had the clawed feet of a reaver
and featured scenes of hounds running in a leafy wood; the pitchers were adorned with images of a young lord on a horse, his
lance at the ready, bearing down on a reaver mage. Once the pitchers were set into their silver bowls, the images
complemented one another--the young lord battling the reaver mage while the hunting dogs surrounded them.
The ornaments on the wine chiller were all cast using some method that Gaborn could not fathom. The silversmith's detailed
workmanship was breathtaking.
Such were the wonders of Bannisferre's goods that Gaborn hadn't even noticed the young woman sidle up to him until he
smelled the scent of rose petals. (The woman who stands next to me wears a dress that is kept in a drawer filled with rose
petals, he'd realized, on some subconscious level.) Even then, he'd been so absorbed in studying the wine chillers that he
imagined she was only a stranger, awed by the same marvelous bowls and pitchers. He didn't glance her way until she took his
hand, seizing his attention.
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She grasped his left hand in her right, lightly clasping his fingers, then squeezed.
Her soft touch electrified him. He did not pull away. Perhaps, he thought, she mistakes me for another. He glanced sidelong
at her. She was tall and beautiful, perhaps nineteen, her dark-brown hair adorned with mother-of-pearl combs. Her eyes were
black, and even the whites of her eyes were so dark as to be a pale blue. She wore a simple, cloud-colored silk gown with
flowing sleeves--an elegant style lately making its way among the wealthy ladies of Lysle. She wore a belt of ermine, clasped
with a silver flower, high above the navel, just beneath her firm breasts. The neckline was high, modest. Over her shoulders
hung a silk scarf of deepest crimson, so long that its fringes swept the ground. She was not merely beautiful, he decided. She
was astonishing. She smiled at him secretively, shyly, and Gaborn smiled back, tight-lipped-hopeful and troubled all at once.
Her actions reminded him of the endless tests that one of his hearthmasters might have devised for him in the House of
Understanding--yet this was no test.
Gaborn did not know the young woman. He knew no one in all the vast city of Bannisferre--which seemed odd, that he
should not have one acquaintance from a city this large, with its towering gray stone songhouses with their exotic arches, the
white pigeons wheeling through the blue sunlit sky above the chestnut trees. Yet Gaborn knew no one here, not even a minor
merchant. He was that far from home.
He stood near the edge of a market, not far from the docks on the broad banks of the south fork of River Dwindell--a stone's