"Jude Fisher - Fool's Gold 01 - Sorcery Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fisher Jude)

"Listen to this, small sister," he said teasingly, bracing himself against the gunwale
with a knee, "and tell me what you think." He pulled from his tunic a length of twine that
had been knotted at intervals in the complicated Eyran fashion that served both as
memory aid and language. Moving his fingers nimbly up and down the knots he began to
declaim:
"From Northern Sea to Golden Sea
Smoothly swam the swan-necked ship
On the backs of Sur's white horses
On the line of the lord's moon path
Easily from the Eyran Isles
Came Rockfallers to the Moonfell Plain."
He wrapped the twine around his hand and into a loop and folded it carefully back into
his tunic before looking to his twin for approval.
"You repeated 'moon,'" Katla said with a grin, and watched Fent's brows knot in
consternation. "And I'm not sure about 'Rockfallers,' either."
"I couldn't fit 'the Rockfall clan' in," Fent said crossly. "It wouldn't scan."
"I'd stick to swordplay, if I were you, brother. Leave the songmaking to Erno." Their
cousin, Erno Hamson, for all his skill at weapons, was at heart a quiet and serious young
man, and he was currently conveniently out of earshot.
"As if you'd know a well-made verse from your ar— Ow! What?" Her fingers were
suddenly tight about his biceps, digging into his skin even through the sturdy leather of
his jerkin.
 "Land: I can feel it."
Fent stared at her, his pale eyes mocking. "You can feel land?"
Katla nodded. "There's rock ahead. My fingers are tingling."
Fent laughed. "I swear you are a troll's get, sister. What is it with you and rock? If
you're not climbing it, you're divining it from the depths of the whale's path! We're miles
north of Istria yet: father reckoned on landfall at first light."
But Katla was shrouding her eyes with her hand, gazing intently at where a dark
smear lay between sea and sky on the horizon. "There—"
"A cloud."
"I'm sure it's not . . ."
There were clouds aplenty, piled up above the horizon in great lumps and towers,
strewn about the upper reaches of the sky, which was darkening already and streaked
with red, the sun having lost its daily battle with encroaching night: a blood-sky, as Erno
would term it.
A shrill cry broke into their reverie. Above them, suddenly, a white bird veered past
the ship, banking sharply. Fent watched it go, his mouth a round "o" of surprise. "A gull,"
he said, like a simple child. "That was a shore gull."
Katla squeezed his arm. "See?"
And now the outline on the horizon was becoming clearer by the minute; not a cloud
bank, after all, but solid land—a long, dark plateau, bordered to the west by higher land
misting away into the distance.
"The Moonfell Plain."
She could hear the delight in her father's voice without even having to see his face;
even so, she turned around at once, eyes alight with excitement, seeking his attention.
"Land, father: I saw it first."
"And sensed it before that," Fent muttered, clearly put out.
Aran Aranson grinned, revealing sharp white teeth amid weather-darkened skin and a
close black beard barely touched by gray.