"Jude Fisher - Fool's Gold 02 - Wild Magic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fisher Jude)

"But Da won't let him?" Even as she said it, Katla knew this to be so:
Aran was so fixed on his dream of gold that he'd not let a small thing like
law or principle stand in his way. Paying blood price for the King's
shipmaker would ensure that the Rockfall clan would never afford another
ship, even if anyone was willing to trade with them again.
Halli shook his head wordlessly, his jaw rigid.
Katla shrugged. "Easier to move mountains than to shift our father a
knuckle's length when he's set on something."
"I hate him." Dark blood suffused his face.
 "Da?" Katla was taken aback.
"Fent."
"He's a hot-tempered? " she started.
"He's a monster." Halli said it with a vehemence Katla had never heard
from her mild-mannered sibling. "He's as dangerous as a mad dog. At
best, he should be muzzled and tied to a post where his poisonous bite can
do no one harm."
A curious expression? part avidity, part calculation? passed over Katla
Aransen's face like a high cloud above clear sea.
"I have an idea," she said.



BY the height of second tide, the mummers' ships were fully laden and
the Rockfallers had come away from their various tasks and had trailed
down to the harbor to wave them off on their voyage back to Halbo. Only
three of those gathered on the quay knew that there was anything more to
the venture than a simple return to the mainland, and one of those knew
more than the other two. In a tight knot on the end of the seawall a little
distance from the crowd, Aran Aranson, Halli Aranson, and Tarn Fox
stood with their heads together, talking quietly.
"Only his best oak will do for the keel," Aran said urgently to his son.
"Don't let him palm you off with anything but the finest single timber he's
got in his store? I'll have no botched-together vessel for this voyage. I've
heard he has oaks from the Plantation, and trees from that sacred grove
can reach a hundred feet tall. For the ship I have in mind, nothing else will
do: that keel will need to be as whippy as a cat's spine to weather the big
seas of the far north."
Halli nodded impatiently. He had the air of one who had heard these
instructions a dozen times or more. "And heartwood for the planking, yes I
know."
"Come back with strakes of sapwood and I'll send you back to Halbo in
a rowing boat? "
"Heartwood, not sapwood." Halli rolled his eyes, but his father had
turned his attention to Tarn Fox.
The chief mummer matched Aran for height, but seemed taller for the
mass of sandy hair he wore in a bizarre combination of topknots and
braids and fierce-looking crests, some of which had been turned by years
of air heavy with seasalt to a bright, streaky yellow. Plaits wove in and out
of his long red beard like snakes; look closer and it became clear that some
of the decorations were snakes, cured and withered, or stripped to their