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

night.
All she knew was that she had owned no knowledge, no identity nor
volition while she lived with the Master. It was as if his sorcery had
smothered them as a wet cloak might smother flames before a fire could
catch hold. All she had known in her years in Sanctuary was how to arouse
Rahe's ardor and slake his lusts: other than this, she had drifted as in a
dream. It was only after she had left the island that she had felt any sense
of herself return. But even after several months of traveling amongst the
fantastic people and places of Elda, she had still been quiescent, content to
drift in Virelai's wake; content to do what he asked of her with the men he
brought to the wagon. Content, that is, until he had tried to sell her to a
southern lord? a man whose touch had made her skin creep, made her
shudder with a revulsion she could neither name nor comprehend except
to know with a deep, primal instinct that he was full of death and she
wanted no part of him.
The fact that she was here, now, in the royal chambers of Halbo Castle
was all her own doing, and she felt some satisfaction in that.
When she had escaped Virelai on the night of the Gathering, she had
not known her own intention. To remove herself from the grasp of the
deathly southern lord meant putting an ocean between them; and a ship
bound for the north required the protection of an Eyran captain; but when
she laid eyes upon Ravn Asharson the future came into clear focus.
Assessing him at a glance as a powerful man, a man who could defend her
against all comers, she knew at once that his soul cried out for the exotic,
and so she had stepped into his orbit and drawn his eyes to her.
In her short experience of the world beyond Sanctuary she had learned
that women used whatever wiles they possessed to attract men to them,
and that the conquest of a king would be regarded by most as a triumph,
not an undertaking to be entered into lightly or by a woman of no
breeding or heritage. But for the Rosa Eldi, this was no game of
statesmanship, no play for status. It was a gambit made simply for
survival, and so she had exerted the full force of her seductive magic upon
him; he was utterly, inextricably bewitched.
What she had not bargained for were the odd sensations he drew forth
from her. These sensations, which she learned to term "feelings," started
with a vague tenderness toward a man so vulnerable her mere glance
could bring him to his knees; then had grown into something altogether
more demanding of their connection in the weeks of the voyage back to
the northern capital and his careful introduction of her into the great
castle he called his home. Now it had become something she could only
think of as a slow fire burning deep inside her, so that instead of
abandoning him as soon as the ship docked in Eyra as she had planned,
she now experienced an almost physical pain every time he left her side.
This pain was made all the worse by the fact that she knew she had
wrought a powerful enchantment upon Ravn: she could not be sure that,
without it, he would feel anything for her at all. And since she had thrown
this veil of bewitchment over him, it was impossible to know his true
character. It was like viewing an island through fogs: she sensed, beneath
the miasma of the magic, something adamantine in him, something
uncompromising and elemental; something that might challenge and