"Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 1 - The Ladies Of Mandrigyn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Starhawk shrugged. "The Mother only knows," she said again. As ever, her face gave away nothing;
if it was a question that had ever crossed her mind, she did not show it. Instead she slapped the
deck of cards before Fawn. "Bank?"

Fawn shuffled deftly despite her fashionably long, tinted fingernails. It was one of the first
things she had learned when she'd been sold to Sun Wolf two years ago as a terrified virgin of
sixteen—mostly in self-defense, since the Wolf and Star-hawk were cutthroat card players.

Watching her, Starhawk reflected how out of place the girl looked here. Fawn—whose name had
certainly been something else before she 'd been kidnapped en route from her father's home in the
Middle Kingdoms to a finishing school in Kwest Mralwe— had clearly been brought up in an
atmosphere of taste and elegance. The clothes and jewelry she picked for herself spoke of it.
Starhawk, though raised in an environment both countrified and austere, had done enough looting in
the course of eight years of sieges to understand the difference between new-rich tawdri-ness and
quality. Every line of Fawn spoke of fastidious taste and careful breeding, as much at odds with
the nunlike barrenness of Starhawk's living quarters as she was with the rather barbaric opulence
of the Chief's.

What had she been? the Hawk wondered. A nobleman's daughter? A merchant's? Those white hands,
delicate amid their carefully chosen jewelry, had certainly never handled anything harsher than a
man's flesh in all her life. The loveliest that money coidd buy, Starhawk thought, with a wry
twinge of bitterness for the girl's sake—whether she wanted to be bought or not.

Fawn laid the cards down, undealt. In repose, her face looked suddenly tired. "What's going to
become of him. Hawk?" she asked quietly.

10 Barbara Hambly

Starhawk shrugged, deliberately misunderstanding. "I can't see the Chief being crazy enough to get
mixed up in any affair having to do with magic," she began, and Fawn shook her head impatiently.

"It isn't just this," she insisted. "If he goes on as he's doing, he's going to slip up one day.
He's the best, they say—but he's also forty. Is he going to go on leading troops into battle and
wintering in Wrynde, until one day he's a little slow dodging some enemy's axe? If it isn't
Altiokis, how long will it be before it's something else?"

Starhawk looked away from those suddenly luminous eyes. Rather gruffly, she said, "Oh, he'll
probably conquer a city, make a fortune, and die stinking rich at the age of ninety. The old
bastard's welfare isn't worth your losing sleep over."

Fawn laughed shakily at the picture presented, and they spoke of other things. But on the whole,
as she dealt the cards, Starhawk wished that the girl had not touched that way upon her own buried
forebodings.

Sun Wolf felt, rather than heard, the woman's soft tread outside his tent; he was watching the
entrance when the flap was moved aside. The woman came in with the wild sea smell of the night.

With the lamps at his back, their light catching in his thinning, dust-colored hair and framing
his face in gold, he did look like a sun wolf, the big, deadly, tawny hunter of the eastern