"Barbara Hambly - Sun Wolf 2 - Witches of Wenshar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

"You think she'd take a post in the guard here, if you take it up to
teach my boy?"
He paused in the act of smearing butter on his bread. "Depends on
what you'd pay her, probably."
Osgard laughed. "There's a mercenary talking," he said with a grin.
"A silver eagle every fortnight-and you won't find purer coin anywhere
in the Middle Kingdoms. Why should we water our silver? We dig it
out of the ground."
"Sounds good." Sun Wolf knew that as currency went, Wenshar's
was, indeed, one of the best. There were cities in the Gwarl Peninsula
where the silver content of the coinage varied from week to week.
"And the same for you, with board in the Hall and a room here for
the pair of you-and the knowledge that you'll be helping a man who's
worked hard and fought hard all his life sleep easier nights."
The boy's got him worried, Sun Wolf thought, leaning back in the
gilded-ebony chair and considering the big man before him, who
pushed so impatiently at his bed-robe and blankets. As a battlefield
physician himself, he was perfectly well aware that Osgard's steady
consumption of wine would drive his fever up by nightfall; but he'd
learned long ago never to attempt to separate a half-drunk man from
his cup. If Kaletha had the nerve to attempt to do so, he had to
approve of her courage, if not her judgment.
In many ways the King reminded Sun Wolf of his own father,
though he was sandy instead of dark-a shaggy, roaring bear of a man,
comfortable with the jostling give-and-take of casual friendship and
unwilling to stir the mud at the bottom of his or anyone else's soul. A
man who could fight all day, drink all evening, and fornicate all night-or
who would die in the attempt to seem to.
A man, Sun Wolf thought, such as he himself had striven so hard
to be, all those years.
"I'll talk to the Hawk," he said, "and meet your boy and decide
then."

"And you, Starhawk?" Kaletha set down the pottery mug of coffee
and looked at Starhawk in the buttercup sunlight pouring through the
long south-facing windows of the Hall. "Will you, too, join our
company, to learn the ways of power?"
Servants were moving back and forth from the service hatches to
the trestle tables set up in the big room with its dark granite walls.
There were few of them, as there were few guards-the underservants
who ate at the lower end of the Hall fetched their own bread and butter
and breakfast ale. Starhawk wondered a little about this. She could
estimate within a silverpiece how much a place would yield in money
and loot, and the fortress of Tandieras was undeniably rich. Ruling the
largest chain of silver mines in the west of the world, they could
scarcely be otherwise.
After last night's incidents, she was acutely aware that most of the
underservants who brought grapes, coffee, and clotted kefir porridge to
the small table which Kaletha had invited her to share were of the
shirdar.