"Hambly,.Barbara.-.Darwath.3.-.Armies.Of.Daylight.e-txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

dressed in an outsize black uniform and white quatrefoil emblem of the Guards.
Minalde brushed the sable hood from her dark hair as she ran down the steps to
meet Rudy, the rich fur of her cloak rippling glossily in the gray light. In
sunlight, her eyes were the unearthly blue of a volcanic lake on a midsummer
afternoon; shadowed as they were now, they were velvet-blue, almost black, and
wide with anxiety. She caught Rudy's hands. "They told me they'd heard a
scream," she said.
Rudy fought the urge to put a comforting arm around her shoulders, as he would
have done had they met alone. She's the Queen, he told himself, the Regent and
the mother of the heir, for all she's nineteen years old and scared. There are
too many people watching.
"Glad to see it wasn't you, punk," Gil Patterson added, bringing up the rear,
her long sword tapping at her ankles as she walked. Since she had joined the
Guards of Gae, her former shy defensiveness had been gradually replaced by a
toughness that, Rudy reflected, wasn't any easier to see through. Those pale
schoolmarm's eyes still forbade any inquiries into the true state of her
feelings, but she did look pleased that he'd survived.
At his side, Alde whispered, "Who was it?"
"Saerlinn. I don't know if you knew him."
She nodded, tears starting in her eyes. Alde knew, and was friends with, almost
everyone in the Keep. Again Rudy struggled with his instinct to hold her, to
offer her silent reassurance. "It puts us in a bad place," he admitted quietly.
"When we go to scout the Nest at Gae…"
"You?" Fear widened her eyes. "But you can't—" She bit off her words, and a slow
flush rose to her cheeks. "That is—it isn't just for that," she added with a
soft-voiced dignity that made Rudy smile. "What about your experiments with the
flame throwers, Rudy? You said you'd be able to create weapons to hurl fire from
the things that Gil and I found in the old laboratories. You can't…"
"They'll just have to wait," Rudy said quietly. "I'll put one together for
myself to take to Gae; the rest can wait till I return." He put his hands on her
shoulders and smiled at her frightened, woebegone face. "And I will return," he
promised her.
She looked down, her eyes veiled, and she nodded.
Gil's voice cut sharply into the silence between them. "You think you'll really
be able to put working flame throwers together, then?"
He looked up, startled at her tactlessness, and saw what she had seen—the tall
form of the Chancellor of the Realm, Alwir, Minalde's brother, standing watching
them in the mist and firelight of the gates. Rudy backed quickly away from Alde
and took a few steps up the path toward the Keep.
"You bet," he bragged in his best Madison Avenue voice. "Hell, in a month we'll
make swords obsolete."
"That would be to your advantage," Gil commented, "since you can't pick one up
without cutting yourself."
But in spite of the banter, Rudy was acutely conscious of Alwir's cold gaze on
him as he rejoined Ingold among the mages at the foot of the Keep steps.
Alwir came down toward them, "a gleaming edifice of sartorial splendor," as Alde
had once joked, dominating those around him with his size, his elegance, and his
haughty, unbending will. Like his sister, he was cloaked in black, a velvet
mantle that billowed like wings behind him. The chain of sapphires that lay over
his broad shoulders and breast were not bluer or harder than his eyes. He was