"Huff, Tanya - Fire's Stone V1.1 Txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

Aaron had saved her from boredom, from loneliness, from lying alone and forgotten in the darkness. She would save him from himself. She chipped away at his shell of stone and night by night uncovered bits and pieces of his past, enough so she could ask further questions.

He had left home at barely fourteen. Why? He had chosen to become a thief, a profession he excelled at, true, but not one destined to provide a steady income, peace of mind, or a ripe old age. Why? She might be safe, but young women terrified him and young men were fiercely taboo. Why?

Actually, it took little digging to find that the taboo against young men was strictly cultural. In Aaron's homeland the soil was poor, the growing season short, and the neighbors likely to torch the crops at any real or imagined slight. Every child was another pair of hands and every pair of hands was desperately needed. Same sex pairs produced no children and same sex love went from being impractical, to being a crime, to blasphemy against god-a god Faharra felt held asinine ideas of what constituted blasphemy, and who in their right mind could believe there was only one god anyway?

Blasphemy was punished by fire.

Unfortunately, Aaron's religious instruction had been intense.

"I was Clan Heir, " Aaron had explained with a shrug, "and Clan Chief rules both people and priests."

Perhaps. But Faharra watched him watching the crowds that passed outside her garden and wondered if, maybe, the priests thought they were saving him from the fire.

From Clan Heir to thief. Quite the fall. And more than just a thief. . . . Where others plodded, Aaron danced. Where others fell, he soared. How better to deny a father

whose word was absolute law. Faharra had been pleased to run into that answer at last. Her own father had been the worst kind of horse's ass and she had been overjoyed when her strong-minded mother had finally divorced him. Her personal theory said that one father could do more to mess up a child's life than every mother in existence put together. She realized she was not entirely without bias on this matter, but that was all right; she blamed it on her father. What had Aaron's father done to turn his son so far from him and what he stood for?
Aaron's mother had died in childbirth.
Aaron felt-had been made to feel-responsible for her death. Was that what made Faharra safe as a friend? That she was too old to bear children? And Faharra added a hearty thank the Nine and One for that.
It took her ten months of poking and prodding and sifting tales to get to the one question that led to all the rest.
"Aaron, what happened to your cousin? What happened to Ruth?"
Aaron grew so still Faharra could almost see the stone she had spent long months chipping away reforming around him. He grew so still he might have become stone himself. When he finally spoke, his voice, in painful contrast, was almost matter-of-fact.
"My father had her flogged to death. "
And then he disappeared; slid off the window ledge and into the night, carrying his own darkness with him.
In the tedious hours between Aaron's visits, Faharra had held his past up to the light, turned it, studied it, and knew she had all the answers but one. What had happened up in the northlands so many years ago that the pain still ruled Aaron's life?
"My father had her flogged to death. "
That was the easy answer. It explained nothing more than why he'd finally settled in Ischia where thieves died under the lash. Looking for his cousin's death, he'd someday make the mistake that would guarantee it.
When he came back, the walls were thicker than ever.
Faharra knew the weak spot now, knew where to place her chisel and strike the blow, but she was afraid. I'm all he has, she told herself. Can I destroy the walls without
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Tanya Huff

destroying him, too? And in back of that . . . He's all I have. I can't risk driving him away.

"Selfish, selfish, old woman!"

"Crazy old woman," Aaron muttered.

Faharra started and realized she had spoke aloud. While she had lain, wrapped in memories, Aaron hadn't moved. It was full dark now, with no moon or stars to break the blackness, but she could still see him on the window ledge, a shadow against the shadow of the night. He swung his leg over the sill, balanced half in and half out of the room.

"Aaron." She grubbed among the things she had to say to him but couldn't hold one long enough to bring it clear. "Come tomorrow," she managed at last.

She felt his eyes on her; studying, weighing, knowing, she was sure, what she wanted to say. It was, after all, the only thing unsaid between them.

"All right." A long pause, as though he were examining his words. "Tomorrow." Then he was gone.

Faharra drank the last dregs of wine in the goblet and sighed. If he returned tomorrow then maybe, just maybe, he was ready to admit to the pain that made his choices for him. And maybe, just maybe, she would have time to cut this last gem, her greatest work, before she died.

Aaron moved across the rooftops of Ischia, almost happy although he wasn't sure why. He leapt lightly from a marble corner, clung for an instant around the scaled neck of a gargoyle, and dropped to a balcony railing ten feet below. His soft leather shoes whispered along the ornate iron, then he launched himself across an alley to land cat-quiet on the flat root of the building one story down. He paused, checked that he remained unobserved, sped across the width of the roof, and swarmed up the intricate carvings on the adjoining building until he was once again three stories above the street.