"Huff, Tanya - Kigh 01 - Sing The Four Quarters V2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

Of the nine other bards in the dining room, only Ter-ezka, busy picking bits of carrot out of her son's hair, didn't turn.
Teeth clenched, Annice waved them back to their meals. "Don't be such a jerk," she muttered.
"You're the one who cast aspersions on my discretion." Stasya bracketed her plate with her elbows, cupped her chin in her hands, and leaned forward. "So tell."
"Pjerin a'Stasiek."
"Never heard of him."
"He's the Duke of Ohrid." Stasya continued to look blank so she added, "Remember 'Darkling Lover'?"
"That Duke of Ohrid? You're kidding."
Annice flushed. "Why would I kid about something like that?"
Stasya shrugged. "I don't know. Why would you sleep with the Duke of Ohrid?"
"Well, for one thing, the song's right—he's absolutely gorgeous. And for another…" Annice frowned as she remembered violet eyes and a thick fall of ebony hair and a night that very nearly blew the roof off the keep. "Actually," she said thoughtfully, "there isn't another. Pjerin a'Stasiek is the kind of man you don't mind going to bed with…"
"You don't mind going to bed with," Stasya corrected acerbically.
"… but you wouldn't look forward to facing over breakfast the next morning."
CHAPTER THREE
Pjerin a'Stasiek, sixth Duke of Ohrid, slid his grip up the smooth wood of the haft, drew in a deep lungful of cold air, and slammed the maul down. The split round of ash exploded away from the chopping block, one of the pieces slamming into an outbuilding just as a small, dark-haired boy ran around the corner. The child cried out and fell.
"Gerek!" Throwing the maul aside, Pjerin dove toward his four-year-old son.
Scowling at the wedge of wood, Gerek scrambled to his feet. "I'm okay, Papa," he insisted, kicking indignantly at a rock sticking up through the snow. "I just jumped back from the noise and that tripped me."
Pjerin checked anyway, his hands engulfing the skinny, wool-covered shoulders as he turned the protesting boy around. There didn't appear to be any damage, so he brushed off a snow-covered bottom and stared seriously down into eyes the same dark violet as his own. "Ger, you know better than to come around the shed like that. What have I told you to do when someone's at the woodpile?"
"Go 'round by the other side so they can see you and stop chopping." Gerek managed to repeat the entire instruction on one long-suffering sigh. "But Bohdan sent me to get you. 'Cause that man is with Aunty Olina again."
"You're certain this will work?"
"Not entirely, no." Albek took a sip of mulled wine and peered at Olina over the edge of the thick pottery mug. "But anything worth achieving carries with it a certain amount of risk. Don't you agree?"
Olina smiled tightly at him and turned to kick at a smoldering log with one booted foot. "That depends on how much risk you consider a certain amount to be. As much as I despise the current situation, I have no intention of losing my head."
"Far too beautiful a head to lose," Albek agreed with polished sincerity.
"Don't change the subject." Nails tapped out her impatience on the mantelpiece. "How great is the risk?"
He set the mug down on the round table drawn up beside his chair. "We now know, thanks to record keeping that borders on the compulsive, that what we plan has either never been attempted or the attempt has never been discovered. It doesn't really matter which as both will serve us equally well. We also know that in the eight generations since Prince Shkoder sailed from the north and founded the country that so originally bears his name, high court procedures have not changed. Our plan will use the court's own formula against it."
"It still seems too simple."
"All the best plans are."
"Don't be facetious, Albek," she warned. "To use a bardic skill…"
"A skill that bards make use of," the Cemandian corrected, spreading his hands and smiling reassuringly up at her. "Not a talent, not an innate ability, just a skill. A skill that in Shkoder is confined to bards and to healers but in my country is used by anyone with enough interest to learn." While that wasn't the entire truth, it was close enough to be believed.
Olina frowned, brows sketching an ebony vee against pale skin. "And the bards can't detect it?"
"Of course they can. If it occurs to them to look for it." Albek leaned back, stretching his feet toward the fire, and reaching again for his mug. "But it won't occur to them. Especially when everything they discover will match exactly with the information they'll already have from young Leksik."
"Leksik? Who is Leksik?"
"The fanatic I told you of. Quite frankly, he makes such an unbelievable trader, I'm amazed they haven't picked him up yet. When he's finished ranting and raving, you'll have King Theron's men camped on your doorstep in no time."
"So you've already used this layered trance thing on him?"
Albek shook his head, the rubies in his ears flashing like drops of captured fire. "Remember simplicity. Why risk tampering with his memories when lying serves as well?"
In three long strides she crossed to bend over him, the fingers of one hand clamped tightly around his jaw. "And how well does lying serve?" she asked softly.
In spite of her grip, his lips curved into a smile. "I have never," he said, staring up into ice-blue eyes, his chest beginning to rise and fall a little more quickly, his voice leaving no room for doubt, "lied to you."
"Am I interrupting something?"
Olina slowly straightened, fingertips caressing the marks left on Albek's face as her hand fell away. Twitching her embroidered velvet vest back over her hips, she turned to face the door. "Pjerin," she said, exhibiting no surprise at his sudden arrival, "do come in. I thought you were out playing woodsman."
"I was." Pjerin circled around his father's sister and went to stand by the window. The pale winter light shining through the tiny glass panes touched his eyes with frost. Weight forward on the balls of his feet, he crossed his arms arid glowered. "Bohdan told me Albek had returned."
"With no intention to keep you from your work, Your Grace," Albek protested. Although he and Olina had been speaking Shkoden, he now switched to Cemandian. He always spoke Cemandian with the due. "I'm on my way home and as this is the western end of the pass…"
"On your way home now?" Pjerin interrupted. Fluent in both languages—although he spoke neither most of the time, preferring the Cemandian-derived mountain dialect of the region—he didn't care which the trader used as long as it soon included a variation on "Good-bye." "You're cutting it fine. Other years, the pass has been snowed in by Fourth Quarter Festival."
"But not this year. I've been keeping a very close eye on the weather, I assure you'll I leave first thing tomorrow, I should have the time I need." He traced a sign of the Circle over his heart. "All things being enclosed."
"Festival's day after tomorrow." Pjerin paused, then ground out, "You're welcome' to stay until after."
Such a gracious invitation. Albek thought, but all he said was. "No, thank you. I can't risk the weather."
Grunting an agreement, Pjerin tried, unsuccessfully, not to appear relieved. "What about your packs?"
"Yes, uh. well, I admit I was a little overly optimistic about the amount I could move this year." The trader dropped his eyes and appeared fascinated by the pattern woven into the thick nap of the carpet. "I was hoping you could continue to store them for me. The lighter I travel, the faster I travel, and the less chance I'll be caught in the mountains. I mean…" His gesture somehow encompassed not only the room they were in but the great, stone bulk of the keep it was so small a part of. "… it's not as if you don't have the space."
"Oh, plenty of space." Pjerin spread his arms and scowled. "What about your mules? Shall we store those, too? Next spring, why not bring an army of traders through with you and we'll billet the lot of them in the Great Hall. We're not using it for anything."
"Pjerin." Olina made his name a warning. "Don't be an ass just because you can."
He turned, smile gone. "Don't push me, Olina. I will not have my home become a tollbooth or marketplace to suit your plans to exploit the pass. Nor will I have my son exposed to…"
"Exposed to what? To new ideas? To the possibility that the seventh Duke of Ohrid might actually be in a position of power instead of a hewer of wood and a drawer of water like his father and his father before him?"