"Katherine Kerr - Deverry 07 - A Time Of War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kerr Katherine)

the Ratters’ quarters required some of a ferret’s agility: first you climbed up a wooden ladder, then
squeezed yourself between two walls and inched along until you made a very sharp turn right into the
doorway. When Jahdo came into the big square chamber that served as kitchen, common room, and
bedchamber for his parents, he found white-haired Gwira, the herb-woman, brewing herb water in an
iron kettle at the hearth. The spicy scent, tinged with resin, hung in the room and mingled with the musky
stink of feircts.

‘Where’s Mam, Gwira?’ Jahdo said.

‘Out with your Da and the weasels. They’ll be back well before dark, she told me. Don’t know where
Kiel’s gone to.’

Dead-pale but smiling, his elder sister, lanky dark-haired Niffa, was sitting at the rickety plank table
nearby and drinking from a wooden bowl. Although she glanced his way, her enormous dark eyes
seemed focused on some wider, distant view. A dreamy child, people called her, and at root, very
strange. Jahdo merely thought of her as irritating.

‘You be well?’
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‘I am, at that.’ Niffa blushed as red as the coals. ‘I never were truly ill.’

When Jahdo stared in puzzlement, Gwira laughed.

‘Your sister be a woman now, young Jahdo, and that’s all you need to know about it. It’s needful for us
to set about finding her a husband soon.’

Vague boyish rumours of blood and the phases of the moon made Jahdo blush as hard as his sister. He
slung the basket onto the table and ran into the bedchamber. At one end of the narrow room lay the
jumble of blankets and straw mattresses that he, his elder brother, and his sister slept upon, while at the
other stood the maze of wooden pens, strewn with more of the same straw, where the ferrets lived. Since
his parents were out hunting, only one ferret, a pregnant female, was at home and surprisingly enough
awake in the daytime, scooting on her bottom across the straw as if she’d just relieved herself. Jahdo
leaned over her slab-sided pen, built high enough to keep the other ferrets out and away from her tangled
ball of a nest, all heaped up straw and scraps of cloth. Tck-tek deigned to allow him to stroke her soft
fur, then reached out her front paws in a long stretch, casually swiping her bottom across his fingers to
mark him as hers.

‘Oh ych, Tek!’ Jahdo wiped his hand on his trousers, then remembered the pewter trinket in his pocket.
‘Here’s somewhat for your hoard.’

When he dropped the disk in, she sniffed it, then hooked the thong with her fangs and, head held high to
drag her prize, waddled back to her nest and tucked it safely away. Some ferrets were worse than
magpies, stealing shiny things to wad up with rags and bits of old leather into a treasure-ball. They liked
socks, too, and stole belt buckles if you didn’t watch them, dragging them belt and all into their nests.

As promised, his parents came home not long after, bent under their burdens of caged ferrets and damp