"Nancy Kress - And Wild for to Hold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

She said, "Are you thinking of the priesthood once the project is over,
Culhane?"

He flushed. Color mounted from the dyed cheeks, light blue since he
had been promoted to project head, to pink on the fine skin of his shaved
temples.

"I'm thinking of it."

"And doing a celibacy mission now?"

"Yes. Why?" His tone was belligerent: A celibacy mission was slightly
old-fashioned. Lambert studied his body: tall, well-made, strong.
Augments? Muscular, maybe. He had beautiful muscles.

"No reason," she said, bending back to her console until she heard him
walk away.


The demon advanced. Anne, lying feeble on her curtained bed, tried to
call out. But her voice would not come, and who would hear her anyway?
The bedclothes were thick, muffling sound; her ladies would all have
retired for the night, alone or otherwise; the guards would be drinking the
ale Henry had provided all of London to celebrate Elizabeth's christening.
And Henry… he was not beside her. She had failed him of his son.

"Be gone," she said weakly to the demon. It moved closer.

They had called her a witch. Because of her little sixth finger, because
of the dog named Urian, because she had kept Henry under her spell so
long without bedding him. But if I were really a witch, she thought, I could
send this demon away. More: I could hold Henry, could keep him from
watching that whey-faced Jane Seymour, could keep him in my bed… She
was not a witch.

Therefore, it followed that there was nothing she could do about this
demon. If it was come for her, it was come. If Satan, Master of Lies, was
decided to have her, to punish her for taking the husband of another
woman, and for… How much could demons know?

"This was all none of my wishing," she said aloud to the demon. "I
wanted to marry someone else." The demon continued to advance.

Very well, then, let it take her. She would not scream. She never had—
she prided herself on it. Not when they had told her she could not marry
Harry Percy. Not when she had been sent home from the court,
peremptorily and without explanation. Not when she had discovered the
explanation: Henry wished to have her out of London so he could bed his
latest mistress away from Katherine's eyes. She had not screamed when a