"Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon - Mage Wars 01 - The Black Gryphon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

them. They called me vile names—and when I got to my feet—
Old sorrow, bitter sorrow, choked him again, blinded his eyes until he had to stop taking his tiny
stitches and wait for the tears to clear.
I never knew till then what "alone" truly meant. Father, Mother, Firemare, Starsinger, little
Zephyr—gone, all gone—Uncle Silverhorn, Star gem, Windsteed, Brightbird—
He had flung himself at the false neighbors, and they had shoved him away, and then raised the horse
whip to him. One blow was all it took, and the world and sky disappeared for Amberdrake. He awoke
bleeding, at least a candlemark later, with a welt across his chest as thick as his hand. Half-mad with
terror and grief, he staggered on into the snow.
He fell against the side of another wagon full of escapees.
The wagon belonging to the kestra'chern Silver Veil, and her household and apprentices.
He forced his hands to remain steady. This is the past. I cannot change it. I did what I could, I
tried my best, and how was I to know what Ma'ar would do when older and wiser folk than I did
not?
Silver Veil did not send her servants to drive him away; although by now he hardly knew what was
happening to him. In pain, freezing and burning by turns, he barely recalled being taken up into the
moving wagon, falling into soft darkness.
In that darkness he had remained for a very long time....
His hands shook, and he put the mending down, closed his eyes, and performed a breathing
exercise to calm himself—one that Silver Veil herself had taught him, in fact.
He had heard of her, in rude whispers, before he had been sent away. As little boys on the verge of
puberty always did, his gang of friends spoke about her and boasted how they would seek her out when
they were older and had money. She was as beautiful as a statue carved by a master sculptor, slim as a
boy, graceful as a gazelle. She took her name from her hair, a platinum fall of silk that she had never cut,
that trailed on the ground behind her when she let it fall loose. He had always thought she was simply a
courtesan, more exotic and expensive than most, but only that.
It took living within her household to learn differently.
She tended him through his illness, she and her household. He posed as one of her apprentices as
they made their way to some place safer—and then, after a time, it was no longer a pose.
Silver Veil did her best to shelter her own from the horrors of that flight, but there was no way to
shelter them from all of it. She had no Gifts, but she had an uncanny sense for finding safe routes.
Unfortunately, many of those lay through places Ma'ar's troops had lately passed.
Ma'ar's forces were not kind to the defeated; they were even less kind to those who had resisted
them. Amberdrake still woke in the night, sometimes, shaking and drenched with sweat, from terrible
dreams of seeing whole families impaled on stakes to die. Nearly as terrible was the one time they had
been forced to hide while Ma'ar's picked men—and his makaar—force marched a seemingly endless
column of captives past them. Amberdrake had watched in shock from fear and dread, searching each
haggard face for signs of his own kin.
Was it a blessing he had not seen anyone he knew, or a curse?
Silver Veil plied her trade as they fled—sometimes for a fee but just as often for nothing, for the
sake of those who needed her. And sometimes, as a bribe, to get her household through one of Ma'ar's
checkpoints. The apprentices, Amberdrake among them, tried to spare her that as much as possible,
offering themselves in her place. Often as not, the offer was accepted, for there was something about
Silver Veil that intimidated many of Ma'ar's officers. She was too serene, too intelligent, too sophisticated
for them. It was by no means unusual to find that the man they needed to bribe preferred something
less—refined—than anything Silver Veil offered.
And finally, as spring crept cautiously out of hiding, they came out into lands that were in friendly
hands. But when Silver Veil reviewed her options, she learned that they were fewer than she had hoped.
Soon she knew that she must seek a road that would take her away from the likeliest direction his family
had taken—back to Ka'venusho, the land of the Kaled'a'in.