"Holly Lisle - Bard's Tale 08 - Curse of the Black Heron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lisle Holly)

"But no more Birdie, right?"
I nodded vehemently. That was, as far as I could see, the greatest
advantage in achieving journeyman status. "Exactly right. No more Birdie.
I've been asking around, and I've already found a place living with the Widow
dar Nothellin. She'll give me bed and board in exchange for three pence a
month, and one bolt of fine blue cloth winter and summer."
"That's less than Birdie's taking."
"Birdie takes everything I make, just because she can." The anger I felt at
that fact was, for once, tempered with satisfaction. "But only for nineteen
more days."
Giraud jumped onto the boardwalk that began where the cobblestone
street became dirt and mud, and offered me his hand. I took it-I would have
been rude to refuse, even though I was quite capable of swinging myself up
onto the walk, and bounded upward. Giraud said, "I still don't know why the
old bitch didn't send you off to Watchowl Bards' Keep to train as a bard.
You've the voice, and I think a touch of the magic, too."
"You think so, do you?"
Giraud smiled, but his eyes were serious. "You've certainly enchanted
me."
I tried to laugh, but the old bitterness came through too clearly and I
stopped myself. I forced a lightness that I didn't feel and said, "But that's the
way with apprenticeships. Our fosters choose what we shall be, and leave us
the quandary of becoming good at what they choose." I pretended to shrug it
off. "My parents wouldn't have fostered me with Birdie if they hadn't agreed
with her that weaving would be the right path for me."
I was not, after all, alone in complaining about my foster-mother, or about
the hardness of my life. Every other weaver-apprentice who studied with
Marda dar Ellai complained, too. Of chores in the evening, of poor meals, of
hard beds. I was alone in other ways, though. I alone came to Blackwarren not
from a smaller town but from the greatest city of them all, Greffon. I alone
recalled a life that was not bounded by the rising and falling of the sun, that
was described neither by the movements of sheep and cattle through the
pastures nor by the growing and harvesting of crops, nor by the cutting and
drying of peat. I recalled the life I'd led as daughter of the king's own bard-I'd
been a child with free run of court with friends up to and including the king's
youngest daughter. I'd met Salgestis on occasion. I'd sung for him once-some
trippery song about what a wonderful king he was. I recall that he'd been
charmed, for I'd written the dreadful bit of doggerel myself, and had gone on
to tell him that someday I would be a Bard like my father. Bard with a capital
"B," not bard-little-b without the magic. And he'd clapped me on the shoulder
and told me what a good bard I should be, too.
I was alone in other ways. Of all Blackwarren's fosterlings, only I never
received a visit from my parents or an invitation to return home for the Long
Holiday. I alone lived exclusively with my foster-mother the year round,
never so much as receiving a letter or an Ammas Day gift from my true
parents. My fellow apprentices had endless theories about this, all of them
ugly and hateful to one degree or another. Either I was an embarrassing
bastard child, or my parents were mad and had been locked away, or I had
done something in the past that was so terrible my parents had banished me
from their lives, or I was an orphan from nowhere taken in by my