"R. A. MacAvoy - L2 - King of the Dead" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

She widened one eye at that, and seemed to be my cynical old Arlin again. “You had to have expected it,
my true knight. With the prior owners vanished without word, they would be waiting by the day for
official dispossession. They have to make the most of the time they’ve got “
I thought about that while I cut up the rabbit, which was no fat baby and would have done better with
steel than teeth to cut the bites. “I never told them the place was ours. Did you?”
Her smile was condescending. “No. But the usual beg-gar does not send letters to King Rudof two or
three times a season.”
“I handled that very inconspicuously,” I began, but she cut me off with the words “Or get them from the
king. By very conspicuous special courier.”
She was looking at the rabbit with no more enthusiasm than I had shown. “One more wolfish feast. Until
these two years, I never would have believed I would look fondly upon a diet of oatcakes and brown
bread.” We each took a bite and it was a while before we could speak again.
“I shall be constipated, on top of all my other problems,” Arlin stated, and she lay back under the canopy
(she was too tall to be comfortable sitting up) and dropped bits of food into her mouth.
Now the light was slanting to late afternoon, and the shadows of the big maple leaves were black as her
hair against Arlin’s pale face. I said, “You know, it’s when you are dis-gusted about something that your
upbringing comes out. You sounded then the true noblewoman. Very strange, in these circumstances.”
She turned her eyes, not her face, to me. “Yes, My Lord Duke,” she said.
This was the expected retaliation. “I was never brought up as a noble. You know that.”
Arlin leaned up on one elbow and pointed at me. “You ...” Whatever argument she had in mind she gave
up, or something more important intervened among her thoughts.
“Norwess,” she said instead. “You can’t wait longer. You have to go there.”
For a moment I was puzzled, for we were in the old dukedom of Norwess. “You mean the honor itself?
God„ woman, what business have I in that house? What could be gained?”
Arlin sat up again, crouching as dust and dry leaves fell onto her head. “You have three choices,
Nazhuret, son of Eydl of Norwess. You can allow yourself to die, you can live a beast for the rest of
your life, or you can confront the people who want your death.”
Arlin’s phrasing revealed there had been a lot of thought before she spoke those words. Her tone hinted
prophecy. I felt helpless as a rabbit myself, when Arlin turned prophet. “We don’t know it’s the young
duke,” I said. “Norwess is cut up like a big pie.”
Arlin lay down again, chewing tough meat but still look-ing very like a prophet. “Where Leoue goes, the
rest will follow,” she said.
That night, as we huddled together against the wet, I dreamed of the Duke of Norwess’s son, Timet. He
rode by me on a tall black war-horse, which served to dwarf him and flush all the color from his pale
skin. I ran, along beside, hoping to catch his eye: hoping for recognition. Though I was too shy to shout it
out, I was closely related to Tim o’ Norwess. It was an unpleasant dream, for the man kept glow-ering
ahead of him, black with the knowledge that he had never had the opportunity to exist. His gear was blue
and gold: Norwess’s colors. I wore clothes of no particular color, of course. I ran barefoot and he never
knew me.
This was not the first time I had had this particular dream, but as I dreamed it (knowing all the while it
was a dream and to be endured) I realized I was destined to repeat it on many other nights. Through my
life, perhaps.
I woke up to Arlin’s sleepy protests; I was clutching her too hard. I asked her if she would prefer to call
me a normal name such as Tim, and she replied that she would not.
—It was my idea to leave Arlin in that island nest while I went on the errand alone. This was not her idea,
and just as well, for I get into trouble explaining things. Though I like to talk (as you know well, Powl)
and like to listen to others talking, I am never sure what they mean when they use the same words I use.
Arlin, having no love for jabber, knows how to use the language as a pry-bar.
Norwess is mountainous; without too much exaggera-tion, one might say it is one enormous, jagged
mountain. Our journey from the foothills to the palace itself took three days of hiking, and though Arlin