"Jennifer Roberson - Sword Dancer 6 - Sword-sworn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Jennifer)

PROLOGUE




THE SAND was very fine and very pale, like Del's hair. As her skin had been once; but
first the Southron sun, followed by that of the sea voyage and its salt-laden wind—and our visit
to the isle of Skandi—had collaborated insidiously to gild her to a delicate creamy peach. She
was still too fair, too Northern, to withstand the concerted glare of this sun for any length of
time without burning bright red, but definitely not as fair as she'd been when we first met.
Oh. That's right. I was talking about the sand.
Anyway, it was very fine, and very pale, and I had worked carefully to smooth it with a
good-sized peeling of the skinny, tall, frond- and beard-bedecked palm tree overlooking the
beach, the ocean beyond, the ship I'd hired in Skandi—and then I had ruined all that meticulous
smoothness by drawing in it.
A circle.
A circle.
I had thought never to enter one again.
But I smoothed the sand, and I drew the circle, and then I stepped across the line into the
center. The center precisely.
Thunder did not crash. Rain did not fall. Lightning did not split the sky asunder. The gods,
if any truly existed, either didn't care that I had once again entered a circle, or else they were off
gallivanting around someone else's patch of the world.
"Hah," I muttered, indulging myself with a smirk.
"Hah, what?" she asked, from somewhere behind me.
I didn't turn. "I have done the undoable."
"Ah."
"And nothing has smited me."
"Smitten."
"Nothing has smitten me."
"Yet."
Now I did turn. She stood hipshot in the sand, with legs reaching all the way up to her neck.
They were mostly bare, those legs; she habitually wore, when circumstances did not prohibit, a
sleeveless, high-necked leather tunic that hit her about mid-thigh. In the South she also wore a
loose burnous over the leather tunic, so as to shield her flesh from the bite of the sun, but we
were not in the South. We were on an island cooled by balmy ocean breezes, and she had left
off most of such mundane accoutrements as clothing that covered her body.
I did say she had legs up to her neck. Don't let that suggest there wasn't a body in between.
Oh, yes. There was.
"Lo, I am smitten," I announced in tones of vast masculine appreciation.
Once she might have hit me, or come up with a devastating reprimand. But she knew I was
joking. Well, not entirely—I do appreciate every supple, sinuous inch of her—but that
appreciation has been tempered by her, well, temper, out of unmitigated lust into mere
gentlemanly admiration.
Mostly.
Del arched one pale brow. "Are you practicing languages and their tenses?"

"What?"
"Smite, smote, smitten."
I grinned at her. "I don't need to practice. I speak them all now."