"JenniferRoberson-SwordDancer5-SwordBorn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Roberson Jennifer)

feeling your age? Really, Tiger--you'd think it was always my idea that we, as you put it,
'demonstrate admiration and affection.' "
"Hoolies," I muttered, "but I'll be glad when we're on land again. Room to move on land."
Del sat down on the edge of my bunk. It wasn't a comfortable position because she had to lean
forward and hunch over so she wouldn't bash her head against the underside of her bunk. I
rearranged bent legs, allowing her as much room as I could; I wasn't about to sit up and risk my
skull again. "Any blood?" she asked matter-of-factly, sounding more like man than woman
preparing to blithely dismiss an injury as utterly insignificant unless a limb was chopped off.
Someone once asked me what it meant if Del was ever kind. I answered--seriously--that likely
she was sick. Or worried about me, but that wouldn't do to say. For one, I hated fuss; for
another, well, Del's kind of worrying doesn't make for comfort. A smack on the butt is more her
style of encouragement, much like you'd slap a horse as you sent it out to pasture.
I inspected my skull again with tentative fingers, digging through salt-crusted hair. No blood. Just
a knot coming up. And itching. But too far from my heart to kill me.
Then I dismissed head and irony altogether. I reached out and clasped her arm, closing the wrist
bones inside my hand. Not a small woman, Del, in substance or height (or in skill and spirit); but
then, neither am I a small man. The wrist fit nicely. "I dreamed about you," I said. "And the
dance. On Staal-Ysta."
Del went very still. Then, eloquently, she took my hand and carried it to her ribs, where she
opened it and flattened the palm against the thin leather of her tunic. "I'm whole," she said.
"Alive."
I shivered. Felt older still than thirty-eight years. Or possibly thirty-nine. "You don't know what it
was like. You were dead, bascha--"
"No. Nearly so. But not dead, Tiger. You stopped the blow in time. Remember?"
I hadn't stopped the blow in time. I managed only to slow it, to keep myself--barely--from
shearing her into two pieces.
"I remember being helpless. I remember not wanting to dance with you in the first place, and
that cursed magicked sword making me fight you anyway. And I remember cutting you."
Beneath my palm I felt the warmth of flesh, the steady beating of her heart. And the corroded
crust of scar tissue mounded permanently in the skin beneath her left breast. "I remember
leaving--no, running--because I thought you would die. I was sure of it... and I couldn't bear to
see it, to watch it--" I levered myself up on one elbow, reached out, and slid my free hand to the
back of her skull, urging her down with me. "Oh, bascha, you don't know what it felt like, that
morning on the cliff as I rode away from the island. From you." But not from guilt and self-
recrimination; I was sure she had only hours. While I'd have years to remember, to wish myself
dead.
I shifted again as she settled; it was too small, too cramped, for anything more than the knotting
of bodies one upon the other. "And then when you found me later, me with that thrice-cursed
sword--"
"It's over," she said; and so it was, by nearly two years. "All of it is over. I'm alive and so are
you. And neither of us has a sword that is anything but a sword." She paused. "Now."
Now. Boreal, Del's jivatma, she had broken to free me from ensorcellment. My own sword, the
one I myself had forged, folded, blooded, and named on the icy island called Staal-Ysta, lay
buried beneath tons of fallen rock. We were nothing but people again: the sword-singer from the
North, and the sword-dancer from the South.
I flinched as she put her hand to the scar I bore in my own flesh, as gnarled and angry as hers
over ribs now healed. She'd nearly killed me in that same circle. But it wasn't her touch that
provoked the visceral response. The truth of it was, I wasn't even a sword-dancer any more, not
a proper one. The Sandtiger was now borjuni, a "sword without a name." And no more proud--
and proudly defended--title won in apprenticeship and mastery through the system that ruled the