"Springer, Nancy - Chains Of Gold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

A light floated past the window, lantern glow, and the door opened.
“Lonn.” The same melodious voice spoke, gladness and relief in it.
“Who else?” Lonn retorted lightly. He closed the door behind him, hung his lantern on a hook, and unshielded it. I flattened myself in terror of the light.
“I knew you would come.” The other strode over to stand beside him.
“And I knew you would be here, taking comfort in the steeds. You have always been besotted by animals… Arlen, have you yet found yourself a modicum of sense?”
I shivered with surprise. It was the winterking himself, he who was destined to wed me and the! Forthwith I moved, feeling that I must see him. Risking noise—the wailing of the wind masked most noise, anyway—I sat up, inched forward, and found a crack in the boards, looked through it…
Great Mother of us all! No one had told me that he was young and tall and beautiful; how was I to know? I had thought Lonn fair, but Aden’s extravagant beauty stunned me. Some wanton energy filled him so that his every move sang to me; he seemed godlike, almost shining, his very hair crisp and alive, as if he wore a crown of flame—it was red, that marvelous many-tinged red of a chestnut horse in sunlight. And the features of his face, surpassingly lovely, their symmetry, the fawn-hued sheen of his skin, and his eyes—his eyes were as green as green springtime grass. And I gasped in glad pain at the pathos of his sad, smiling mouth.
Arlen of the Sacred Isle. With an eerie insight I knew, even then, that I would love him till I died.


TWO

“A modicum of sense?” Arlen said, and he shook his glorious head, his hair shining like a red hawk’s feathers in firelight. “What has sense to do with what is happening?”
Little enough, I thought, gasping again with the pain of my thawing feet. Little enough sense. They had not heard me; my noise was lost in the sound of wind outside. Arlen smiled and sat on a barley bin, and Lonn sat beside him, looking commonplace next to his splendor.
“Even so, I must ask you yet once more to think,” said Lonn in that warm, steady way of his, and Arlen glanced at him in annoyance.
“Don’t badger me, my good friend, please. Not this last night that is given us to share.”
“I must! Arlen, I cannot bear it. They will tie you up to that bloody tree, tie you with willow thongs and beat you until you faint—”
“I know,” said Arlen.
“—and then they will put out your eyes.”
Those incredible eyes. I shuddered and closed my own. I had not known it was to be so cruel.
“I know,” Arlen said sharply. “Lonn, stop it.”
“I cannot,” said Lonn. “Then they will castrate you. And after the death blow you will be flayed—”
“Say no more, I tell you!” Arlen made a small, furious sound in his throat sprang up, turning his back on Lonn, and patted several horses at random. I watched, seeing the anguish on his face, furious at Lonn in my turn.
“And then they will sever your joints,” said Lonn, very softly, “and gut you, and hack you apart, catching your blood in a silver basin, and they will sprinkle us—” He choked, unable to go on. Pitiful pain in his voice—it was impossible any longer to be angry at him.
“Why?” Arlen spoke without turning around. “Why are you doing this to me? They have told us these things since we were striplings.”
“They have told us so that we would not hear, not really know, not understand—how horrible—”
Silence.
“Arlen, go, flee,” Lonn said softly at last. “Live.”
Arlen turned back toward him, his face hard and fair, like a carving. “I would rather be dead than dishonored,” he said. “A coward—”
“There is no dishonor in putting an end to madness.”
“The sacred rites of the goddess, madness?” For a moment Arlen’s green eyes blazed, but then he merely looked weary. “Lonn, I have no desire to quarrel with you. Please.”
“All right,” said Lonn stubbornly, meaning that it was not right at all. “If honor is of such concern to you, then think of the girl, her honor. She will be bound to know no man but you, one hour’s wedlove in all her life and then celibacy. Suppose she has promised herself to a sweetheart? She is not here of her own will, any more than we are. Likely she will be foresworn.”
I could have laughed or cried. Me, a sweetheart, in sterile Stanehold, with father standing guard? Arlen must have thought something of the same sort, for he laughed out loud, mocking laughter yet not unmelodious.
“A daughter of that precious Rahv? She’ll be black as a crow and hard as flint, not likely to care for any lover or honor either. Save your concern, Lonn.”
“But I think she is not of corvine sort, Arl,” Lonn remarked with meaning in his glance.
“You’ve seen her? How in the many kingdoms did you manage-”
“I blundered in.”
Arlen sat down again, sighing and shaking his fiery head, and Lonn spoke on.
“She is a gentle thing; I swear it from just my glimpse of her. No crow, Arl, for all that her hair shines black as the Naga. She seemed more like—like a dusky flower, a fragile blossom.”
I snorted. Perhaps they heard me and thought I was a horse.
“Not that she lacked spirit,” Lonn added hastily, as if I had reproached him. “She looked ready to bolt. You have seen the panicky glance of a tethered yearling…? But no flinty shell, Arlen. This—this horror, how is she to withstand it? What is to become of her?”
He spoke with an ardor that made me stare, forgetting any resentment, that made Arlen stare as well, made him furrow his fair brow.
“What do you want of me?” he asked Lonn quietly.
“Go away. Live. Let her return to her home.”
“No one knows what would happen if the winterking did not come to the ceremony,” Arlen replied, not in argument this time but in genuine keen-edged thought. “Likely they would slay someone else in my stead, and that one would not thank me. As for the lady Cerilla, they might be inclined to punish her in order to avert the wrath of the goddess.” His voice was very low, with a stillness in it. “Indeed, they would be as likely to slay her quite slowly as to free her.”
“Surely Rahv would not allow harm to come to her,” Lonn said fiercely.
“I am not so sure,” Arlen replied, and I knew that truth spoke in him, that he interceded for my life as Lonn interceded for his, and I shivered where I sat in the darkened stall.
They must have been friends, those two, ever since they were small boys. They sat gazing at each other, all the futility of the thing in their eyes, and reached a wordless agreement.
“I think we must settle for honor,” Arlen said finally. “A winterking’s death for me, and for her the life of a white-robe. She will make peace with it somehow. They all do.” He shifted his gaze. The matter was closed, and new matter was needed. “What ails my gentle Bayard,” Arlen murmured idly, “that he stands so oddly in his stall?”
He stood up and started toward me. I did not care to be found cowering in the soiled straw. With all the dignity I could muster I pulled my blanket tighter, rose, and stepped forward to meet him. We came face to face in the dim corridor between stalls, and I trembled in the lantern light like a dazzled deer.