"Christopher Stasheff - Rogue Wizard 05 - A Wizard In Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stasheff Christopher)

A Wizard In PeaceA Wizard In Peace
The Fourth Chronicle of Magnus D'Armand, Rogue Wizard
By Christopher Stasheff
ISBN: 0-812-56797-8


CHAPTER 1
Miles fled swiftly through the forest or as swiftly as he could, in the dark.
That was still fairly quickly, for he knew the forest well, this close to home.
Nonetheless, fear chilled him, and the thought of turning back flitted through
his mind-but through it he went, with all his heart helping it on its way, for
he fled from Salina.
Well, from the magistrate, really. The thought brought the man's face instantly
before his mind's eye, heavy fowled and hard-eyed, glowering down from behind
his high bench against the paneled wall of the courtroom, with the clerk looking
on from his desk in front of the bench and the other petitioners watching from
their stools. The magistrate orated, "Salina, daughter of Pleinjeanne, and
Miles, son of Lige, I have given you each five years and more to find mates, and
you have found none."
"But we don't fancy one another, Your Honor," Miles protested.
Didn't fancy Salina, indeed! He glanced up at her--quite plain, rawboned and
scrawny, with squinting eyes, a long, sharp nose, and a tongue quick to insult
and blame linked to a mind that could find every fault unerringly and instantly.
She was only five years older than he, but was a shrew already. "Salina, you
came of age ten years ago," the magistrate intoned. "Miles, you came of age five
years ago. If I leave you to find your own partners, you never will."
"Give me time, Your Honor!" Salina glared at Miles in a way that made it clear
she was as appalled as he at the thought of marrying, for he was no prize. He
was short, a full head shorter than she, and so stocky that he seemed fat. He
was round-faced, with too strong a chin and too short a nose, quiet and
reticent-too quiet for Salina's taste. She proclaimed far and wide that she
loved a good quarrel. Miles hated them.
"Give me time," she said again, "and a permit to travel, and I'll find a man
before I'm thirty."
"By thirty, fifteen years of childbearing will be past! Eight children you could
have borne 4n that time-and you have already wasted ten years, forgone the
bearing of five more citizens for the Protector."
Citizens and taxpayers, Miles thought sourly.
"But you, Miles." The magistrate frowned down at him, puzzled. "You've always
been a good boy, never any trouble. You haven't broken a single rule in your
whole life, never even gone poaching!"
Miles winced at the thought of the public punishments the reeve meted out to
anyone the foresters caught. No, he had never gone poaching! He shuddered at the
memory of the last flogging he had seen-a man from two villages away hanging by
his wrists from the pillory while the cat-o'-nine-tails smacked across his back.
His whole body had convulsed with every stroke; he had cursed at first, then
begun to scream, and finally mewled before they cut him down. Miles had heard
that he had lived, but hadn't walked straight again for six months.
"What has made you so stubborn now?" the magistrate demanded. "You know the
Protector decreed long ago that everyone over eighteen must be safely bound into