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

marriage, so that the men won't make trouble for the reeves and the women won't
raise havoc among the men. Salina shouldn't waste her life in spinsterhood when
she can bear many healthy babies nor should you, when you could be earning a
living for a wife and family."
"But I don't love him," Salina snapped, glaring at Miles. "Love!" the magistrate
snorted. "What has love to do with it? We speak of marriage and child-rearing,
and since you two have not spoken nor been spoken for, you shall marry or go to
the frontier farms, so that the Protector shall have some use from you!" He
banged his gavel on the bench, and that was the end of it.
Until nightfall.
As he ran, Miles wondered if perhaps he should have chosen the frontier farms
after all. He remembered what he had heard of them, those places that the
Protector wished to see used, so that people wouldn't become crowded in their
homelands as they increased. Some were in the north, where it was cool in summer
but frigid in winter; some were in the western desert, where people broiled by
day and froze by night. They were prisoners, those folk, lawbreakers-waste
people for the wastelands-turning the desert into a garden or the frozen lands
into oatfields for a few months of every year, making the land livable for their
children, if they had any, or for settlers whom the Protector would send when
the land was fertile. Then the prisoners would move on, always in the
wastelands, always where the work was backbreaking and constant, always where
life itself was a punishment.
But could it be worse than the punishment for trying to leave the village
without a pass?
With the thought came the memory of Lasak in his shackles, the long chain
stapled to the side of the courthouse, dressed in rags and striking blow after
blow with sledgehammer or pickax, trimming blocks to shape for the magistrate's
walls, smashing broken blocks into cobblestones, fourteen hours a day,
gray-faced and haggard, his eyes losing luster with every sunrise. He had stayed
at that labor for a year, and when the magistrate released him, he did whatever
he was told, looking up in fear at the slightest word from the Watch, cringing
at a word from the magistrate, going when he was told, coming when he was
bidden, marrying the worst shrew in town as he was ordered, and going almost
eagerly out to hoe all day in the fields, glad to be away from her. His spirit
hadn't just been broken-it had been extinguished.
And here was Miles, daring to leave the village without a pass just as Lasak
had, courting disaster just as Lasak had-but bound and determined that he would
escape, as Lasak had not. He resolutely put the memory out of his mind-he would
rather hang slowly than marry Salina. She might feel insulted at that, but she
would thank him secretly, and who knew? The next husband the magistrate chose
for her might be more to her taste. At least she wouldn't be sent to the
frontier farm for disobeying, not when the crime was his.
So here was Miles, fleeing through the wood, though the punishment would be far
worse if he were caught, far worse than for either refusing to marry, or for
poaching, or any of the hundred other things the Protector forbade. Still, the
difference between giving up a few hours' sport and a week's meat on the one
hand, and sacrificing a whole lifetime's chance of happiness on the other,
wasn't worth thinking about.
He slipped between trees, went down almost-hidden gametrails at a trot, for,
poacher or not, he knew the ways of the forest well. He, like every other