"S. M. Stirling and Holly Lisle - The Rose Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

she'd be glad to get back to real Tykissian cooking.


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Twenty-two hundred crowns, she told herself again, pouring another slug of wine-and-water into her earthenware mug. The few
others in the common room were a mixed crew. Small dark locals, mostly.

She wished she were tall and blonde like the classic Tykissians, instead of short and ruddy. A bit less enthusiasm on her ancestors'
parts, she thought, and a damn sight more selectivity, and she would have been as lithe and fair and thin as she deserved. She
slugged back a large draught of the wine and scowled at no one in particular. The migrations were five hundred years past, so there
was nobody to complain to.

Two of the Derkinoi scowled back. Probably resentful of the upcoming war on their kinsmen in Tarin Tseld south over the
Imperial Sea. Probably they'd rather be ruled from An Tiram than from Olmya.

Piss on them, then, she thought. Heretic-lovers.

Over in one corner, two enormously tall black men with glossy shaven heads and sweeping white robes played some foreign card
game; Karah finally guessed them to be Shborin traders, who were notoriously standoffish. She glowered at them, as well.

The man at the next table was Tykissian. He had thinning red hair and freckles across his snub nose—she guessed him to be
midding thirty. He dressed in citified clothes, but from the look of his hands, he'd done real work in his life. He was reading a little
leather-bound book, peering down his nose at it through small spectacles and eating forkfuls of meat pie at the same time.

She noticed the man was wearing a ring with the totem head of the Running Wolves. "Evening, lodge-brother," she said.

"Ah?" He looked over at her, and then past her, his expression puzzled. Karah flushed—she had been embarrassingly mistaken for
a native several times since arriving in Derkin. But he focused on her again, and she saw his eyes flick from her ring to the three
blue dots tattooed on her face.

He touched thumb and forefinger to his own cheek marks and both together between his brows. "Good evening to you, lodge-
sister; the Three be with you." He started to turn back to his book, but Karah, lighthearted from the success of her hard-driven
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bargain, and a bit giddy from the wine, suddenly didn't want to eat her meal alone.

"So, lodge-brother, what do they call you…and what brings you to this hot, stinking mourye-hole of a city?" she asked the man.

He closed his book with a faint air of regret, leaving one finger between the pages to hold his place. "I am Amourgin Thurdhad, a
law-speaker of Olmya. I am here on…business."

He had a capital-city accent, slightly pedantic to her ears; the profession explained the book, at least.

Karah felt bold and successful at that moment. If she could outbargain the Imperial fisc, surely she could hold her own in
conversation with a scholar from the capital.

"Yah—business." She winked and raised her glass to him. "Then here's to business. Karah Grenlaarin."