"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Ethshar 2 - With a Single Spell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

good fortune.
It was a small boat, without sails or deck so far as he could tell; it
was either a rowboat or one intended for magical propulsion. It was the right
way up, which was encouraging.
No one was in it, and he could see no one anywhere nearby; a gull cried
overhead, startling him, but he saw no people.
He wondered why the boat had been left where it was, untended. He saw no
house on the shore above it. Probably, he thought, it was an old wreck, and he
had neither the means nor the knowledge to repair it.
Or maybe, it occurred to him, it was propelled and protected by magic, so
that its owner could leave it anywhere without needing to worry about it.
Why here, though? He could see nothing that anyone would want on this
stretch of sand.
No, it was probably a wreck, or a ship's boat washed overboard in a storm
and cast up here.
It was certainly worth investigating. He tried to work up some
enthusiasm, breaking into an awkward trot -- awkward because his feet hurt
from their unaccustomed efforts, and because the battered sandals were not
meant for such use.
As he neared the boat, his hopes rose steadily; by the time he reached
it, he was actually cheerful. His luck had obviously changed. The little craft
looked quite intact indeed, more than adequate to get him out to sea, where he
might still catch that trader he had spotted. The boat was even partially
equipped; a sound pair of oars was neatly tucked under the thwarts, and a
canvas sack of some sort was wedged into the stern. He could still see no one
around who might be the owner. If there were any magical protections on it, of
course, he might not be able to use it. In that case, he might need to rely on
his status as a fellow wizard to avoid trouble, assuming the owner was a
wizard, and not a witch or a priest or a demonologist or one of the mysterious
new warlocks or some other sort of magician.
His heart suddenly plunged into the pit of his belly. The owner, no,
owners, had not vanished without a trace and left him their boat, after all.
The lines of footprints wound their way across the beach and up the nearest
dune.
Something looked odd about those footprints, however. He stared at them,
puzzling.
One set was large and deep, the other smaller and shallower. They were
very close together; not on top of each other, as they would be had one person
followed the other, but very close to each other and exactly parallel. Not
straight, by any means; they wove back and forth like a snake's spine. In two
spots the lines were broken by a small trampled area.
Tobas stared, and realization came to him, accompanied by a slow smile.
He knew why these two people had pulled up on this lonely stretch of sandy
beach, so far from anywhere, in the middle of the day, and why they had walked
up over the dune, leaving the boat unguarded. People in love did foolish
things, that well-known fact was why most people avoided romance and married
for comfort and money. These two had probably had their arms about each other,
accounting for how close their steps were to each other's, and the trampled
areas were undoubtedly where they had paused to kiss, an appetizer to the main
course that was surely under way somewhere in the dunes, inaudible over the