"Karen Wehrstein - Chevenga 01 - Lion's Heart" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wehrstein Karen)

failure and death are? This way is quick; the child dies unknowing; the
parents are freed to try again, also best for a demarch.

Most unjust are those who say my parents could not have loved me, to
have done such a thing. Their hearts lay in the ice-water with me,
nameless though I was. I know from standing there myself. It was worst
for my mother, who had carried me. How else can it be with parents? But
they must think of others than themselves.

I've been told I'd think differently if I could remember it, the sight of
them, standing still with calm faces while my flesh shrank and my
breathing weakened, while the life in me, so new, first felt itself failing,
and the air shimmering with the steel wings of Shininao the Carrier
waiting to draw out my soul when it came loose. Perhaps a child is one
who has not yet learned to see beyond himself, and so the world must have
been nothing but pain and terror to me then. But I think better of myself,
now I am an adult, than to let the memory stain my belief. Besides, I had
reason to trust my parents. They had loved me all my life.

These are only words. I would prove more taking my own firstborn
there in my arms. As we are grateful so may we be thanked.

In my own time, as I would so many times later, I fought without
speculating. Afterwards they lifted me out limp and blue and went back to
the Hearthstone. When I turned from blue back to pink and my heartbeat
didn't cease, they voted on my name. By the hearth they made the signs of
the rite, sharing one crystal, and took up chalk or charcoal, one by one, to
choose.

The decision was not unanimous, but split three-to-one. (To this day I
do not know which one of them voted against, and never will.) It was a
risk, after all, one they only dared because my father was so well-regarded.
Only three demarchs had ever borne the name, and none since the War of
the Travesty, two hundred years ago. It was considered too rife with the
sound of war and grandeur, invoking the beast that was named Monarch
of Beasts even before the Fire, and her fighting spirit. It has a tinge of
human domination too, being descended in meaning from the name of the
king who united Iyesi and whom Enchians still worship, First Curlion, who
took it from warrior-kings older still. In the pure ancient tongue Yeola
made, "che" is heart, and "i-veng" is lion.

Thus they threw their die, and I grew into the cast. In full: Fourth
Chevenga Shae-Arano-e, at that time Ascendant to the Demarchy of
Yeola-e.

I have been everything and nothing. I am Athyi but to some have been
God, and yearned a thousand times, God knows, to pray. I have been both
the living hand that wields it and the dead steel itself; I have been torn
down to the roots and raised again cell by cell, enveloped by fire and
water. I have been measured beside Saint Mother, and my namesake