"Walter Jon Williams - Woundhealer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williams Walter John)

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Woundhealer

by Walter Jon Williams


The horn echoed down the long valley, three bright rising notes, and it seemed
to Derina-frozen like an animal in the bustle of the court-as if the universe
halted for a long moment of dread. A cold hard fist clenched in her stomach.

Her father was home.

She went up the stone stair by the old gatehouse and watched as her father and
his little army, back from the Princes' Wars, wound up the mountain spur toward
her. The cold canyon wind howled along the old flint walls, tangled Derina's
red-gold hair in its fingers. The knuckles on her small fists were white as she
searched the distant column for sign other father and brothers.

Derina's mother and sister joined her above the gatehouse. Edlyn carried her
child, the two of them wrapped in a coarse wool shawl against the wind.

"Pray they have all come home safe," said Derina's mother, Kendra.

Derina, considering this, thought she didn't know what to pray for, if anything,
but Edlyn looked scorn at her mother, eyes hard in her expressionless face.

When Lord Landry rode beneath the gate he looked up at them, cold blue eyes
gazing up out of the weatherbeaten moon face with its bristle of red hair and
wide, fierce nostrils. As her father's eyes met hers, the knot in Derina's
stomach tightened. Her gaze shifted uneasily to her brothers, Norward the
eldest, gangly, myopic eyes blinking weakly, riding uneasily in the saddle as if
he would rather be anywhere else; and Reeve, a miniature version of his father,
red-haired and round-shouldered, looking up at the women above the gate as if
sizing up the enemy.

Derina's mother and sister bustled down the lichen-scarred stair to make the
welcome official. Derina stayed, watching the column of soldiers as it trudged
up to the old flint-walled house, watched until she saw her father's woman,
Nellda, riding with the other women in the wagons. Little dark-haired Nelly was
sporting a black eye.

Mean amusement twisted Derina's mouth into a smile. She ran down the stair to
join her family.


Nelly was halfway down the long banquet table and her eyes never left her plate.
Before the campaign started she'd sat at Landry's arm, above his family.

Good, Derina thought. Let her go back to the mean little mountain cottage where