"Terry Goodkind. Faith of the Fallen (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

of amber light filling the small room around her. Since the light wasn't
bright, she reasoned that there must be a covering over a window muting
the sunlight, or maybe it was dusk. Whenever she woke, as now, she not
only had no sense of time, but no sense of how long she had been asleep.

She worked her tongue against the pasty dryness in her mouth. Her
body felt leaden with the thick, lingering slumber. She was as nauseated
as the time when she was little and had eaten three candy green apples
before a boat journey on a hot, windy day. It was hot like that now:
summer hot. She struggled to rouse herself fully, but her awaking
awareness seemed adrift, bobbing in a vast shadowy sea. Her stomach
roiled. She suddenly had to put all her mental effort into not throwing
up. She knew all too well that in her present condition, few things hurt
more than vomiting. Her eyelids sagged closed again, and she foundered to
a place darker yet.

She caught herself, forced her thoughts to the surface, and willed
her eyes open again. She remembered: they gave her herbs to dull the pain
and to help her sleep. Richard knew a good deal about herbs. At least the
herbs helped her, drift into stuporous sleep. The pain, if not as sharp,
still found her there.

Slowly, carefully, so as not to twist what felt like double-edged
daggers skewered here and there between her ribs, she drew a deeper
breath. The fragrance of balsam and pine filled her lungs, helping to
settle her stomach. It was not the aroma of trees among other smells in
the forest, among damp dirt and toadstools and cinnamon ferns, but the
redolence of trees freshly felled and limbed. She concentrated on focusing
her sight and saw beyond the foot of the bed a wall of pale, newly peeled
timber, here and there oozing sap from fresh axe cuts. The wood looked to
have been split and hewn in haste, yet its tight fit betrayed a precision
only knowledge and experience could bestow.

The room was tiny; in the Confessors' Palace, where she had grown
up, a room this small would not have qualified as a closet for linens.
Moreover, it would have been stone, if not marble. She liked the tiny
wooden room; she expected that Richard had built it to protect her. It
felt almost like his sheltering arms around her. Marble, with its aloof
dignity, never comforted her in that way.

Beyond the foot of the bed, she spotted a carving of a bird in
flight. It had been sculpted with a few sure strokes of a knife into a log
of the wall on a flat spot only a little bigger than her hand. Richard had
given her something to look at. On occasion, sitting around a campfire,
she had watched him casually carve a face or an animal from a scrap of
wood. The bird, soaring on wings spread wide as it watched over her,
conveyed a sense of freedom.

Turning her eyes to the right, she saw a brown wool blanket
hanging over the doorway. From beyond the doorway came fragments of angry,