Cairhien: переводы

→I peeled his coat open, and my stomach flopped over. The flesh around the wound had turned black. Black veins spiderwebbed out of it, vanishing beneath the edges of his clothes. How extensively had the poison spread? I dragged his coat and the shirt underneath open farther, undoing buttons toward his waist without a care for preserving his modesty. Or my own, for that matter, as while I’d educated myself thoroughly on the subject, I’d never seen a man undressed.

→“It happens when a wound goes bad. I’m going to touch this.” I indicated his clothes and he tensed, but nodded. While he waited for me to do my work he took his hand out of the dirt, inspected it, then cast about for something to wipe it off on. I had the annoyed suspicion he considered my dress before he victimized a patch of moss instead.

→“What’s a fever?” he demanded with a scowl, which didn’t improve my fears.

→“You look strange.” I steeled myself and touched his forehead, which proved hot as an oven against my chilled fingers. “I was under the impression fair folk didn’t get fevers,” I said, concerned.

→“I feel strange,” he announced, struggling to focus on the empty air beside me.

→Gently, I closed the pin, but I had to press down on his chest to secure the latch, and I think it hurt, because his eyes flew open. Their unearthliness in the light of day gave me an unpleasant jolt. They were glassy, burning with fever. He tried to move and started panting.

→I remembered how he’d insisted on removing the pin for his portrait. Even then he had fumbled to protect himself, his reputation, from his damningly mortal grief. He wore it still, though the pin’s tarnish and antique craftsmanship gave it away as two or three hundred years old.

→I would be lying if I claimed the secret it revealed surprised me. There were precious few explanations for Rook’s behavior, and this was proof of the most likely one: a curl of blond human hair nested inside the compartment, carefully tied together with blue thread.

→I dropped to my knees and splayed my hand across his chest. When I felt it rise and fall shallowly beneath the rags of his coat, I breathed out an uneven laugh, shaken by relief. I reached for the coat’s edge to peel it back from his wound. My sleeve caught on his raven pin, and cold metal sprang against my wrist. I pulled away. I’d tripped a catch. The bird had a hidden compartment inside.

→Because I was wrong. He had to be alive. His spilled blood had turned to moss overnight, but his body remained whole. If he were dead, I wouldn’t be looking at him now, not intact, not like this.

→I went to him, my damp, grimy skirt flapping against my legs as I moved. I stood over his body and for a moment just looked. I’d gambled everything on his survival—more than was wise, I admitted to myself, as a gray bleakness engulfed me, chased by a weak flutter of hope.

→He lay sprawled a few feet away in exactly the same position I’d last seen him. His hand was still buried in the dirt, and his face was sepulchral. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for him to grow any paler overnight, but he seemed to have done so.

→Then I rolled over, and found Rook dead beside me.

→Waking up that morning was worlds different than the morning previous. The jagged scraps of sky showing through the brambles were so overcast I couldn’t tell whether it was before dawn or after. Dew had settled on me overnight, leaving my clothes sodden and my skin so clammy my fingers and toes had gone numb. I was immediately conscious of how sore I felt, and how disgusting a state I was in. Of my entire body only my shoulder felt warm, but in a moist, disagreeable way that set my skin crawling. I found it covered in moss where Rook’s blood had soaked through my dress, and hastily peeled the growth off in clumps.

→When the last tendrils snarled into formation beneath the moon, shattering it like a broken mirror, Rook sighed and went still.

→He plunged his hand into the soil, long fingers grasping down. This was no offering to the earth, but a command to it, and the forest surged around us. Bramble roots as wide around as kitchen tables heaved up from the ground, bristling with thorns longer and more wicked than any sword. When they reached their full height they branched, heaving higher, knotting together, until they gathered us up in a fortress like something out of an old tale, a place where a cursed princess slept imprisoned. I was gladdened by the sight of those vicious thorns more than I could say, and wondered whether the stories would have gone any differently if the princesses had been the ones telling them.

→It was all the answer Rook needed.

→I lifted the folds of my skirt and sat down on a rock.

→“I am a prince yet,” he said, and looking at that inhuman, sharp-boned face, lying in repose in a tangled nest of curls, those eyes feverish with resolve, I thought, Yes, you are, aren’t you.

→I swallowed once, twice. Surely I was mad. I glanced at his bloody hand. “We’re still in the summerlands.”