Читать книгу Hidden Warrior - Lynn Flewelling - Страница 8

I ran away from Ero a frightened boy and returned knowing that I was a girl in a borrowed skin.

Brother’s skin.

After Lhel showed me the bits of bone inside my mother’s old cloth doll, and a glimpse of my true face, I wore my body like a mask. My true form stayed hidden beneath a thin veil of flesh.

What happened after that has never been clear in my mind. I remember reaching Lhel’s camp. I remember looking into her spring with Arkoniel and seeing that frightened girl looking back at us.

When I woke, feverish and aching, in my own room at the keep, I remembered only the tug of her silver needle in my skin and a few scattered fragments of a dream.

But I was glad still to have a boy’s shape. For a long time after I was grateful. Yet even then, when I was so young and unwilling to grasp the truth, I saw Brother’s face looking back at me from my mirror. Only my eyes were my own—and the wine-colored birthmark on my arm. By those I held the memory of the true face Lhel had shown me, reflected in the gently roiling surface of the spring—the face that I could not yet accept or reveal.

It was with this borrowed face that I would first greet the man who’d unwittingly determined my fate and Brother’s, Ki’s, even Arkoniel’s, long before any of us were born.