Читать книгу Dragon’s Empire – 3. Countess and Dragon онлайн

62 страница из 64

At the foot of the hill at which the count’s fortress rose, I stopped. This dark monolith with a multitude of towers appeared unshakably calm, but inside the warm halls, furnished in the last fashion, reigned real turmoil. The interested servants and maids whispered in the corridors, the last gossip turned out to have all new and very incredible details. The cooks were busy in the kitchen, hoping that the tired, sick mistress at the insistence of the doctor will try at least a broth – this decoction, similar to the soup now prescribed by doctors from all diseases. But the countess refused to eat and drink. Her strange disease could be reduced to the grave and a more stronger man, but Francesca was still full of power. What helped her stay on the feet, melancholy, thirst for revenge or impending madness?

It was unlikely that she could lose the mind from such a smallness as her little adventure in the stormy sea. Looking at the window, I saw that Francesca in a black mourning dress sat in a chair and sorted by fingers an agate rosary. Her face was frozen and impenetrable as a very elegant plaster mask. There were doctors and a priest near her chair. Vincent was in the room too and sometimes inserted his witty replicas into the conversation. Light in the room was very small, and all bright things, even the tapestries are replaced with a more gloomy, an iron binding is inserted into the window: whether to dull the flow of light, or so that no one uninvited to penetrate the fortress through the window. It must be, after seeing the gold scales on the skins of the dragon, even the weakest light hurt the eyes of Francesca. She painfully pushed, looking at the candle. Their in the room was only a few, one in the candlestick on the table and three more in the wall brake. Doctors had to strain all their eyesight to get the necessary bottles of ointments from their aid kits. It was quite difficult to do, without disassembled the labels, such a number of herbs and minerals, crushed into powder, pill, balms and various tinctures were not even by the court doctor, to whom I was somehow advised to contact Florian.