Читать онлайн «Tess of the Road»
Автор Рэйчел Хартман
Also by Rachel Hartman
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2018 by Rachel Hartman
Cover art copyright © 2018 by Simon Prades
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
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Names: Hartman, Rachel, author.
Title: Tess of the road / Rachel Hartman.
Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, 2018. | Summary: “Tess Dombegh journeys through the kingdom of Goredd in search of the World Serpents and finds herself along the way”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016041764 | ISBN 978-1-101-93128-8 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-1-101-93129-5 (lib. bdg. ) | ISBN 978-0-525-57857-4 (intl.
) | ISBN 978-1-101-93130-1 (ebook)Subjects: | CYAC: Courts and courtiers—Fiction. | Fantasy.
Classification: LCC PZ7. H26736 Te 2018 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9781101931301
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
When Tessie Dombegh was six and still irrepressible, she married her twin sister, Jeanne, in the courtyard of their childhood home.
Married her to Cousin Kenneth, that is. Tessie, draped in one of her father’s law robes cinched with an incongruous red ribbon, played the priest. Faffy the snaphound was the flower girl (Tessie had cleverly given him a bouquet of snapdragons).
It was past midsummer, and the plum tree was dropping fruit onto the bricked walkways, little plummy bombs that fermented in the sun and got the bees drunk. They buzzed in slow orbits, the worst sort of wedding guest, and terrified the groom.
Tessie led the wedding party to the bee-free apex of the garden, where the green-man fountain, forever choking on leaves, glugged and fussed and spit water at intervals. Father Tessie—she was a clergyman, after all—clambered onto the low fountain wall and turned toward the happy couple, wrestling her expression into solemnity as she leafed through the weighty tome she carried, just like the priest at Aunt Jenny’s wedding the week before.
