"Edghill,.Rosemary.-.Empty.Crown.Trilogy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Edghill Rosemary)

Reality, Ruth kept herself from saying. "New York."

("O."

Plainly this meant nothing to him. He looked around again-looking up,
as no native-or-acculturated New Yorker would think to, and his mouth
settled itself into harsh lines having little to do with the drubbing
he'd received. For a moment Ruth saw the world through his eyes: a
perfidious Albion of dark satanic mills, frighteningly alien.

"It seems a large place," he said. He tried to keep his voice even,
but the sound of it made Ruth revise her estimate of his age
downward.

Younger than she, and therefore less threatening.

"Eleven million plus people-as of the last census."

He looked quickly at her, as if hoping to catch her in a lie, and she
saw the quick cat-in-darkness flash of his eyes.

It was the eyes, perhaps, that decided her, with the backward wistful
logic of "If a mad ax-murderer pretending to be an elf has gone to all
the trouble of getting mirrored tinted contact lenses, why don't I let
him get away with it?"

That, and the fact that it was her birthday, and she was thirty, and
all her hopeful attempts to climb up to the imagined sanity and perks
of the adult world didn't seem to be worth the trouble. Like Oakland,
California; when you got there, there was no there there. Or so
Gertrude Stein had said.

"Look," said Ruth, with firm calmness. "Why don't you come back to my
apartment? You can at least get cleaned up. I'll make you a cup of
tea."

"I thank you, mortal girl." He looked pleased, but not surprisedand
more relieved than pleased, as if good manners would have kept him from
asking for what he desperately hoped for.

"Ruth," said Ruth steadily. And besides, she could always hit him with
one of Naomi's shinai.

" I am . . . Melior." He hesitated over the name, as if there had
been going to be more. "Melior," he repeated firmly. He shook his
head and winced.

"Come on." Ruth, belatedly awakening to the fact that where there had
been muggers there could still be muggers, glanced up and down the
hill. She took a few steps toward home and sanity, meaningfully.