"Elgin,.Suzette.Haden.-.Ozark.-.01.-.Twelve.Fair.Kingdoms" - читать интересную книгу автора (Elgin Suzette Haden)

"Echo in here," said my mother, always useful.

"I'm sorry. Patience," I said. "I hadn't heard that there was
anything happening with streetsigns."

"All over the city," said my uncle Donald Patrick. "Don't
you pay any attention to anything?"

"Well? What's been happening to them? Floating in the air?
Whirling around? Exploding? What?"

Patience laughed softly, and the sun shone in through the
windows and made the spattering of freckles over the bridge of
her nose look like sprinkled brown sugar I was very fond of
Patience of dark.

"They read backwards," she said. "The sign that should say
'River Street' . . . it says'Teerts Revir'" She spelled it out
for me to make that deal; though the tongue does not bend too
badly to "Teerts Revir"

"Well, that." I said, "is downright silly."

Twelve Fair Kingdoms 7

"It's all silly," said Patience, "and that is why I was
laughing. It's all ridiculous."

Emmalyn, whose freckles just ran together and looked like
she hadn't bothered to wash, allowed as how she might very
well have been cut when her mirror shattered, and that was not
silly.

I looked at them all, and I waited. My uncles, pulling at their
short black beards the way men always do in meetings. My
mothel; trying to keep her mindЧsuch as it wasЧon the
discussion. My grandmothel; just biding her time till she could
get back to her embroidery. And the sistersЧEmmalyn
watching Patience, and Patience watching some inner source
of we-know-not-what that had served us very well in many a
crisis-

Not a one of them mentioned me Mules, though I gave them
two full minutes. And that meant one of three things: they had
not noticed the phenomenon, or they did not realize that it was
of any importance, or they had some reason for behaving as if
one of the first two were the case. I wondered, but I didn't have
time for finding out in any roundabout fashion.