"Nancy Kress - Summer Wind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

"It was not supposed to happen this way, Corwin."
He didn't answer, of course. She reached out one finger and patted the
droplet from his sleeping lips. She put the finger in her own mouth and
sucked it.
"How many years was I asleep? How many?"
His chest rose and fell gently, regularly.
She wished she could remember the color of his eyes.
****
A few years later, the first prince came. Or maybe it wasn't even the first.
Briar Rose was climbing the steps from the cool, dark chambers under the
castle, her spread skirt full of wheat and apples and cheese as fresh as the
day they were stored. She passed the open windows of the Long Gallery and
heard a tremendous commotion.
Finally! At last!
She dropped her skirts; wheat and apples rolled everywhere. Rose
rushed through the Gallery and up the steps to her bedchamber in the highest
tower. From her stone window she could just glimpse him beyond the castle
wall, the moat, the circle of grass between moat and Hedge. He sat astride a
white stallion on the far side of the Hedge, hacking with a long silver sword.
Sunlight glinted on his blond hair.
She put her hand to her mouth. The slim white fingers trembled.
The prince was shouting, but wind carried his words away from her. Did
that mean the wind would carry hers toward him? She waved her arms and
shouted.
"Here! Oh, brave prince, here I am! Briar Rose, princess of all the
realm! Fight on, oh good prince!"
He didn't look up. With a tremendous blow, he hacked a limb from the
black Hedge, so thick and interwoven it looked like metal, not plant. The
branch shuddered and fell. On the backswing, the sword struck smaller
branches to the prince's right. They whipped aside and then snapped back, and
a thorn-studded twig slapped the prince across the eyes and blinded him. He
screamed and dropped his sword. The sharp blade caught the stallion in the
right leg. It shied in pain. The blinded prince fell off, directly into the
Hedge, and was impaled on thorns as long as a man's hand and hard as iron.
Rose screamed. She rushed down the tower steps, not seeing them, not
seeing anything. Over the drawbridge, across the grass. At the Hedge she was
forced to stop by the terrible thorns, as thick and sharp on this side as on
the other. She couldn't see the prince, but she could hear him. He went on
screaming for what seemed an eternity, although of course it wasn't.
Then he stopped.
She sank onto the green grass, sweet with unchanging summer, and buried
her face in her apple-smelling skirts. Somewhere, faintly on the wind, she
heard a sound like old women weeping.
****
After that, she avoided all the east-facing windows. It was years before she
convinced herself that the prince's body was, must be, gone from the far side
of the Hedge. Even though the carrion birds did not stay for nearly that
long.
Somewhere around the thirteenth year of unchanging summer, the second
prince came. Rose almost didn't hear him. For months, she had rarely left