"Mercedes Lackey - Wet Wings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

Wet Wings

Katherine watched avidly, chin cradled in her old, arthritic hands, as the
chrysalis heaved, and writhed, and finally split up the back. The crinkled,
sodden wings of the butterfly emerged first, followed by the bloated body. She
breathed a sigh of wonder, as she always did, and the butterfly tried to flap
its useless wings in alarm as it caught her movement.

"Silly thing," she chided it affectionately. "You know you can't fly with wet
wings!" Then she exerted a little of her magic; just a little, brushing the
butterfly with a spark of calm that jumped from her trembling index finger to
its quivering antenna.

The butterfly, soothed, went back to its real job, pumping the fluid from its
body into the veins of its wings, unfurling them into their full glory. It was
not a particularly rare butterfly, certainly not an endangered one; nothing
but a common Buckeye, a butterfly so ordinary that no one even commented on
seeing them when she was a child. But Katherine had always found the markings
exquisite, and she had used this species and the Sulfurs more often than any
other to carry her magic.

Magic. That was a word hard to find written anymore. No one approved of magic
these days. Strange that in a country that gave the Church of Gaia equal
rights with the Catholic Church, that no one believed in magic.

But magic was not "correct." It was not given equally to all, nor could it be
given equally to all. And that which could not be made equal, must be
destroyed. . . .

"We always knew that there would be repression and a burning time again," she
told the butterfly, as its wings unfolded a little more. "But we never thought
that the ones behind the repression would come from our own ranks."

Perhaps she should have realized it would happen. So many people had come to
her over the years, drawn by the magic in her books, demanding to be taught.
Some had the talent and the will; most had only delusions. How they had cursed
her when she told them the truth! They had wanted to be like the heroes and
heroines of her stories; special, powerful.

She remembered them all; the boy she had told, regretfully, that his
"telepathy" was only observation and the ability to read body-language. The
girl whose "psychic attacks" had been caused by potassium imbalances. The
would-be "bardic mage" who had nothing other than a facility to delude
himself. And the many who could not tell a tale, because they would not let
themselves see the tales all around them. They were neither powerful nor
special, at least not in terms either of the power of magic, nor the magic of
storytelling. More often than not, they would go to someone else, demanding to
be taught, unwilling to hear the truth.

Eventually, they found someone; in one of the many movements that sprouted on