"Linville, Susan Urbanek - Born in the Seventh Year" - читать интересную книгу автора (Linville Susan Urbanek)

Myrica leaned back, careful not to hold the baby too close. She studied the moon and stars. Ursa, the bear, pointed to the north, and Draco protected the skies. As she watched, Aurora threw her blood-red curtain across the darkness.

Myrica stood up. Still looking at the heavens, she turned in a circle.

"That's it! How stupid could I have been? The sky, that's where the signs are. The Wikkens didn't travel on the ground, they flew along the treetops on bundles of ragwort stems."

Myrica tied the baby sling to the lower branches of a white pine and climbed to its top. She brushed the soft needles against her cheek. The odor of nightshade filled the air. Myrica broke a needle from the tree and rubbed it on her forehead, then turned until she could see the moonlight bending in the air, as if being sucked into a tunnel. This was the fairy passing she was looking for.

The path took them northeast toward a small human village. They crossed cultivated land, ready for spring planting.

Cold iron had cut the brown earth. The smell of the metal made her teeth ache. When they reached the town, Myrica slipped along the streets, hiding in the shadows. She was careful not to touch the iron gates and crosses that were common on human dwellings, but her head throbbed from their nearness. Myrica sniffed, hoping to catch the scent of her child, but the sour stench of humans overwhelmed everything. Even the herb-tinged smell of the Wikken was lost. She rounded a corner and was overcome by the scent of cooked beef. "Flesh-eaters!" She vomited against the side of a building. The baby stretched against his wrap and cried softly. "Hush." Myrica rocked the baby and fumbled in her pocket. After a few minutes, she retrieved a forked stick carved with runic inscriptions. She held the stick in both hands and closed her eyes. "Live oak of the forest, show me my child." The stick pulled against Myrica's hand, leading her down a dark alley. She walked quietly past a sleeping man with a dog, and crossed the deserted town square. A narrow road lined with small houses stretched northward. Myrica followed it until she reached a stone house with a lamp burning in the window. "This is it." She removed her traveling pack and put the baby on the ground. Pressing a clove of garlic against the side of her mouth, Myrica crept to the door of the stone house. The pungent herb burned her cheek. She touched the cold wall with her left hand. A female was whispering inside. She was praying. "Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee ..." The human baby whimpered from his cold resting place. His cry roared in Myrica's sensitized ears. "Quiet!" she snapped. "I need to hear if Cedrus is inside."

"Lord, forgive me," said the female, "I didn't know what to do." The Mam cried out again. Myrica turned from the building and picked up the child. "If you don't shut up, I'm ..." Myrica turned. The crying was coming from the darkness, on the hillock behind the house. "Cedrus?" Myrica ran, the baby still in her arms. She crashed through the rose garden in back of the house. The thorns ripped at her legs and arms, stinging like pixie arrows.

"Cedrus!" Myrica struggled against the blackberry canes, not taking the time to walk "with the briars" the way her grandfather had taught her. A dog barked in the distance. Myrica sucked a scratch on the back of her hand and pushed through the new growth until she reached a rocky ledge at the crest of the hill.

"Cedrus!" she cried, gasping for air. She stumbled around on the boulders, searching the crevices for a sign of her child. The only thing she found was fresh rat dung. She cried out to the gods for help.

The moon rose above the trees and cast its light against the hillside.

"My son."

Myrica spotted a small basket tucked into a green thicket. An embroidered blanket covered the still form beneath. "What have they done to you?"

Salty tears burned her eyes. She laid the human child on the grass. Gently she picked up and caressed her withered baby, running her fingers through his soft brown hair. His small hands were blue and cold.

"How could they leave you here like this?"

Cedrus opened his mouth, but there was no cry. She pushed her breast against his dried lips. He would not eat. She smelled death; that same musky sweet odor she'd smelled in her grandmother's hut, just before she had died.

"Please eat, Cedrus." A tear dripped from her cheek to his. Cedrus closed his dark-brown eyes.

"No! Don't take him from me now! No! Wake up!" She tried to blow life back into his lungs.

"You're the grandson of Tanoak, wizard of the wood." She grabbed some sassafras leaves and rubbed them on his forehead, then held him up toward the east.

A cold wind blew.

Myrica looked at the small limp form in her arms. She fell to her knees, howling a death scream in the language of the wolf.

The human baby cried again.

"You shut up! You're never going home again. I'll leave you here for the wild dogs and the rats, the way they left Cedrus. A curse. I will put a curse on you and your house." Myrica wrapped her dead son next to her breast and climbed down the hillside. She broke a branch from a hemlock and laid it at the back door of the stone house. "They will pay for this." She cleared the ground and cut a pentagram in the soil with a forked oak stick. "Gods of the forest and sky. Gods of the water and earth. I, Myrica, daughter of..." The cries of the human baby echoed in the distance. "I, Myrica, daughter of Fay and all that is of the forest, call you."

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee," the female prayed inside. "Bring my revenge against this house. Bring death to ..."

"Our father who art in heaven," the woman prayed. Myrica looked down. She touched her fingers to her dead son's head-What was she doing? Killing another child in revenge? Cursing a mother who lost a child?"

"They left you to die," she whispered. "Those flesh-eating beasts!" The female inside was crying. "Bring my revenge..." Suddenly Myrica stopped. Was Rubra right? Was she being selfish? Refusing to think of her son's welfare when she kept the Fay-erie from him, had she caused her own son's death? She brushed the pentagram from the dirt and looked up at the wooden door of the house. Tears blurred her vision as she realized what she must do. Myrica carefully wrapped her scarf over her ears and hair to disguise her appearance. She knocked lightly on the door. "Go away. I want no beggars here in the middle of the night."