"George R. R. Martin - Ice Dragon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

excitedly when his wing passed overhead, thirty great dragons in proud
formation against the summer sky. Adara watched with her small hands by her
sides.
There were other visits in other summers, but Hal never made her smile,
no matter what he brought her.
Adara's smiles were a secret store, and she spent of them only in
winter. She could hardly wait for her birthday to come, and with it the cold.
For in winter she was a special child.
She had known it since she was very little, playing with the others in
the snow. The cold had never bothered her the way it did Geoff and Teri and
their friends. Often Adara stayed outside alone for hours after the others had
fled in search of warmth, or run off to Old Laura's to eat the hot vegetable
soup she liked to make for the children. Adara would find a secret place in
the far corner of the fields, a different place each winter, and there she
would build a tall white castle, patting the snow in place with small bare
hands, shaping it into towers and battlements like those Hal often talked
about on the king's castle in the city. She would snap icicles off from the
lower branches of trees, and use them for spires and spikes and guardposts,
ranging them all about her castle. And often in the dead of winter would come
a brief thaw and a sudden freeze, and overnight her snow castle would turn to
ice, as hard and strong as she imagined real castles to be. All through the
winters she would build on her castle, and no one ever knew. But always the
spring would come, and a thaw not followed by a freeze; then all the ramparts
and walls would melt away, and Adara would begin to count the days until her
birthday came again.
Her winter castles were seldom empty. At the first frost each year, the
ice lizards would come wriggling out of their burrows, and the fields would be
overrun with the tiny blue creatures, darting this way and that, hardly
seeming to touch the snow as they skimmed across it. All the children played
with the ice lizards. But the others were clumsy and cruel, and they would
snap the fragile little animals in two, breaking them between their fingers as
they might break an icicle hanging from a roof. Even Geoff, who was too kind
ever to do something like that, sometimes grew curious, and held the lizards
too long in his efforts to examine them, and the heat of his hands would make
them melt and burn and finally die.
Adara's hands were cool and gentle, and she could hold the lizards as
long as she liked without harming them, which always made Geoff pout and ask
angry questions. Sometimes she would lie in the cold, damp snow and let the
lizards crawl all over her, delighting in the light touch of their feet as
they skittered across her face. Sometimes she would wear ice lizards hidden in
her hair as she went about her chores, though she took care never to take them
inside where the heat of the fires would kill them. Always she would gather up
scraps after the family ate, and bring them to the secret place where her
castle was a-building, and there she would scatter them. So the castles she
erected were full of kings and courtiers every winter; small furry creatures
that snuck out from the woods, winter birds with pale white plumage, and
hundreds and hundreds of squirming, struggling ice lizards, cold and quick and
fat. Adara liked the ice lizards better than any of the pets the family had
kept over the years.
But it was the ice dragon that she loved.