"Alphabet Of Thorn" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

УMy name is Bourne,Ф she heard him say, Уof Seale. If I come to the library, will they let me see you?Ф

They looked like thorns, the strange letters: brambles curling and twisting around one another, linked by their sharp spurs. УYes,Ф she said to him. And then a word spoke out of the book, a deep, sudden sound she recognized, swift as an adder biting into her heart and clinging.

She looked at the young man, Bourne, dazed by the unexpected wealth: his gold eyes, his name, the book coming to life in her hands. УYes,Ф she said again, holding those eyes while she slipped the book into a deep pocket in her tunic, beneath her cloak. УCome to me.Ф

She had forgotten Oriel, the isolated rider stopped in the middle of the plain while it ran hither and yon beneath her. Riding back, she hardly saw the grass. Speaking, Oriel startled her, as though one of them had appeared out of nowhere.

УWell?Ф she asked. УDid you get it?Ф

Nepenthe scarcely thought; the answer came out of her as easily as truth. УOh. The mages didnТt send it after all. The student said that they had finally learned its secret language.Ф

Oriel turned her horse, matched NepentheТs distracted pace. УThen we came for nothing. Oh, well, we had a ride on the plain in the sun. Was it magic? The book?Ф

Nepenthe lilted her face to all the gold flowing down from the sky. УSomeoneТs secret recipes,Ф she answered vaguely.

УWe came all the way out here for a cookbook?Ф

УSo it seems.Ф

She urged her horse forward, racing for the cliff road, wanting to run herself all the way back to the labyrinth of the library, where she could hide and find a way through the brambles. She heard Oriel shouting behind her, but it was nothing, only fear, only beware of falling off the edge of the world, and Nepenthe had been balanced there before she had a name.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO

Bourne lay on earth, in silence, somewhere within the Floating School. On those days, which were as timeless and dark as nights, the Floating School seemed to bury itself underground. The place was silent as a grave. It smelled like one, Bourne supposed, if the dead could smell earth and stone and roots and tell about it. The students could and did. They woke on what felt like pebbles instead of pallets. Forewarned and given challenges the day before, Bourne was still surprised. Straw turned to stone, light to night, the daily genial pulse of life within the school with its scholarly murmurings and colorful mishaps was suddenly, utterly stilled. Illusion, he knew, all illusion. If he cried out, someone would answer instantly. If he battered at the blinding dark, tried to run from it, then what seemed a tiny cell of unmortared stone and earth would suddenly expand around him; a hand would draw him into light. So he had heard. So far he had been patient in the dark, more curious than afraid. So far, he had been able to concentrate on the challenge, the test they must pass through to find the day.

So far. He lay on his back, feeling a mass quite close to his face, as though he were in a box. If he sat up, nothing would stop him. But the illusion hung there, persistent and subtle: nothing there, but something. There. They had been instructed, that day to listen for the sound of the sea and to interpret what it said. Buried in earth and stone and dark halfway across the plain, he could not imagine such a thing was possible. Even standing on the edge of the cliff, staring down at the foaming, churning waters, Bourne had never heard the sea.

But the mages expected the impossible, and Bourne had learned that he could occasionally surprise himself.

He had surprised himself simply by staying at the school since autumn, after his brothers and cousins had made bets that he wouldnТt last the season. He would send the Floating School tumbling into the sea, they warned. He would turn himself into a donkey and forget how to change himself back. The mages would lock him out sooner or later. Sooner became later; autumn became winter. In early spring, the Lord of Seale rode to the door of the school and demanded to speak to his youngest nephew about a neighborТs daughter who was waning and weeping and writing poetry about BourneТs golden hair. Find him, the mages had suggested. If he chooses. If you can. Bourne, buried in dark on that silent day, could not be found. He had been given a word he had never encountered before to interpret. Hearing, from very far away, his uncleТs voice, he mingled the sound of it into his interpretation of the word and produced a very apt description of the fiery, puissant, bellowing beast the word named.

This time, he heard nothing but his own breathing, his heartbeat, his blood. Hard enough to concentrate on the sea, which he could neither see nor hear, let alone imagine the sound that might come from it. What he kept seeing was a face. For the first time, he grew impatient in the charged and magical silence. He wanted to get up, walk until he found a door, then walk out of the wood toward the cliff road until he saw again the rider coming toward him, her long hair shining and crisp as a blackbirdТs feathers, her shoulders as straight as any hunterТs, her skin like sun-drenched earth.

His breath broke explosively out of him. He held it a moment, then lay quietly, drawing and loosing air, drawing and loosing slowly in long, measured cadences, until the dark was filled with the soft rhythm of it and he recognized, his eyes widening suddenly and his breath heaving and breaking again, the ceaseless patterns of the tide.

He smiled in the dark, charmed. So the sea breathed like some great, restless, dreaming animal. So it spoke. But what did it say? An ancient and untranslatable language, like the voices of trees, the voice of wind. It was enough that he had heard it; the mages could expect no more.

But it was still dark; he had nothing else to do but listen. Blood in his ears sang like water; his breath weltered like spume. He heard her voice again: Nepenthe. The orphan N, reared by librarians. Her voice, low and slightly husky, dredging words out of the strange silence that had encircled them both like a spell. A little world. The air that they both breathed. He heard his breath again at the memory of her eyes, that moment when they changed. Chestnut, then leaf. Opaque, and then luminous as she turned toward the sea.

Come to the library.

He had been to the palace with his uncle, Ermin of Seale, Lord in the realm of Raine and ruler of the Second Crown. Lord over three sons of his own, as well as three of his dead brotherТs, all of whom were either safely and appropriately married, or wealthily betrothed. He had different plans for Bourne, whom he sent to the Floating School. Not, Bourne knew, for any great gifts he possessed; his uncle had no illusions about that. What he had were ambitions, which the young and inexperienced queen, ascending to her perilous place in the world, had sharpened immeasurably. A mageТs powers, he made Bourne see clearly, would be a great asset to the family. The more power Bourne acquired from the Floating School, the better. His uncle would hardly approve of an orphaned transcriptor distracting him from his studies. The librariansТ foundlings came from everywhere, like blown leaves, and no telling from what tree she might have fallen. Let alone what far-flung language she had been born to speak.

Where had she come from? he wondered, shifting a little to rearrange a pebble under his shoulder blade. She with those long bones, those eyes?