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

What does the sea say?

He breathed an answer; the word washed over him, through him, fanning out, separating into pale, delicate fingers of spume. He stared back at the changeless dark, trying to see through illusion into light.


УNepenthe,Ф the mage Felan repeated curiously when Bourne explained what the sea had said to him. There was a muffled snicker amid the unwashed, hungry students clustered together at the end of the silent day. Some had heard poetry; one or two had heard spells, which they attempted then and there, but which came to nothing in the light of day. They lacked an element, Felan suggested. Perhaps the true sea, cold, dangerous, and indifferent, might have fed the magic, rather than their imaginary seas. Others had heard nothing, not even their own breathing.

УYou told us to listen for the sea,Ф one said bewilderedly. УWhy should I listen to myself?Ф

УEverything connects,Ф Felan said mildly. He smiled at the fretting student. УDonТt worry. There will be other days.Ф He was a huge, gentle man, bald as a stone, with astonishing power. He could hold the Floating School in the air by himself, if the students lost faith in their powers and threatened to drop it. УYou hold it with your heart,Ф he would tell them, Уnot with your hands. It has nothing to do with strength.Ф

Felan taught the beginning students and ran the school. He was responsible only to the ruler of the Twelve Crowns and to the aging mage Vevay, who had headed the school for a century or so, by some accounts. Others said she had founded it, she was that old. She lived in the palace now and rarely visited the school. Bourne had never seen her, only the imaginary Vevay, made timeless and immortal by legend, whose beauty and powers would never change.

УA transcriptor,Ф he told Felan when questioned further. УShe gave me permission to visit her.Ф

УThen you had better do so,Ф Felan said, without a smile hidden anywhere on his broad, calm face. УIf that is what the sea said.Ф

So Bourne did that on his next free day, walking through the wood to the plain. The trees were quiet that day, and not quite so thickly tangled as they had been the day he had passed through them on his way to the queenТs coronation ceremony. Then he kept tripping; he heard rustlings in the brush; things dropped on his head, including some yellowish slime from an invisible bird. It seemed the woodТs opinion of his intentions toward the new queen. He ignored it. Brilliant he was not, but anyone with half a brain could learn how to blow apart a wall with a thought. And like his uncle, Bourne did not see why the young queen should possess so many Crowns. By all accounts she was hardly capable of ruling one.

The wood seemed to approve his intention to see Nepenthe. The thought of her in his head seemed to open a path through the trees, as though the wood guided him. The palace was more complex: he spent an hour or two passed from guard to guard through a system of gates and stairs and hallways that challenged his memory. When he finally passed through the palace to the library, he wandered a long time through the maze of stones and manuscripts, listening within its silence, its thick ancient shadows and sudden spills of torch fire, for the word from the sea.

He picked up the thread of her finally. Someone had glimpsed her this way. She might have gone that way. She was usually to be found here. Or if not here, then probably there. So he was passed from librarian to scribe, deeper and deeper into stone. When he came upon her finally, it was not where he had been told to expect her. He had simply gotten lost. He turned a corner into a quiet corridor and saw a transcriptor alone at a desk in an alcove of books, poring over another, open on the desk.

УPlease,Ф he said, and there they were, those eyes, vague with words still clinging to them from the page, and so dark now they seemed to have shifted from brown to black. Then she recognized him. She smiled, and the breath he hadnТt realized he was holding ran out of him swiftly. A flow of color like firelight ran beneath her burnished skin. She started to close the book she studied, then didnТt.

She said instead, a little breathlessly, УYou see, the librarians gave it to me to translate. IТm good with odd alphabets. Notches on twigs, such thingsЕФ

He said, УOh,Ф without comprehending. Then he glanced at the book beneath her hand, saw the tangles of thorn like winter-stripped canes winding across the page. He said, УOh,Ф again indifferently, then remembered that it might be magic.

УHow did you find me?Ф

УOnly by accident,Ф he answered wryly. УI have no idea where I am, or how I will ever get out of here.Ф He paused. УI wanted Ч I had to Ч Ф

УYes,Ф she said softly and studied him, her eyes filling with him now, instead of thorns. УBourne. Bourne who? What? From where?Ф

УOdd questions,Ф he commented, Уcoming from an orphan.Ф

УYou might have fallen out of the sky, for all I know.Ф She gestured. УThere will be a stool at the next desk down the hall. Sit with me. No one comes down this far during the day, except the occasional visiting scholar searching for something obscure. So we can talk.Ф

УAm I interrupting work?Ф

She looked down at it. УNo. I am. I should be translating something else entirely. But I was too curious about this.Ф

He stepped down the hall, brought a stool back, and sat beside the desk, half of himself still in the hallway, for the alcove was tiny. The vast stone ceiling, high above the books and barely illuminated by the torches, had been formed by some unimaginable burrowing, centuries before, into the solid heart of the cliff. He was under the earth again, he thought, and still listening for magic.

УBourne of Seale,Ф he answered her. УMy father is the younger brother of the Lord of Seale, in the Second Crown. He died several years ago. My uncle Ermin sent me to the magesТ school.Ф

She raised a brow, tapping lightly and idly on the pages with a quill. Her eyes grew opaque for a moment; he waited, while she laid his name on her scales and weighed it against all kinds of things. Trouble, for one, he guessed. Heartache, he hoped, for that was on his scale as well. Then she stopped weighing, yielded to whatever it was that outweighed everything.

УYou are right,Ф she said abruptly. УI donТt want to know. My heart saw you before you had a name. That never happened to me before.Ф