"Patricia A. McKillip - Song for the Basilisk" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

Small clusters of courtiers, like elegant bouquets, drifted in the wake of the prince's departure. Finally the mirrors emptied even of
servants, who left them to reflect themselves, while the onyx-eyed basilisks turned one another into stone.
Later that evening, Giulia made her way alone through the streets of Berylon. She still wore her magister's black, beneath a flowing
hooded cloak. The stone streets, broad and lamplit in front of the music school, grew narrow and twisted as she neared the north wall
of the city. Tiers of closed doors and bright windows rose above shops and taverns, smithies, tanneries, market stalls covered for the
night. Each street had its own particular odor: she could have smelled her way by now to the tavern at the gate of the Tormalyne
Bridge.
Four bridges led across water into Berylon, each named after one of the ancient ruling Houses. To the west, the Iridia Bridge crossed
slow moat water in which the frogs would be singing. The plain beyond that was treeless, grassy, the long, dust-white road curving
through it flowed visible from the horizon. To the south, the Marcasia Bridge spanned broad deep water to the docks, where fishers
moored their boats and cleaned their catch, and the trade ships, sails colored according to House or province, took their wares
downriver. East, the Pellior Bridge rose over slower, shallower water, where goods and passengers were carried by flat bottomed
barges. The Tormalyne Bridge crossed the river at the beginning of its long curl around the city, where the rushing, silvery water had
sliced a path through shelves of rock, torn earth away and swallowed it, scoured the sides of the ravine into cliffs as sheer as a knife
blade. There were no docks on this side of the city, no river traffic. Travelers crossing the bridge passed into a forest that stretched
between Berylon and the northern provinces. The smells that roamed into the tavern beside the bridge were redolent of raw pelts and
tanneries.
She was stopped once by the night watch. The long instrument she carried had made a suspicious silhouette in their torchlight.
Bloodred basilisks on black tunics cast baleful stares at her; neither they nor the watch saw farther than her magister's robe, and they
let her pass.
On Tanner's Street, she opened a weather-beaten door beneath a faded sign: a griffin poised between broken halves of shell. The
Griffin's Egg, the tavern called itself. At that hour it had a scattered crowd of trappers, tanners, a few dusty travelers out of the
provinces, shopkeepers, tired women with barefoot children at their knees. Giulia eased through the crowd to the back corner of the
tavern, where Justin was fitting pieces of his bass pipe together, and Yacinthe unwrapped half a dozen small drums of various sizes
from their cases. Ionia, who played the flute, set a brass bowl on a table with a few small coins in it to inspire their audience. She
smiled at Giulia, showing a sapphire fang over one eyetooth. Jewels glinted through her hair, down her shoulder, from the studded
rein that she had trimmed from some horse's fine harness. Yacinthe, beating a drum, danced around Justin, the gold rings on her toes
tapping on the floorboards, blue feathers trying to fly in her dark hair. He tossed her a grin, his eyes on Giulia as he went to meet
her.
"I'm sorry I'm so late," Giulia said. "I had toтАФ"
He stopped her with a kiss. Then he said softly, "I know what you had to." She looked closely at him. His eyes were lowered, his
smile troubled. He was tall and fair-haired, with a sweet ruffian's face that was a misleading combination of innocence and danger.
His hatred of Pellior House was genuine and unremitting. She had met him in the Griffin's Egg one night when she searched for a
place outside the school to play. Like the instrument she brought there, he was an indulgence and a passion; she knew little of his life
outside of the tavern where they played, the tiny room above a shop where he lived. She laid a hand on his chest; he clasped it, but
still did not meet her eyes, busy swallowing his protests, she suspected.
"I play where I'm told," she reminded him simply. "You know that. It's my work. And I can't help loving the music. You know that,
too."
"I know." His fingers tightened on her hand. He raised her palm to his mouth, before he loosed her. He looked at her finally, his
brows crooked. "I worry about you in the Basilisk's house. He is unpredictable and ruthless. And you were alone on the streets.
There's a full moon tonight. They're coming in here to drink hard. The watch challenges anything that moves."
"They stopped me," she said. She slid off the mag-ister's black beneath her cloak, and then shrugged off her cloak. "They thought I
was armed."
"They killed a man near Pellior Bridge. They thought he was armed."
Giulia, on one knee, froze for half a breath, then continued unbuckling a shoe. "They don't kill magisters."
"Not yet."
She kicked off her shoes, then pulled the gold net out of her hair so that it fanned darkly over her bare shoulders, nearly reaching the
waist of the short, full skirts that skimmed her knees. Justin watched her, his smile surfacing again. Someone rattled a cup against a
table like a drumroll. Yacinthe imitated it. Justin pulled the gilded, beaded leather tie from the mouth of her instrument case. He
looped it around her neck carefully, tied it, while she watched the mottled light slide over his brown, muscular hands, and catch in