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

the tangled cloud of white-gold hair. He pulled the instrument out of its case and handed it to her.
"Magister," he said gravely. "Don't break the windows with it."
He picked up his pipe again and blew a deep note. She plucked the string, listening until she heard its solitary voice clearly beneath
laughter and argument, the roll of dice and clank of pewter on wood. She tuned it to a note out of the north.

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Patri...McKillip%20-%20Song%20for%20the%20Basilisk.html (9 of 87) [10/31/2004 11:44:44 PM]
McKillip, Patricia A. - Song for the Basilisk

They began to play.




Chapter Three

┬л^┬╗

Sirina waited until hollis was fourteen before she left them. Rook had sensed her going long before. Like tide turning, drawn by the
moon, by the mysteries of the deep, she had ebbed, little by little, away from him, so that he stood once again on a lonely shore,
watching the distance widen between them. She asked him, in many ways, to come with her, before she got tired of asking.
"Luly is growing tiny," she had said to him. "There's not enough room. For all of us."
He thought of the stone chambers, tiered like a beehive, the walls so thick not even the sound of the picochet traveled between them.
They might have been living there with only the wind and the sea shouting poetry at them in forgotten languages. "There's room," he
had answered absently.
"I thought I would take Hollis home," she said another time. He had stared at her, oddly perplexed by the word, as if what he had
thought it meant was wildly inaccurate.
"He is home. Luly is his home."
"I mean to see my father. For a while."
"How long is a while?"
"Just a while. Just a few months. So he can see what it is to be a court bard. In a house planted on earth instead of stone. With people
coming and going. So that, when he's older, he can make choices."
"I made choices without knowing."
"I know," she said softly, her brows crooked at something he could not see. She had grown, he thought, more beautiful through the
years: tall and supple, with a line beside her mouth left there by laughter, by pain, by thoughts she did not reveal.
"Come with us," she begged.
"I can't leave my students."
"It's this rock you can't leave," she said, turning abruptly, gazing out at spindrift as pale as her hair. He thought only that she was
probably right.
When she finally made it clear to him that she was leaving, he felt, stunned, that the rock was the only safe and changeless thing he
knew.
"I can't stay," she said. "I love you. But I never meant to stay here. I want the world back."
"I'll come," he said, without moving. She separated her skirts from his tunics, folded them neatly on the bed. "I'll come," he said
again. "When you find a place. Send word to meтАФ"
She made an exasperated noise. "You'll come when the quarter moon falls out of the sky. You'll come when you can row it to land
like a boat."
"HollisтАФ"
"I'll let him choose."
He stared at her, breathless at the thought. "How can he? He's a child! How can you ask himтАФ"
Her face twisted; tears appeared seemingly at random. beneath her eyes, on her cheekbone, beside her mouth. "It's all I can do!" she
cried. "It's the best I can do. I only stayed for you and Hollis. I am a bard of Luly. I must find my place. As you never did. Ever.