"Patricia A. McKillip - The Snow Queen" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKillip Patricia A)

The Snow Queen


Neva entered late. She wore white satin that clung to her body like
white clings to the calla lily. White peacock feathers sparkling with
faux diamonds trailed down her long ivory hair. Her eyes were
black as the night sky between the winter constellations. They swept
the room, picked out a face here: Gerda'sтАФHow sweet, Neva
thought, to have kept that expression, like one's first kiss treasured
in tissue paperтАФand there: Kay's. Her eyes were wide, very still.
The young man with her said something witty. She did not hear. He
tried again, his eyes growing anxious. She watched Kay tell another
story; the women around himтАФdoves, warblers, a couple of
trumpeting swansтАФlaughed again. He laughed with them, reluctant
but irresistibly amused by himself. He lifted champagne to his lips;
light leaped from the cut crystal. His pale hair shone like the silk of
Neva's dress; his lips were shaped cleanly as the swan's wing. She
waited, perfectly still. Lowering his glass, the amused smile tugging
again at his lips, he saw her standing in the archway across the room.
To his eye she was alone; the importunate young lapdog beside her
did not exist. So his look told her, as she drew at it with the

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The Snow Queen


immense and immeasurable pull of a wayward planet wandering too
close to someone's cold, bright, inconstant moon. The instant he
would have moved, she did, crossing the room to join him before
his brilliant, fluttering circle could scatter. Like him, she preferred
an audience. She waited in her outer orbit, composed, mysterious,
while he told another story. This one had a woman in itтАФGerdaтАФ
and something about angels or fish.
"And then," he said, "we had an argument about the first word in the
world."
"Coffee," guessed one woman, and he smiled appreciatively.
"No," suggested another.
"It was for a crossword puzzle. The first word you learn to
conjugate in Latin."
"But we always speak French in bed," a woman murmured. "My
husband and I."
Kay's eyes slid to Neva. Her expression remained changeless; she
offered no word. He said lightly, "No, no, ma chere, one conjugates
a verb; one has conjugal relations with one's spouse. Or not, as the
case may be."
"Do people still?" someone wondered. "How boring."
"To conjugate," Neva said suddenly in her dark, languid voice,
"means to inflect a verb in an orderly fashion through all its tenses.
As in: amo, amas, amat. I love, you loveтАФ"
"But that's it!" Kay cried. "The answer to the puzzle. How could I