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

also a gift." She tugged the pearls at her throat; they scattered like
luminous, tiny moons around her in the snow. "Oh, sorry."
"What are you doing?" Briony breathed. The woman, wearing
nothing more than a short and rather silly dress, turned to the icy
darkness beyond the window-light. She had actually taken a step
into it when Briony caught her arm. She was cold as an iron statue
in winter. "Stop!" Briony hauled her coat out of the snow. "Put this
back on. You'll freeze!"
"I don't care. Why should you?"
"Nobody is worth freezing for."
"Kay is."
"Is he?" She flung the coat over Gerda's shoulders, pulled it closed.
"God, woman, what Neanderthal age are you from?"
"I love him."
"So?"
"He doesn't love me."
"So?"
"If he doesn't love me, I don't want to live."
Briony stared at her, speechless, having learned from various
friends in extremis that there was no arguing with such crazed and
muddled thinking. Look, she might have said, whirling the woman
around to shock her. See that snowdrift beside the wall? Earlier
tonight that was an old woman who could have used your coat. Or:
Men have notoriously bad taste, why should you let one decide
whether you live or die? Piss on him and go find someone else. Or:


file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Deskto.../Patricia%20McKillip%20-%20The%20Snow%20Queen.html (12 of 31)3/12/2004 11:31:15 PM
The Snow Queen


Love is an obsolete emotion, ranking in usefulness somewhere
between earwigs and toe mold.
She lied instead. She said, "I felt like that once."
She caught a flicker of life in the still, remote eyes. "Did you? Did
you want to die?"
"Why don't we go for hot chocolate and I'll tell you about it?"
They sat at the counter of an all-night diner, sipping hot chocolate
liberally laced with brandy from Briony's flask. Briony had short,
dark, curly hair and sparkling sapphire eyes. She wore lace
stockings under several skirts, an antique vest of peacock feathers
over a shirt of simulated snakeskin, thigh-high boots, and a dark,
hooded cape with many hidden pockets. The waitress behind the
counter watched her with a sardonic eye and snapped her gum as
she poured Briony's chocolate. Drawn to Gerda's beauty and tragic
pallor, she kept refilling Gerda's cup. So did Briony. Briony,
improvising wildly, invented a rich, beautiful, upper-class young
man whose rejection of her plunged her into despair.
"He loved me," she said, "for the longest night the world has ever