"Robin McKinley - Spindle's End" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKinley Robin)

the ones people knew about were the ones who lived in the towns
and villages with other people and visibly did magic. There were
known to be fairies who lived in the woods and the desert places
(and possibly even in the waters), but they were rarely seen, and it
was only assumed that they were fewer than the known ones.
There were also, of course, wicked fairies, but there weren't many
of them, and they tended to keep a low profile, because they knew
they were outnumbered-unless someone angered them, and people
tried very, very hard not to anger them. It was the malice of the wicked
fairies that gave the good ones a lot of their most remunerative work
putting things back to rights, but generally speaking, things could be
put back to rights. People were diligently cautious about bad fairies,
but they didn't worry about them too much; less than they worried
about the weather, for example, a drought that would make crops fail,
or a hard winter that would bring wolves into the towns. (It was
actually easier if droughts or hard winters were caused by a bad fairy,
because then what you did was very straightforward: you hired a good
fairy to fix it. The capriciousness of real weather was beyond everybody,
even the united efforts of the Academy, who periodically tried.)
"I think," said the king slowly, "I think that's not quite enough."
The queen sighed. "I was afraid you'd say that." There had been
relatively little magic in her father's country and she had never quite
adjusted to the omnipresence of magic, and of magical practitioners.
Magic had its uses, but it made her nervous. Sigil she loved dearly,
and she was at least half-friends with several of the other fairies
strategically employed in the royal household; the magicians she
mostly found tiresome, and was rather relieved than otherwise that
none of them were at present speaking to her because they blamed
her for the secrecy of her pregnancy.
There was a pause. "What if," said the queen at last, "what if we
invited a few fairies to be godmothers to our daughter? We could
ask twenty-one of them-one each for her twenty-one names, and
one each for the twenty-one years of her minority. Twenty-one isn't
very many. There will be eighty-two magicians. And it will make the
fairies seem, you know, wanted and welcome. We can ask Sigil
whom to invite."
"Fairy godmothers?" said the king dubiously. "We'll have a time
getting that past the court council-and the bishop."
Sigil had been worrying about the fairies, too, and thought that
inviting one-and-twenty fairies to be godmothers would be an excellent
idea, if they could hedge it round first with enough precautions.
"No gifts," said the king. "Too controversial."
"Oh, godmothers must give gifts!" said the queen. "It would be
terribly rude to tell them they mustn't give their godchild anything!"
"The queen's right," said Sigil, "but we can tell them they must
be token gifts only, little things to amuse a baby or flatter a baby's parents,
nothing-nothing-difficult." What she meant, the king and
queen both knew, was nothing that would make the princess unduly
visible on the ethereal planes. That sort of thing was the province of
heroes, who were old enough to choose it and strong-or stupid enough