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

tidings about the princess' name-day, was not swift horses but six legged
flat-footed ponies that could see in thick mist and the green
darkness of trees. He had given up riding, after his fancy thoroughbred
had put its foot in a gap of root and stumbled, for the umptymillionth
time, and he was now leading it, half an eye anxiously
upon it, for he thought it was going a bit lame. He sneezed. Also
needed were human beings impervious to cold and damp. The Gig
was a damp sort of place, and most of its village names reflected this:
Foggy Bottom, Smoke River, Dewglass, Rainhill, Mistweir. Moonshadow
didn't sound very promising either, although at least it didn't
utterly guarantee wet; and the last village of the Gig, right out next
to the wild lands where no one went, was called Treelight. He had
thought this was a very funny name when he was setting out from the
royal city. It was less funny now, with the leaves overhead dripping
down his neck, and he not yet arrived at the first village of this soggy
province. He sneezed again.
To think that Lord Prendergast preferred to live out here and
leave his seat at court empty from year's end to year's end! There
must be some truth in the stories about that family, and the house
they lived in, Woodwold, a vast mysterious place, a thousand years
old or more, full of tales and echoes of tales, and with some uncanny
connection with the people that lived in it. But it was still a
grand and beautiful house-grand enough for a highway to have
been built to get to it. Except it hadn't been.
The herald blinked, distracted. The sun had suddenly cut through
the leaf cover and a gold-green shaft of light fell across his path. He
looked at the sunbeam, scowling; there was no reason, this far off the
highway and with soggy leaf-mould the chief road surface, for there
to be so much dust to dance in a sunbeam. The thick dust and moist
air would conspire to leave ineradicable chalky smudges on his
livery. He sighed again. Maybe Foggy Bottom-which should be the
first village he came to-would have a blacksmith who could look at
his horse's foot.
Foggy Bottom had heard of the princess' birth as quickly as the
rest of the country; one of the village fairies had a particular friend
who was a robin whose wife's cousin's sister-in-law was closely related
to a family of robins that lived in a bush below the queen's bedroom
window, and had heard the princess' first startled cry. Foggy
Bottom was expecting something like the herald (and was accustomed
to travellers who had never been to the Gig before, by the
time they reached Foggy Bottom, looking cross and rather the worse
for wear), but were not at all expecting his announcement.
They had turned out eagerly to hear him-this was one of those
villages where the herald stood at the public watering-trough to make
his proclamation-but they were only expecting some cushiony,
royal adjectives to ornament the known fact of the young princess'
birth. They were so startled by the invitation to the name-day they
forgot to relish her name.
"From every village?" said Cairngorm, who ran the pub. There
was a square, although it was not square, at the centre of the village,