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

Summary The infant princess Briar Rose is cursed on her name day by Pernicia, an evil
fairy, and then whisked away by a young fairy to be raised in a remote part of a magical
country, unaware of her real identity and hidden from Pernicia's vengeful powers
[1 Fairy tales ] I Title PZ8 M1793 Sp2000 [Fie]-dc21 99-041818
ISBN 0-399-23466-7
13579 10 8642
First Impression
To the Lodge, my Woodwold,
and to the other Dickinsons who love it too

Part One

1
The magic in that country was so thick and tenacious that it settled
over the land like chalk-dust and over floors and shelves like slightly
sticky plaster-dust. (Housecleaners in that country earned unusually
good wages.) If you lived in that country, you had to de-scale your
kettle of its encrustation of magic at least once a week, because if
you didn't, you might find yourself pouring hissing snakes or pond
slime into your teapot instead of water. (It didn't have to be anything
scary or unpleasant, like snakes or slime, especially in a cheerful
household-magic tended to reflect the atmosphere of the place in
which it found itself-but if you want a cup of tea, a cup of lavender and-gold
pansies or ivory thimbles is unsatisfactory. And while the
pansies-put dry in a vase-would probably last a day, looking like
ordinary pansies, before they went greyish-dun and collapsed into
magic dust, something like an ivory thimble would begin to smudge
and crumble as soon as you picked it up.)
The best way to do it was to have a fairy as a member of your
household, because she (it was usually a she) could lay a finger on the
kettle just as it came to a boil (absentminded fairies could often be
recognised by a pad of scar-tissue on the finger they favoured for
kettle-cleaning) and murmur a few counter-magical words. There
would be a tiny inaudible thock, like a seed-pod bursting, and the
water would stay water for another week or (maybe) ten days.
De-magicking a kettle was much too little and fussy and frequent
a job for any professional fairy to be willing to be hired to do it, so if
you weren't related to one you had to dig up a root of the dja vine,
and dry it, and grate it, producing a white powder rather like plaster
dust or magic, and add a pinch of that to your kettle once a week.
More often than that would give everyone in the household cramp.
You could tell the households that didn't have a fairy by the dja vines
growing over them. Possibly because they were always having their
roots disturbed, djas developed a reputation for being tricky to grow,
and prone to sudden collapse; fortunately they rerooted easily from
cuttings. "She'd give me her last dja root" was a common saying
about a good friend.
People either loved that country and couldn't imagine living anywhere
else, or hated it, left it as soon as they could, and never came
back. If you loved it, you loved coming over the last hill before your