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

village one day in early autumn and hearing the corn-field singing
madrigals, and that day became a story you told your grandchildren,
the way in other countries other grandparents told the story of the
day they won the betting pool at the pub, or their applecake won
first place at the local fete. If you lived there, you learned what you
had to do, like putting a pinch of dried dja vine in your kettle once a
week, like asking your loaf of bread to remain a loaf of bread before
you struck it with a knife. (The people of this country had developed
a reputation among outsiders for being unusually pious, because
of the number of things they appeared to mutter a blessing over
before they did them; but in most cases this was merely the asking of
things it was safer to ask to remain nonmagical first, while work or
play or food preparation or whatever was being got on with. Nobody
had ever heard of a loaf of bread turning into a flock of starlings for
anyone they knew, but the nursery tale was well known, and in that
country it didn't pay to take chances. The muttered words were
usually only some phrase such as "Bread, stay bread" or, in upperclass
households, "Bread, please oblige me," which was a less wise
form, since an especially impish gust of magic could choose to translate
"oblige" just as it chose.)
Births were very closely attended, because the request that things
stay what they were had to be got in quickly, birth being a very great
magic, and, in that country, likely to be teased into mischief. It was
so common an occurrence as to occasion no remark when a new-sown
field began coming up quite obviously as something other than
what was planted, and by a week later to have reverted to what the
farmer had put in. But while, like the pansies and the thimbles, this
kind of magic was only a temporary aberration, it could be very
embarrassing and onerous while it lasted. Farmers in that country
worried more about falling asleep during the birthing times of their
stock than they worried about the weather; the destruction a litter of
baby taralians caused remained, even after it had reverted to piglets.
No one knew how the wild birds and beasts negotiated this, but
human parents-to-be would go to extreme lengths to ensure a fairy
was on hand to say the birth-words over their new little one.
Generally speaking the more mobile and water-dependent something
was, the more likely magic was to get at it. This meant
animals-and, of course, humans-were the most vulnerable. Rocks
were pretty reliably rocks, except of course when they were something
else that had been turned into rocks. But rocks themselves sort
of slept through magic attacks, and even if some especially wild and
erratic bit of magic decided to deck out a dry-stone wall as a marble
fountain, you could still feel the dry-stone wall if you closed your
eyes and touched the fountain, and the water would not make you
wet. The lichen that grew on the rock, however, could be turned into
daisies quite convincing enough to make you sneeze if real daisies
did so; and the insects and small creatures that crept over the lichen
were more susceptible yet.
(There was an idea much beloved and written about by this country's
philosophers that magic had to do with negotiating the balance